Country Life
Trees of the river
Peter Quince
The alder is curious;y unrecognised, compared with several other native trees. I s-spect there are scores of people, possibly hundreds, who could instantly identify an oak or an ash for each one who would know an alder at sight. And yet it is a common enough tree in many parts of England, and has a distinctive leaf. Somehow, in spite of this, it has failed to lodge itself in the current stock of general knowledge about the natural world. It is even unhonoured and unsung by the poets.Yet alders, which haveclearly failed to make the grade in these respects, are in many ways excellent trees.
One of their merits is now becoming apparent. The leaves of the alder stay green, and stay upon the branch, after those of almost every other deciduous tree have first changed colour and then been discarded. The autumn is beginning to show unmistakably in the foliage these days, and there are drifts of fallen leaves along the footpaths, but each alder is still in full, vigorous green leaf, and will remain so until it stands alone in a world of bare branches.
In this parish there is one place where alders flourish in profusion. It is a lost patch of ground which, many years ago, was excavated for gravel. A stranger would hardly be able to guess its history now, for with the passage of time it has grown up into a delightful wilderness. The river crosses it on a winding course, broadening at one point into a small lake (where the excavations were most intensive, I suppose); and the ground has been covered by natural regeneration, with patches of miniature forest, including some thriving young oak trees, and stretches of shrubby growth, which provide the village with unfailing and copious Supplies of blackberries.
Alders have formed a splendid bank along the riverside, and the river in places flows between dense curtains of their broad, heart-shaped leaves. These trees thrive on wetness, and send their roots to the very water's edge; and, as their vigorous colonisation of this stream illustrates, they make full use of the water for propagation. The seeds of the alder are provided with cork-like growths which make them buoyant in water, and in the autumn many of them, in the natural way of things, fall into the river; thanks to their buoyancy, these are carried down the stream to spread the colony a little further along the river bank. The seeds germinate and grow rapidly. Hence our handsome alder banks.
So far as I know, no one bothers much with alder timber nowadays, but this was not always so. The tree's liking for wet places gives its wood a rare resistance to water; I have read that this made it the favourite wood for the soles of clogs, in the days when such footwear was still much used (until well into the present cen
tury, that is to say). Apparently there used to be gangs of men who travelled the country, buying standing alders and then felling them and converting the timber into clogs on the spot.
The timber was much used by country people to make pipes or drains and to perform similar useful service in damp, subterranean conditions. That sort of dependence upon what the village and its environs could provide has all gone now, of course; something made of plastic in a remote factory is more likely to meet our needs today than anything grown beside our river. Perhaps it is the disappearance of that utilitarian link with the natural world which accounts for the loss of so much popular knowledge of that world, and explains, partly at least, why even the name of a great and plentiful tree like the alder is unknown to so many people.
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