An Old Thorn

W. H. Hudson

The life and work of the naturalist and novelist William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) had a strong connection to trees. Hudson was born in the Argentinian pampas where his Anglo-American parents had settled to make a living ranching sheep. His childhood home, a house named Los Veinte-cinco Ombues (“The Twenty-five Ombú Trees”), was said to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered slave that could be seen roaming “about the great trees”. It was among the woods of South America that Hudson set his most famous work, the ecological romance, Green Mansions (1904). The novel brings a Romantic sensibility into its depiction of the “great dark forest” of Guyana and constructs a mystical environmentalism that pervades Hudson’s writing. In his non-fictional account of the New Forest, Hampshire Days (1903), for example, Hudson explained his enduring sense of the spirituality of nature: “The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one”.

By the time ‘An Old Thorn’ was published in the English Review in 1911, Hudson had been living in Britain for many years. The story is located in Ingden, a fictional village in the South Wiltshire Downs, and focuses on the occult properties of an ancient hawthorn. Given the setting in England’s South West and the magical nature of the tree, it is tempting to speculate on a link between Hudson’s story and the Glastonbury thorn, a tree said to have sprouted two millennia ago when Joseph of Arimathea rested his staff on the ground, whereupon it took root and blossomed. But while the Glastonbury thorn is seen as a joyful religious emblem, Hudson’s tree is more sinister. Covered with ivy “like a slender black serpent of immense length”, Hudson’s thorn might even be seen as the Satanic double of the Glastonbury tree.