In later life I’ve often been lucky to live near forest and woodland. Back in the 80s we lived in R.A.F. married quarters in Rheindahlen, Germany, and we had only to step out of the gate at the bottom of the garden to take a walk in the woods. This is where I learned to love my favourite bird, the Nuthatch, which I would watch from my kitchen window as he scurried up and down the trunk of the trees over the road.
When we lived in Salisbury, we would visit the New Forest, where not only oak, ash and beech grew, but also more exotic trees such as Wellingtonia, Sweet Chestnut and Japanese Cedar. The Knightwood Oak grows there, a visitor attraction since Victorian Times, when it was marked on the OS maps as ‘The Queen of the Forest’. She and the slightly smaller, ‘Adam and Eve’ and the ‘The Eagle Oak’ vie for the prize of largest tree, but these are youngsters of 200-300 years compared with the mighty Major Oak of Sherwood.
It is easy to feel dwarfed by these huge, ancient trees and be somewhat in awe of them, as Francis Kilvert wrote of the ancient trees in Moccas Park in Herefordshire, when he visited in 1876.
"I fear those grey old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, misshapened oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century, biding God’s time with both feet in the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation after generation, with such tales to tell, as when they whisper them to each other in the midsummer nights, make the silver birches weep and the poplars and aspens shiver, and the long ears of hares and rabbits stand on end. No human hand set those oaks. They are the ‘trees which the Lord hath planted'. They look as if they have been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end."
We should also remember though that trees can bring us joy and create hours of fun. Apart from hiding inside their hollowed trunks, generations of children have climbed into their leafy canopies, for games of hide-and-seek, to make tree-houses, or just for the sheer challenge and adventure. Here are my own two, twenty-five and more years ago, learning to appreciate some of the sensations we feel in the company of trees. The pleasure of leaning on the sturdy trunk of a mature tree whilst bathed in dappled sunlight, and surrounded by the natural sounds of the woodland and those earthy forest-floor smells. The childish happiness felt when achieving that first clamber into the lowest branches of the garden tree, knowing that from then on anything was possible. There may be falls and scrapes along the way, but what a lesson in life.
If you want to branch out and hear some more old arboreal memories, visit this week’s Sepia Saturday, where Alan’s picture prompt sowed the seed for today’s post.