#44 Listen to the Trees
Jun 28th, 2008 by doing better
I wonder why it is that I feel such a tremendous sense of wellbeing around trees. Last weekend we took trips to two wooded areas, Burnham Beeches and Cliveden, both in Buckinghamshire. Burnham Beeches is a 540-acre wood that was bought by the City of London in the nineteenth century to stop it from being developed into houses. After four hundred years, the ancient beech pollards still look vigorous and alive, even though their smooth grey bark is tough and wrinkled like elephant skin, and many of them are hollow.
Pollarding is a technique of increasing the timber supply by chopping off limbs about ten feet above the ground before they get too heavy and damage the trunk; new limbs then grow out sideways, too high for animals to chew, and after a few years they can be harvested. The method of pollarding old trees that have been left alone for such a long time is a lost art, and the managers of Burnham Beeches are trying to rediscover how to do it without killing the trees.
As soon as we walked into the wood, I felt calm and happy. This was not only because I had just wolfed down a Stag burger at the nearby Stag pub. When I looked up at the sunlight shining through the high canopy of beech leaves, it seemed to envelop me in a green and gold bliss. Though surrounded by suburbia, the wood felt pristine and ancient. We wandered past ponds dense with white-blossoming water lilies. We saw an oak tree and a beech tree that had grown together in a Gothic arch, so that their trunks joined, then crossed and moved apart, and then came back and joined together again much higher up. It was very romantic. I suppose trees must be aware of each other somehow since they spend hundreds of years in one another’s company.
We saw an 800-year old oak tree known as the Druid’s Oak. I commented on how tiny our lives are compared to those of the trees. My boyfriend said, “But they don’t do very much.” On further reflection, we realized that actually they do a tremendous amount – they make the air we breathe, which is quite a task; they provide a habitat for countless organisms; and they grow much taller than I could dream of being. We found one young beech tree beside a commemorative plaque stating that it had been planted in 1957. In those fifty-one years it had grown at least thirty feet high. If I grew at such a rate, I would have to spend most of my time shopping for new clothes, but the trees have more important things to do.
When we read some of the signs, I saw how the wood has healed itself since the Second World War, when it was used as a military base, a place to hide tanks, and a prisoner of war camp. It was bombed by the Germans, and the bomb craters are still visible, although we argued over what was actually a bomb crater and what was a valley or a natural depression. Few signs of this violent past remain; I could have believed we were walking in a wood in the Middle Ages, except that I was not worried about highwaymen.
Cliveden, the National Trust property where we went the next day, was also put to military use; it was a hospital in both wars, and soldiers who died were buried in what used to be the tennis court. There is an Italianate mansion, last lived in by the Waldorf Astors of hotel fame, but now turned into a five-star hotel. The house was at the center of a British political sex scandal in the 1960s known as the Profumo affair.
Mr. Profumo should have saved his reputation and his career by leaving the party and the pretty girl and going down the hill, past the formal gardens to the lovely stretch of woodland along the River Thames. The wood grows on a very steep hill and is therefore known as the Hanging Wood. This is an apt name, as the great yew trees look as if they are barely hanging onto the slope, with their roots exposed and the ground around them eroded. We saw a small, stocky muntjac stag feeding in the undergrowth; he looked shy, but he stared at us for a long time.
A few weeks ago (as described in #35 Never Give Up) we set off on a fruitless hunt for a box wood without finding a single box tree. This quest was finally fulfilled at Cliveden when we found ourselves in the midst of a great many old box trees growing on the hill. They were just as gnarled and ancient as I would have hoped. If we had not spend a whole day in May looking for such trees, I might have passed right by them without distinguishing them from the rest of the wood, but because of our failed quest, I was grateful for every box tree we encountered. I thought it possible that, in their own way, they too rejoiced in the completion of our journey.
