Country Life
Turning green
Peter Quince
Horse-chestnuts are always among the first trees to come into leaf: this year they seem ahead of schedule. The landscape at this stage of the spring is still predominantly brown, but a closer look at any hedge or wood discovers, within the hazy, muted tones which provide the general effect, an infinity of points of brighter tints. The buds of every species have their particular colour, ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other, and varying in size from minute specks to fat and bulging globules. The horse-chestnut buds, huge by comparison with almost any others, have changed from the deep brown in which they end the winter into a soft yellow-green after shedding the scales which gave protection during February. Any day now they may be relied upon to begin unfolding leaves. Then these handsome giants of trees will be transformed into green masses in the brown scene, among the first to undergo the annual transformation.
Like most people, I should guess, I find it hard to imagine the English landscape without horsechestnuts, at least in the spring, yet they are of course immigrants, and have not been here much above three centuries. They were not especially welcome aliens in the first instance, either. William Gilpin, the eighteenth century enthusiast for the picturesque, who had much to do with forming the taste of his times, had nothing complimentary to say of them: they failed to meet his standards of pictorial merit. Yet it is precisely because of their pictorial qualities that we prize them so highly today. It is an odd, and perhaps humbling, reversal of values. I imagine the horse-chestnut's virtues came to be better appreciated after the continental habit of planting it in large formal gardens and parkland. had been adopted here; although nowadays it is as welcome in an informal setting as in a great avenue. Not only did our forebears fail to admire the horse-chestnut as it deserves, but for a long time after that error had been corrected they continued to get its origins wrong. I possess an excellent mid-Victorian study of the trees of Britain, the work of a scholarly clergyman in the days when such as he had leisure for these things, which states unhesitatingly: "The Horse Chestnut is a native of Asia, probably of Northern India." Not so, according to more modern sources. It is a native only of a certain remote mountainous districts of Albania and Morthern Greece (although it has been planted in many parts of the world subsequently). The notion of its Indian origin lingered through the centuries, and not only in this country. Its French name is still marronier d'Inde.
I like the tree, apart from anything else, because it grows quickly and yet lasts a long time. From my windows I can see half a dozen magnificent specimens which were planted a couple of hundred years ago. One of their lost some large branches during last winter's gales, and the ugly white scars are visible half-way UP the trunk; yet they are in splendid condition generally and good for a long time yet. I have surreptitiously planted a/ few chestnuts of my own at various points in the parish, in the hope that the landowners will be grateful for these unsolicited gifts. (To do this you merely push a conker in the ground — very simple: but it must be fresh from the tree, since if conkers are dried in the air they seem to lose their fertility.) There is a great deal to be said for a tree which gains a
noble stature in a man's lifetime. A
friend once pointed out to me a magnificent horse-chestnut in the garden of the house where he spent his boyhood, saying he remembered bringing the conke,r
home from Richmond Park ano planting it; and he, still has not a grey hair on his head.
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