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.