Did we think this art, or this custom, too little a thing to cherish any longer? I cannot find any person with a word to say about it. I have tried and the result was curious. I have invited persons of my acquaintance into an old churchyard and begged them to look on this stone and on this—the hard ugliness of one, an insult to the dead, and the beauty, the pathos, of the other. And they have immediately fallen into a melancholy silence, or else they have suddenly become angry, apparently for no cause. But the reason probably was that they had never given a thought to the subject, that when they had buried someone dear to them—a mother or wife or daughter—they simply went to the stonemason and ordered a gravestone, leaving him to fashion it in his own way. The reason of the reason—the full explanation of the singular fact that they, in these house-beautiful and generally art-worshipping times, had given no thought to the matter until it was unexpectedly sprung upon them; and that if they had lived, say, a hundred years ago, they would have given it some thought—this the reader will easily find out for himself.
Beauty of old gravestones
It is comforting to reflect that gravestones do not last for ever, nor for very long; and in the meantime Nature is doing what she can with our ugly modern memorials, touching, softening, and tingeing them with her mosses, lichens, and with algæ—her beautiful iolithus. In most churchyards in southern England we see many stones stained a peculiar colour, a bright rust-red, darkest in dry weather, and brightest in wet summers, often varying to pink and purple and orange; but whatever the hue or shade the effect on the grey stone, lichened or not, is always beautiful. It is not a lichen; when the staining is looked closely at nothing is seen but a roughness, a powdery appearance, on the stone's surface. It is an aerial alga of the genus Croöleptus, confined to the southern half of England, and most common in Hampshire, where its beautifying blush may sometimes be seen on old stone walls of churches, and old houses and ruins; but it flourishes most on gravestones, especially in moist situations. The stone must not be too hard, and must, moreover, be acted on by the weather for well-nigh half a century before the alga begins to show on it; but you will sometimes see it on an exceptionally soft stone dating no more than thirty or forty years back. On old stones it is very common, and peculiarly beautiful in wet summers. In June 1902, after many days of rain, I stood one evening at the little gate at Brockenhurst churchyard, and counted between me and the church twenty gravestones stained with the red alga, showing a richness and variety of colouring never seen before, the result of so much wet weather. For this alga, which plays so important a part in nature's softening and beautifying effect on man's work—which is mentioned in no book unless it be some purely technical treatise dealing with the lower vegetable forms—this alga, despite its aerial habit, is still in essence a water-plant: the sun and dry wind burn its life out and darken it to the colour of ironstone, so that to anyone who may notice the dark stain it seems a colour of the stone itself; but when rain falls the colour freshens and brightens as if the old grey stone had miraculously been made to live.
Churchyard yews
If never a word has been written about that red colour with which Nature touches the old stones to make them beautiful, a thousand or ten thousand things have been said about the yew, the chief feature and ornament of the village churchyard, and many conjectures have we seen as to the reason of the very ancient custom of planting this tree where the dead are laid. The tree itself gives a better reason than any contained in books. It says something to the soul in man which the talking or chattering yew omitted to tell the modern poet; but very long ago someone said, in the Death of Fergus, "Patriarch of long-lasting woods is the yew; sacred to forests as is well known." That ancient sacred character, which survived the introduction of Christianity, lives still in every mind that has kept any vestige of animism, the root and essence of all that is wonderful and sacred in nature. That red and purple bark is the very colour of life, and this tree's life, compared with other things, is everlasting. The stones we set up as memorials grow worn and seamed and hoary with age, even like men, and crumble to dust at last; in time new stones are put in their place, and these, too, grow old and perish, and are succeeded by others; and through all changes, through the ages, the tree lives on unchanged. With its huge, tough, red trunk; its vast, knotted arms outstretched; its rich, dark mantle of undying foliage, it stands like a protecting god on the earth, patriarch and monarch of woods; and indeed it seems but right and natural that not to oak nor holly, nor any other reverenced tree, but to the yew it was given to keep guard over the bodies and souls of those who have been laid in the earth.
The yew is sometimes called the "Hampshire weed," on account of its abundance in the county; if it must have a second name, I suggest that the Hampshire or British dragon-tree would be a better and more worthy one. It would admirably fit some ancient churchyard yews in the neighbourhood of Selborne, especially that of Farringdon.
In the great mass of literature concerning Gilbert White, there is curiously little said about this village; yet it has one of the most interesting old churches in the county—the church in which White officiated for over a quarter of a century, during all the best years of his life, in fact; for when he resigned the curacy at Farringdon to take that of Selborne, for which he had waited so long, he was within two years of bidding a formal farewell to natural history, and within eight of his death. The church register from 1760 to 1785 is written in his clear, beautiful hand, and in the rectory garden there is a large Spanish chestnut-tree planted by him. Although not so fortunate in its surroundings as Selborne, with its Lyth and flowery Bourne and wooded Hanger, Farringdon village, with its noble church and fine old farm-buildings and old cottages, is the better village of the two. At the side of the churchyard there is an old oast-house, now used as a barn, which for quaintness and beauty has hardly its match in England. The churchyard itself is a pretty, peaceful wilderness, deep in grass, with ivy and bramble hanging to the trees, and spreading over tombs and mounds. Long may it be kept sacred from the gardener, with his abhorred pruning-hook, his basket of geranium cuttings—inharmonious flower!—and his brushwood broom to make it all tidy. Finally, there is the wonderful old yew.
Farringdon yew
A great deal has been written first and last about the Selborne yew, which appears to rank as one of the half-dozen biggest yew trees in the country. Its age is doubtless very great, and may greatly exceed the "thousand years" usually given to a very large churchyard yew. The yews planted two hundred years ago by Gilbert White's grandfather in the parsonage garden close by, are but saplings in comparison. A black poplar would grow a bigger trunk in less than ten years. The Selborne yew was indeed one of the antiquities of the village when White described it a century and a quarter ago. It is, moreover, the best-grown, healthiest, and most vigorous-looking yew of its size in Britain. The Farringdon yew, the bigger tree, has a far more aged aspect—the appearance of a tree which has been decaying for an exceedingly long period.