Lament for a cherry tree

It’s hard to believe that it’s now more than twelve years since DH and I embarked on a house-hunting trip to Normandy one chilly and damp week in February.  We’d done a fair bit of research on the internet and had made appointments with a number of French estate agents to view likely-looking (i.e. cheap) properties.

After my Sunday-morning services we packed the very small campervan and took the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Ouistreham, which decanted us, after an almost sleepless night, neatly onto the Caen péripherique or ring-road in the middle of the morning rush-hour! DH turned pale, gripped the steering-wheel with white-knuckled hands and begged me to find the first suitable turn-off.

During the next couple of days we criss-crossed southern Manche from one appointment to the next, trying to find polite ways of telling one agent after another that what had looked possible on the web was impossible in reality. Finally, having told yet another agent that the house we’d booked to see wouldn’t do, we asked him if he had anything else in our price-range.

He produced two photos of houses for which he had not yet had time to compile details and took us off to see them. One was a complete non-starter, being both miniscule and in the middle of a remote field without an access road, but the other had distinct possibilities. To cut a long story short, after much discussion over supper in the van, we went back next day to see the agent and agreed to buy it.

We’d noticed of course that there were several trees scattered around the nearly half-acre of land on which the house stood, but in their February leaflessness they were not easy to identify. When we went back in late August to complete the purchase, it was a different matter. The apple trees and espaliered pear were full of ripening fruit,  but we still couldn’t work out what the other, larger trees might be.

Bare bones, but no identity

It was the carpenter, who came to look at the house and discuss the necessary renovation work, who broke the news to us that we had three very large cherry trees in our newly-acquired garden. I still remember the thrill his words gave me at the thought that we would one day be able to pick our own cherries instead of having to buy them in small and very expensive quantities.

Because I was still working at that time, our visits over the next few years were short and infrequent and somehow never managed to coincide with the cherry season. It wasn’t until after I retired in the spring of 2007 that we were able to make our first long summer visit and discover that we had three different varieties of cherry tree, the largest and most impressive of which was a yellow Coeur de Pigeon which stood in the middle of the front garden and in the shade of which we had parked the van in the years when the house was still being made habitable.

In subsequent years we have eaten its large and juicy cherries, revelled in its generous shade in hot weather and admired its statuesque beauty, as it dwarfed not only the house but also every other tree in the garden, except for the leggy poplars in the hedge.

Huge and luscious cherries - far more than we could ever eat.

In a green shade...

Then, two summers ago, disaster struck. One afternoon, while picking cherries, I looked up to where the three very large main boughs, each as big as the trunk of a medium-sized tree, spread out from the enormous main trunk, and spotted a tiny sapling growing out of the hollow between the boughs. On investigation it became apparent that a cherry stone had become lodged in a crack between the boughs and had germinated and grown.

We removed the sapling and saw that the crack wasn’t very big and didn’t seem to be a problem. Nevertheless DH measured it just in case and we agreed we’d keep an eye on it in subsequent years. Last summer we measured the crack again and saw to our horror that it was definitely bigger. Given the height and weight of those three main boughs and the mass of smaller branches each carried, the thought of what might happen if one of them split away from the main trunk in a gale was very worrying.

So small, yet so deadly.

Luckily for us, our nearest French neighbour up the hill from us is a landscape gardener and tree surgeon and we asked him to come and give us his opinion. However, before he could do so, we had to return home early because of the death of my friend, and we agreed that he would come and inspect the tree as soon as he could after our departure.

This he did and in fact was so concerned that he called in a friend who specialises in fruit trees for some expert advice. The consensus was that the cherry tree was by then so top-heavy that it was only a matter of time before one or more of the boughs would split away and come crashing down. Unfortunately full-grown cherry trees don’t respond well to pruning or pollarding and the only sensible solution was to fell it, along with the three leggy poplar trees which were badly interfering with phone and power lines.

Poplar with mistletoe

All this means that when we arrive next week for our usual summer visit, the garden will look very different and I must confess I’m not looking forward to the prospect. I have no strong feelings about the loss of the poplar trees, which had a bad habit of dropping twigs and even branches in the slightest wind and were always full of mistletoe which DH had to try to remove.

However the thought that the magnificent cherry tree, which has for so long dominated the front of the house and given us so much pleasure, will no longer be there to greet us, really saddens me. Trees have character too and our Coeur de Pigeon was strong, friendly and generous. I will miss it very much.

We ate in its shade...

.. and read in it.

It gave welcome shade to the house...

... and to the garden.  It won't be quite the same without it.