Trees, Forests and Avenues

Last spring we called a firm in to remove three Norway spruces that had been in our northern Strasbourg garden from the time we acquired the keys to the house in October 1994, when both the trees and our two children were small. But our children had become adults and left home, and the trees—which I suspect had been lifted as seedlings from the Rhine forest at the end of our road by the previous owner (and should never have been in a suburban garden in the first place)—had become giants, were undermining my wife’s potagers with their roots, and keeping our increasingly disgruntled neighbours in the shade.

It is no small thing to cut down large trees. Well, you might think it would be no small thing, but the three gardeners who came from a German firm across the border with petrol-driven chainsaws and tree spurs had lopped all the branches off the spruces, which were over twenty metres high, and felled the three trunks within an hour. The rest of their work-day was spent collecting the debris and digging out the roots with a small hydraulic excavator which they somehow managed to drive over the fence on an aluminium pontoon and into the garden. Extracting the roots was as tough as its dental equivalent. The spectacle of our garden suddenly desolate and in disarray made me think of the warning signs that are common in the Rhine forest these days, as the municipal authorities attempt to restore it to something resembling its primordial floodplain ecology: “Abattage d’arbres.” As in English, it’s the same noun as describes the felling or slaughter of animals, an indication of just how serious a business forestry is.

Seeing trees being worked on in French cities is a common site in late autumn, when the municipality sends out its workers in trucks with telescopic ladders to lop and prune (élagage) the branches of the plane trees back to pollarded crowns. Strasbourg’s municipal works department employs sixty élagueurs to trim the 23,500 roadside trees (and there are at least twice that number in schools, cemeteries and other public grounds). Pruning trees shortens their lifespan considerably, from several centuries to about fifty years. That is the price to pay for having an aesthetically pleasing city: you can’t have rows of massive chestnut trees—which are spectacularly beautiful in spring with their red-and-white blossom-sprays—adorning a city street without having to trim off branches and prune back dangerous overhangs.

While I’ve never been terribly fond of formal French gardens, with their insistence on a display of mastery over nature (“Show a French gardener a tree and he will reach for his pruning saw,” writes Hugh Johnson), I do like their allées, those long cathedral naves of plane trees, or the famous roadside arbres d’alignement which once thrilled Cyril Connolly as he drove past them on his way to the Midi. And although the plane tree goes a long way back in French culture—being introduced in the mid-sixteenth century by the naturalist Pierre Belon, who also brought the cork oak, cedar and lilac with him from his travels in Asia Minor—for about twenty years the French have been proceeding with a wholesale abattage of these magnificent plane trees, on the pretext that their slant of light and shade plays havoc with the steering abilities of hapless motorists (which was how Albert Camus died with his publisher Michel Gallimard in 1960). A recent experiment in Norfolk has in fact shown that planted intelligently, with a kind of staggered narrowing of the distance between each tree, along with a tapering of the alley’s width at the approach to a town, it is possible to create a stroboscopic visual effect that makes drivers reduce their speed involuntarily.

There were reputedly three million of these arbres d’alignement in France at the end of the nineteenth century; these days they number a few hundred thousand. I was surprised to notice a French allée in Scotland recently. Driving my hired car back to Edinburgh airport recently from my mother’s house in Kirriemuir, I took a shortcut to Perth and realised that I was being guided along an avenue of what appeared to be alternate oaks and maples standing like sentinels along the Meigle road, south of Alyth. These magnificent trees must have been planted over a century beforehand by somebody who wanted to introduce the French effect to what is one of Scotland’s most fertile (and protected) areas. Dundee and its hinterland are dotted with arboreal projects.

Sara Maitland suggested recently in the periodical the Author that “writers of both poetry and prose seem to have a strangely deep affinity with trees”. She’s not mistaken; you can find writers leaning on trees almost anywhere you care to look. Fresh in Paris as a young man from the provinces, Stendhal felt fortunate that his cousin’s patronage had procured him a desk job at the Ministry of War. It was a dull job, although the bureaucratic habits he acquired were to see him through employment under two regimes. He became fond of two pollarded lime trees at the bottom of the ministry garden, against which his fellow workers liked to urinate. “They were the first friends I made in Paris,” he writes, “and I felt sorry for them, clipped as they were.” He contrasted them with the limes of Claix on his father’s estate in the mountains, although he had no wish to return to Grenoble solely on account of the lindens.

Stendhal maintained an interest in trees all his life. In his Souvenirs d’Egotisme he mentions visiting the trees at Richmond: “Nothing equals this fresh greenery in England and the beauty of these trees: to cut them down would be a crime and a dishonour.” He commended the respectful attitude of the British to such wonders of nature and lamented that a French landowner would, at the drop of a hat, order the logging of five or six large and ancient oaks on his estate for the sake of extra revenue. And he would surely have deplored the scene in Goethe’s novella where an additional torment for the suicidal young Werther is the arrival from the city in his little town of Wahlheim of the new parson’s wife, who has “pretensions to scholarship” and orders the felling of the ancient walnut trees in the manse garden so that she can have more light to read the latest works of Bible criticism.

Mikhail Chekhov relates that when his brother Anton moved to his estate at Melikhovo, he planted many trees which he tended “as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his Three Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like in three or four hundred years.” Walt Whitman asked himself in Song of the Open Road: “Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?” And a more recent line in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle carries the same sentiment: “These motionless, foliage-laden, air-bathing beings with their boundless abundance of leaves … For whenever I caught sight of them I was filled with happiness.”

Trees aren’t always associated with this sense of openness and happiness. Indeed, it is the argument of the Stanford literary critic Robert Pogue Harrison in his book-length essay on the place of the human in nature, Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation, that, at a subconscious level, we resent trees for their antiquity, their antecedence to human consciousness, their brooding presence on the edge of settlement. Drawing from the genetic psychology of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, Harrison traces the human dread of forests—massed ranks of trees in other words—to the origin myths of the classical sky-god who ruled Greece as Zeus and Rome as Jupiter, and whose announcement to aboriginal humanity was a lightning bolt directed into the canopy in order to produce a clearing, and open up the “mute closure of foliage”. It was only then that humans could see the overarching sky as a medium and source of revelatory messages about our origins and destiny, and worship its blueness (and this idea of the clearing was an important one for the most influential of twentieth-century philosophers, Martin Heidegger). For religious and secular authorities alike, the tent-poles of the biosphere have been objects to abominate, rather than consecrate. The governing institutions of the West from the family to the law, Harrison contends, “originally established themselves in opposition to the forests, which in this respect have been the first and last victims of civic expansion”.

Vico’s association is anthropologically sound. In central Sumatra, there is an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe known as Orang Rimba, which lives in the remaining forests of northern Jambi province: until about twenty years ago, when loggers and land-grabbers intruded on their tropical forest, these people had had no contact with the outside world known to them as Terang—“The Light”. In the Old Testament, Yahweh commands the Hebrews to burn down sacred groves wherever they find them, perhaps recalling the decisive role that two trees in a garden played in the events of Genesis 3. The word for forest is, as in Isaiah 21, synonymous with “uncultivated places”. For Dante, living in a Europe that would soon be cutting down its trees to build caravels and carracks, the forest was demon-haunted and evil, an underworld out of which his protagonist has to extricate himself; for Descartes, it was the very embodiment of confusion, a maze of custom grown up any-old-how that needed to be lit by the rectilinear beams of reason.

Walking with my wife in the Black Forest—just across the Rhine from Strasbourg—I was reminded that dense woodland actually offers a refuge and reprieve for people in crisis as we walked past a birch tree in the forest above Bad Petersal that bore the date 17 May 1945 on a widened scar in its bark. That was just ten days after the unconditional surrender of German forces after six years of a terrible war. Perhaps it had been carved by a villager seeking safety in the forest. The forest constantly figures in the accounts of persons who escaped their villages in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and survived there, beyond the reach of the Wehrmacht or local militias. Under those circumstances, the forest stood for safety and tradition; it was the modernity of the century outside that was terrifyingly suspect.

In our dealings with trees, it seems that they too are subject to a dialectic that plays between their nature as individual beings—the longest living on the planet—and as a massed force, the former having something of a personality and the latter being the lair of forces which continually threaten human civilisation; unless of course the said civilisation makes urban life untenable, in which event forests offer something of the primitive nurturing protection they always have. Perhaps their figuring in the earliest biblical story about the acquisition of knowledge is a reminder that the tree was just as important as its fruit: they were created on the third day, before animal and human life on the fifth and sixth days of Creation. The learned Simeon of Frankfurt even calculated that there would be eight hundred species of marvellous and odorous trees in Paradise, among which number would doubtless be the Tree of Life itself.

In the excavations left by the uprooting of the spruces in our garden, we planted a young pear tree and a quince. When I looked yesterday, the quince tree, hardly a metre high, was developing fruit, little golden light-bulbs with the faintest hint of fluff, only a year after being put in the earth. The quince, I recall, was something else that thrilled the generally unimpressible Cyril Connolly.