Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

PLANTING A SPINNEY

The idea of planting a spinney arose out of the necessity of finding a name for the cottage. It is difficult to find a name for anything, from a baby to a book, but it is most difficult of all to find a name for a house. At least so we found it. Jane wanted "The Knoll," and somebody else, with a taste for Hardy, wanted "The Knap," and someone else, as a tribute to Meredith (and in view of the fact that the upland we had built on was a famous place for skylarks), wanted "Lark Uprising" (what would the postman have thought?), and another wanted "Windy Gap," and so on, and amid the multitude of suggestions the cottage seemed as though it would lose its youth and grow old without any name at all.

Then one day someone said "The Spinney," and in sheer desperation everyone else said, "Why, of course, 'The Spinney.' Perfect. The very thing." The only objection that was made was that there was no spinney. But a good name could not be sacrificed to so negligible a consideration. Moreover, what had we been about to forget to plant so desirable a thing as a spinney? There, below the house, just out of the line of view so as not to blot out the landscape of four counties, was the very spot, and in the garden there were plenty of trees, pine, spruce, chestnut, beech, and lime of twelve or fifteen years' growth ready to hand. It would have been safer and simpler to have set young saplings, but that would not have satisfied the elders. It would have been starting a spinney for another generation to enjoy, and we wanted a spinney that we could sit under ourselves.

If you plant saplings, I think you ought to do it in your youth so that you and the trees can grow to maturity and age together. I often regret that I did not plant an acorn from that glorious tree, the Queen Elizabeth's oak at Chenies, when I was young. It would have been a stalwart fellow by this time with a comfortable shade on summer days. But now, no, I should be too heavily handicapped in the race, and the young oak just starting on its prodigious career would mock my little span. One ought not, of course, to be sentimental over such things, but if you love trees you cannot help it. Witness that story in Tacitus of the noble Roman who owned the garden of Lucullus and who, being sentenced to be burned in his garden, asked permission the night before his execution to go and choose the place for the funeral pyre in order that the flames which consumed him should spare the trees he loved. That is a fine legend by which to be remembered for two thousand years.

I was told the other day a pleasant fact about Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman which will endear him still more to some and make him appear, perhaps, absurd to others. When he went from London to his estate of Belmont in Scotland, it was his practice to walk round his park and take off his hat to the trees he loved most. If Sir Henry had been given to irony, it might be supposed that the gesture was intended as a compliment on the company he had left behind at Westminster. "The more I see of men," he might have meant, adapting Pascal's famous phrase, "the better I like trees." But I do not fancy there was any anger with men in his greeting. There was nothing of the misanthrope in that shrewd and companionable man. He was a good hater, and had as acute a sense of character as any man of his time. He knew a crook or a humbug by instinct, and anything fraudulent or shoddy withered in his presence; but an honest, plain man was always at home with him.

He saluted his favourite trees in the spirit in which Xerxes, when passing with his army through Lydia, decorated with golden ornaments a plane-tree of extraordinary beauty, and left a warrior from the Immortal Band to be its special guard, as you may read in Herodotus. He saluted them because he loved them, and no one who has the spirit of the woodlands in him will think the action odd or even fanciful. It has never occurred to me to go about the woods taking off my hat to the kings of the forest, but that only shows that I have less imagination and less chivalry than he had. I am not sure I shall not do so in future. It is the least courtesy I can offer them for all the pleasure they have given me in life, and the action will seem reasonable enough to anyone who has witnessed those wonderful experiments of Professor Bhose which reveal the inner life of the tree with such thrilling suggestions of consciousness and emotion.

It is not possible to live much among trees without experiencing a subtle sense of comradeship with them. Our intimacy may not go so far as that of Giles Winterbourn, in The Woodlanders, who could tell what sort of trees he was passing in the dark by the sound of the wind in the branches—but without that erudition it can create an affection almost personal, not unlike that we feel for those quiet companions of whom we have not thought much, perhaps, until we find that their simple constancy and friendliness had made the atmosphere and sunshine in which we moved.

I confess that when I walk through the woods that crown the hills behind the cottage, and see the great boles of the noblest of the beeches marked for felling, I feel very much as when I hear bad news of an old friend. That those glorious fellows, whom I have seen clothing themselves with green in the spring and with gold in the autumn, should be brought low and split into fragments to make chairs and tables seems a sacrilege. It is an unpractical sentiment, of course, and I daresay if I owned the trees I should cut them down too. So I am glad I don't own them, and can just love them and lament them.

I should, however, find it hard to cut down beech-trees of all trees, for after many affairs of the heart with trees, my affections have settled finally on them as the pride of our English woodlands. With what stateliness they spring from the ground, how noble their shade, how exquisite the green of their leaves in spring, how rich the gold of autumn, what a glowing carpet they spread for us in winter! If I go to Epping Forest it is to see the grand patriarchs of the tribe who are gathered together in solemn conclave in Monk's Wood, and if I place Buckinghamshire high among the counties, it is because there you will find a more abundant wealth of beeches than anywhere else in the land.

But I am no narrow sectarian about trees. If I put the beech first, I worship at many shrines. When I go to Chenies it is to pay my devotions to the Duke of Bedford's oaks, and especially the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth's oak, which still strews the greensward with acorns, though in its ancient trunk, hollowed by the centuries, you could seat a tolerably large tea-party. And who would go to Shere without a visit to those stalwart Spanish chestnuts that are the glory of the Duke of Northumberland's park? It is worth a journey to Salisbury, not merely to see the spire and Stonehenge, but to make the acquaintance of those magnificent cedars in Wilton Park. There is an elm at Nuneham that I go to see much as I go to see a venerable relative, and there is a wonderful yew-tree in the churchyard of Tidworth in Surrey that is better worth a pilgrimage than many a cathedral.

But to return to the spinney. We began our adventure a year ago, between the months of November and February, which are the limits within which transplanting can be done. A dozen spruce, two pines, a sycamore and two limes, all standing ten to a dozen feet in their boots, so to speak, were, with enormous gruntings, heavings and perspirations, borne to the chosen spot, and there placed in new-dug holes, earthed up, wired in position, and left to weather the storms. The handy-man shook his head over the operation—"didn't know but what they warn't too big to shift, but happen some on 'em would live." All through the spring and summer I watched those trees struggling for life, like a doctor walking the wards of a hospital and feeling the pulses of his patients. Month by month the spruces flickered on. The fairest of them all was the first to give up the ghost definitely, and then three others followed. It was August before any shoots of new foliage began to appear, and then one by one the remainder put forth tiny buds of life, the last sending out his faint signal of spring as late as October. "Ain't done so bad," said the handy-man, scratching his head to help him to a right judgment.

To-day with more heavings and gruntings the handy-man and I have transplanted another bunch of pines a good fifteen feet in height to the spinney, and for months to come I shall walk the wood again to catch signs of life in my new patients. Meanwhile, in order to provide for the future, we have planted young saplings among the big trees, and altogether my spinney, I think, makes a handsome show. I have just had a walk along the lane below to view it as a stranger might, and, speaking as a stranger, I remarked to myself that that was a nice little spinney beside the cottage on the hill, and when I came to the gate I, still as a stranger, was struck by the appropriateness of the name. I think that that spinney will be my memorial to the countryside, and I want no better. There is no pleasanter thing to be remembered by than trees. They are better than battles or books, for they do not record our passions, our ambitions, or our contentions. They record only that we once passed this way and loved the friendliness of the woods.