WIND AND SCENERY
THE scenery of England, always susceptible to changes of climate as well as of season, has been visibly altered for a generation or more by the gales and wet combined of the winter that is—perhaps—over. A great number of the trees, both larger and smaller, have been tilted for the rest of their term towards the north-east. Now and again exceptional gales, coming at a crisis in the season, may level, as if they were nine- pins, the elms, which give to our English scenery as distinctive an architectural style as any Corinthian capital or perpendicular panel. The upward reach of the boughs, combining into the outlines of a rather flattened dome based on a single shaft of great height, announce the species at any distance, at any time of year. You are as little likely to take an elm for any other tree as St. Paul's or Tom Quad for a Gothic spire. The shape as well as the broad grain is not calculated to resist strong winds ; and the want of any tap root completes the likeness to a ninepin. Yet, rather surprisingly the gales of the last few months have not actually upset any great number. The .fatal casualties were fewer because every aged ;weakling was laid low by the historic gale of 1916, when every other road was blocked by the trunks, and more than one cstate, such as Panshanger in Hertfordshire, counted the victims by the thousand. Though few are felled very many are weakened, especially at the side of roads and streams. On such sites the roots are often one-sided, and the result is a small slope towards the weaker side. But this is a protection not an added danger in many particular instances ; for should a suitable wind blow the trees are more apt to be felled towards the side where the roots are stronger. On the edge of the River Lea, for example, the fallen trunks lay after the 1916 gale at right angles and all away from the stream, not bridging it. An elm—as Mr. Kipling and Jefferies have noted in strangely similar language—does not fall when you expect •it to fall. She rather waits
" Till every breeze be still To drop a. limb on the head of him Who doubteth her sovereign will."
And we may • prophesy that when the gold and purple flowers, now colouring the roof of the woods, give place to heavy foliage many of the sloping trunks and yet more of the bent boughs will quite collapse. Indeed, the saw and axe of the countryman arc already at work fending off this foreseen danger.
Our deciduous trees are saved by their want of leaves, as surely as our English intellects by their " want of logic." Even the oak is an easy victim if snow falls in company with a driving wind at a belated date when the leaves are out. Indeed, no other tree -is thus quite so susceptible. The lateral spread of the bough standing horizontally in defiance of gravity is atoned for in normal seasons by the exceeding toughness of the fibre ; but a little extra weight is the last straw and the defiant Hercules cracks.
As our gales of this year were wintry, the worst-sufferers have been the evergreens. In some more or less recent plantations at least 80 per cent. of the conifers to-day lean at various angles from the perpendicular in a north- easterly direction. In one particular grove, planted only six years ago, the trees were set upright four several times before the endeavour was given up. Not all the king's horses and all the king's men could set them up again permanently. But bigger and older trees suffered hardly less. In most gardens adorned with exotic pines or firs a fair proportion bend more or less away from the west. Some seem to give the lie to all the proper rules of gravity. Sequoias—which our insular botanists insist on misnaming Wellingtonias—are leaning hard on their broad lower boughs, and the roots on the south-west side have tilted the ground into a mound. A large number of spruces are in much the same case, bending so far over that it is a miracle they do not fall. But a root is a miraculous bond. It is so soft, even when broad and of some age, that an axe will go through it as if it were• butter ; but so flexible and tough, so prehensile of the soil into which it has wound its way, that it may be called unbreakable. Nevertheless,. after a very long wet period even the roots lose their grip. In most cases the trees have half fallen, not so much because the gales were overwhelming as because they coincided with a softened, a diluted earth. A building cracks in dry weather because the sub-soil, especially if it be clay or marl, shrinks. Trees are weakest in their foundations when the excessive wet softens the cement about the roots.
It is then that " grouting " is needed. The whip and taper of the trunks are marvellously designed to save the base from strain and distribute the pressure, especially in the pine and fir. But we often plant these species in the soft soil to which they are not to the manner born ; and when that alien loam is more than normally soaked the result is collapse.
Wind is always by far the worst of the gardener's enemies, as of the forester's. Even the small bushes feel the strain. A fond gardener visiting his favourite shrubs after recent nights of storm found a number shifting within the compass of a hole much bigger than the base of the stem, which had swung this way and that till it had smoothed the earth round it into the polished semblance of a well-used rat hole. The worst sufferers were large rose bushes left unprimed, such as Penzance briars ; and all transplanted trees and bushes went in risk of their lives. Never did hard hammering of the earth about the roots and good staking give better results. But there are few gardens, indeed few landscapes, in which a shrewd observer could not to-day infer the extent and nature of recent gales. A good proportion of the trees and bushes are a set compass, very much like the groves of the west coast, where the trees slope in regular gradation, dwarfed on the western margin, taller but still not tall on the eastern. So they stand, kneeling, bent, erect, in their several ranks, to receive the charge of the western enemy.
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