The Trees

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Written September 2020

It was Catherine who suggested this week’s theme. She’s often wanted me to write down some of those stories I used to tell her about the ‘tree giants’ we would look out for on our Zambian journeys, our imagination seeing them walk onto the road. In point of fact I can’t remember the details of those stories - there today, gone tomorrow - but I can remember a few other trees I’ve bumped into on the way.
 
No, I didn’t bump into this one. This one nearly bumped into me. Our childhood days often included a Saturday afternoon picnic at the camping site just outside Grahamstown. My sister, Margaret, and I would play by the side of a small stream that flowed down Howieson’s Poort. The rains had obviously softened the earth and down it came. A towering pine crashed. We ran for our lives. Those memories don’t fade.
 
That was different from another childhood memory: dressed in my Sunday best and put up to recite Psalm 1 on the stage of the Port Elizabeth City Hall at the beginning on the annual young people’s ‘demonstration’. The curtain rose; the stage lights blinded me and I gave them my best with:
 
 
My grandmother would tell me of her childhood. She was a daughter of the Gilbey family who’d migrated from London’s Old Kent Road to the forests of Knysna where her father was a woodcutter. No wonder I delight in a special lamp which still graces the lounge, a gift resulting from a visit to Quebec in the 80s, a couple of woodcutters whittling away, their axe resting at their side.
 
The early 1960s and the borrowed VW beetle would regularly find its way to one of Cape Town’s leafy suburbs - Pinelands, home of the Siebrits family, to visit Margaret. An evening drive out together would often be along the routes that wind through the forest on the slopes of Table Mountain.
 
I could mention many trees from our Zambian days: the line of mulberries in our back garden where I built a tree-house for Catherine, the avenues of rapidly-growing toonas, planted by our predecessors on the mission, the brilliant red African flame tree, the frangipani with its scent, the jacarandas (though nothing to compare with the streets of Johannesburg ablaze with their rich purple colour), the msasa trees with their amber and red wine colour that herald the coming of spring. But one of my favourites - the mopane of the Zambezi valley. This is not ‘planted by the rivers of water’. It survives in very dry conditions. A lesson for us in difficult days? There are other trees in that valley - the Chirundu Fossilised Forest - Zambia’s own Jurassic Park!
 
But there’s another tree on the north bank of the Zambezi. I’d heard about Syakalya Banyama; I had to find it on one of our leprosy review visits. It’s a partially uprooted baobab that resembles an animal lying on its side. That’s of interest, but more significantly, it marks the home of migrants who had returned from their work on a mica mine south of the river. They brought with them a Tonga reader and a New Testament. They were told to teach the children in the day, and the adults at night. That marked the beginning of The Salvation Army in Zambia nearly a century ago. These days we might mark a special place with a tree. That one just happened to be there.
 
The 1980s brought us back to London. We stayed in Norwood - the wood on the north side of The Weald. Wooded Beaulieu Heights was just across the road. We got to know the trees of England: oaks and chestnuts, sycamores and beeches and more. There were trees in our back garden.- too many. Margaret wanted some down to give a little more light to her garden. I had no hesitation in exercising my scouting skills with an axe. Our neighbour stood with bated breath as they fell as planned, and not on her glass-roofed conservatory!
 
I must hurry on to the Indian days: the coconut palms in our back garden, (harvested each year by the local tree surgeon, shall I call him?) the immense banyan in Adyar at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society spreading over nearly an acre; the groves of cashews or rubber cultivated on Salvation Army property, all in efforts to enable us to be financially self-sufficient. And there were reminders from other faiths of the significance of trees. It was under the boda tree, for example, that the Buddha had sat when his enlightenment occurred.
 
Our final visit to India was in 2003 to attend the Atmik Mela (spiritual festival) in Gujarat, a few thousand attending. It was held just a few hundred meters away from the tamarind tree under which Salvation Army pioneer, Booth-Tucker had slept. Villagers had seen his blistered feet and asked his companion who he was. ‘So he comes all this way to tell us this,’ was their response. It marked a turning point for The Salvation Army in India. I picked up a few leaves and pressed them as a keepsake. I have them still. I wonder what’s happening there nowadays.
 
Back in England in 1999 and our home is in The Elms. That's just a name now. They’ve disappeared - Dutch Elm disease. There are oaks and crab apples, lilac and conifers. The squirrels delight in them; so do the green parakeets. The ash survives. Ash die-back has not arrived here yet. Nearby is Jubilee Country Park where for many years I would join the Monday morning work party, lopping branches to keep the bridleways clear, and learning to use the tree-popper to ensure unwanted sapling roots come out too. Then there’s the art of coppicing and using what’s been harvested for weaving a fence. It’s been a special joy to be part of a project with the adjoining girls’ school in developing an app that enables visitors to go round the round the park, discovering some of its natural history, the trees included. More recently I’ve got to know Wandsworth Park in west London. There’s a trail there too. Come along and I could introduce you to the 40 different species of tree there. But much easier would be a relaxed walk along the avenue of 32 ancient trees I will recognise without having to look at the plaque nailed to one - the London Plane. If Catherine were to come, she'd ask if this is them – her tree giants. Though it's nearly 50 years ago that the tradition started, she’s bound to ask for another story. I’ll just have to make it up as we go.
 
It might seem a strange place to have heard this, the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983, but in one of the small groups I attended we were told: ‘If you can’t hug a person, the next best is a tree!’ I thought it weird at the time, but maybe in these strange days of the pandemic it’s an idea that should be promoted. Perhaps I’ll be able to bring that into the tree giant stories.
 
September 2020