COUNTRY LIFE PETER QUINCE
'How can I stop someone cutting down a tree?' It was the voice of a neighbour which presented me with this question on the tele- phone at breakfast time the other day, and the matter was clearly urgent. A newcomer to the village, it transpired, was having a magnificent horse-chestnut tree felled in its prime, and for no other reason than a general and uncivilised dislike of trees. This particu- lar tree, moreover, was a valuable ingredient in the village scene. Could nothing be done to stay the vandal's hand?
I had to reply that, as I understood the Tree Preservation Order procedure, it might have been effective if invoked earlier; but that no bureaucratic device could be expected to intervene between the arrival of a gang of men with power-driven saws and the speedy destruction of their allotted victim. And by lunch time, the job was done.
When I saw the scene of devastation later I was puzzled anew by the inexplicable ob- jection to fine trees which had caused it. It was not the first time I had come across the phenomenon. Usually, as in this case, it shows itself when someone unused to living in the countryside decides to settle down to live there; and then, very quickly in the cases I have in mind, the new arrival sets about refashioning his surroundings so as to make them resemble as closely as possible the urban setting he has left behind. Why, one wonders, do people go to all the trouble of migrating to the countryside, if they want concrete and asphalt on their paths, and those hideous painted plank fences instead of hedges, and brilliant lighting around the outside of their houses, and all the rest of the stock properties of suburbia? Why, especi- ally, go to live among trees if they detest them?
It is a mystery, and we have not as yet arrived at any satisfactory explanation in my village. We are, as it happens, particularly sensitive about trees at present because, like almost every other part of England, this stretch of countryside is growing steadily poorer in this respect. The farmers, of course, uproot many from their hedges, because to them trees represent a measurable loss of money at harvest time. This is understand- able, although the farmers themselves fre- quently express misgivings about what they are doing to the landscape. The county coun- cil also fells trees galore, whenever it has a job of road widening or straightening in hand.
And now, on top of these human on- slaughts upon our trees, it appears that the many elms which still contribute so much in the way of graceful dignity to our surround- ings are threatened by the fungus of the elm disease, which has spread across this country
at an appalling
rate in recent years. There is, indeed, a very fair chance that before many more years have elapsed the elm will be all but extinct in Britain; and that would be a sadder deprivation than all the brutal, but ultimately reparable, damage wrought upon trees by men.
I find it hard to imagine the English coun- ,tryside without elm trees standing in solemn rows along hedges or in grand avenues. It is, of course, a vulgar townsman's error to think of the countryside as merely 'nature' given its freedom; the more one learns about the countryside, the more one comes to see it as a marvellously complex artefact, the product of ages of collaboration between man and his living surroundings; and the elm tree has been an important element in this complica- ted equation for an immense period of time.
In the ancient world elms were valued highly as hosts to the vine. Pliny gives direc- tions for forming an Ulmarium, or planta- tion of elms; and it was the custom to plant them in large numbers so that, carefully pruned, they could serve as props and shelter for the vines to which they were said to be `married'. It used to be thought that the Romans introduced the elm to Britain for this purpose, but I believe this is no longer the received opinion; the elm was here when the Romans arrived.
In its present profusion the elm certainly dates back to the Enclosures, when its habit of speedy reproduction by suckers and its rapid growth made it particularly useful at a time when hedgerows were coming into being perhaps even faster than they are now disappearing. Moreover, its timber has played a bigger part in man's service than is generally suspected, for many of the massive beams so highly prized as 'oak' in old houses are in fact elm; or so I have been told by an expert.
And the elm has contributed so much to the beauty of the landscape that its disap- pearance is hard to contemplate.
At this moment our elms are in brilliant yellow leaf; they are one of the unforgettable sights of the autumn. I have always thought this one of the brighest and happiest manifes- tations of this season of colourful decay.
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