Happy is the man who plants a tree in whose shade he knows he will never sit…
I had never come across this ancient Chinese proverb before I became a farmer. I’d never, to be honest, had any need.
Suddenly, on the 18th of September 2008 my wife and I became owners of a small farm in Devon. Overnight, we went from four window boxes in a one bedroom flat in South Kensington to being in charge of twenty six unruly acres of field and forest in the wildsof the Blackdown Hills.
My first action of stewardship, the very weekend we took possession, was to march down to Mole Valley Farmers (the excellent and addictive farmers’ department store) to buy a chainsaw. Farmers, I reckoned, chopped things up and so, armed and (quite literally) dangerous, I stomped off down the hill to the bottom of our bottom field and began to cut up a fallen tree that was threatening, well… precisely nothing, as it happens.
Land does that to you, you see. It sits there, like a baby or a small dog, except on a much larger scale, and taunts you. “I need looking after,” it seems to say. “And you haven’t the first clue what to do with me, have you?”
Which was entirely true. As I stood in the long autumnal grass, brand new Husqvarna in hand, the personification of a City Boy way out of his depth, I really did have no idea what to do with all this green. There are some who would argue that ten years as a farmer did nothing to fill that lacuna in my thinking.
Chopping something up seemed like a good place to start, however, and so, in the absence of any other agricultural inspiration, I did what most blokes do in such circumstances. I did something, anything. I started to saw.
Over the years I would learn to resist that urge to wield a chainsaw in anger. A fallen tree is sometimes best left to nature, which will welcome it in and gather it up like the gift it is. Insects, in particular, adore a rotting beech trunk, as do any number of mammals and fungi. A willow bough will regenerate shoots within a matter of weeks and thicken to a broad tree within three years. I’ve even seen a fallen apple tree with a single leaf go onto to crop heavily once more, albeit at a rakish angle. Things want to live.
But that day, I had no such bucolic wisdom at my disposal and so, possessed with the urban desire to achieve, I slashed and revved and trimmed for a good few hours, pausing only when my screaming limbs begged for mercy (hauling a seven kilo chainsaw about your person is a great workout, by the way).
And then the strangest thing happened in the silence. With the intoxicating sweet smell of oak chippings filling my nostrils (and sawdust filling pretty much everything else; I had a lot to learn technique-wise) I began to open my eyes. I looked up and around me. For the first time, I saw not a single, green mass but the hundreds of trees, ancient and young, that were crowding around me, forming a protective cordon in this quiet corner of Devon.
I stared down at the wood pile it had taken me so long to create. Moments before, in my mind, it had been huge, a very physical manifestation of my labours. Now, in the fading light of a Devonian evening, it was as tiny as I, in the grand scheme of things, suddenly felt.
I sat beside the small stream at field’s edge and, with its clear waters gurgling behind me, I let my eye run down the fence line into the setting sun. Shades of green began to emerge from the wall of foliage as individual species began to speak to me. At the time I didn’t have names for them but my eyes were beginning to pick out the different textures and hues and sizes and characters of the myriad oak, beech, alder, holly and ash that lined our land.
As my eye roamed further around our farm, my breath was arrested by the scale on which they operated. Whether it was the sheer size of some of the specimens – the tallest was a Scot’s pine, well over a hundred foot tall – or the unexpected density of some of the pockets they had colonised – there was an overgrown orchard, about 3 acres, where the impregnable canopy rivalled anything the Amazon has to offer – there was something deeply spiritual about the trees I was now custodian to.
I can look back now and realise that that afternoon, some sort of switch tripped within me. From that day on I was never casual about chopping up a tree living or dead and even now regard felling a healthy tree as an act of barbarism.
But despite being blessed with in excess of 10,000 trees on our small farm, we still managed to discover the joy of planting one or two. Over the course of our ten years in the Blackdowns, we managed to plant poplar, walnut, cherry and dark elder, to say nothing of a huge, mature oak in memory of my father and innumerable pears and apple trees in between. Each one gave me a sense of karmic pride it is difficult to describe and that only the proverb at the beginning of this piece comes close to capturing.
They ask little and give a lot, the trees that surround us, living their lives quietly, often for many hundreds of years, all the while providing us with the oxygen we need to breathe even when we hurl environmental abuse at them. To plant a tree or two, to replenish in some small way that arboreal bank of the spirit that our forests represent, wasn’t something I gave thought to. Ultimately, it just seemed A Good Thing to Do, much like keeping bees.
And it’s a habit we’ve maintained. When we sold up in Devon and ended up in our current home on the Highclere Estate in Berkshire, one of the first acts we undertook was to not only redo the garden (more of which in due course) but also plant a tree. A rather wonderful Lime tree, Tilia Cordata ‘Winter Orange’, that we christened, Tilly.
Currently a mere stripling at just over 8 feet tall, it will grow up to 80 feet high and provide an enormous canopy in whose shade future generations will be able to sit.
As a karmic thought to warm the heart in these straitened times, I know of no better.
