Epilogue: The Tree of After Life

THEY WERE THE OTHER POLE of my dawning understanding of plants, the converse of samphire’s urgent and transient flitting. Beech trees defined the landscape I grew up in, studding the local commons, hanging on steep chalk hillsides, big trees gracing big front lawns. For me they made a kind of timber frame, but it seemed sinuous and playful and not at all stolid. Beeches move with the weather and, fecklessly rooted, are often felled by it. They’re fluid, feline, shape shifting in response to changes in forest ambience. For twenty years I had custody of a wood in which there were a large number of beeches, and they always seemed like sprites, not part of the working proletariat of oak and ash. Thirty-five years after the book inspired by samphire I wrote another, Beech-combings. Its star was a giant 400-year-old pollard called ‘the Queen’ which I had known most of my life, and eulogised like a lovelorn admirer: ‘a great inverted bowl through the mist of foliage,’ I wrote rhapsodically, ‘it still takes my breath away, the mass of it, the hunched shoulders, the low spreading skirt … its long low branches trail out like the arms of a giant squid’. This magnificent tree survived all the great storms of the 1980s and 90s, and I thought its immense cantilevered branches and low centre of gravity would see it through another few centuries. But in June 2014 I heard from an acquaintance that it had been blown down in a minor gale. He wondered if I wanted to pay my respects.

I’m there a few days later, and unsure for a moment whether I’ve found the right tree. The space it occupied has changed dramatically, not just because the Queen is now cleaved down the middle and lying like two huge spills on the forest floor, but because of the light, reflected off the gashed wood and last year’s crisped leaves and tree surfaces that have not seen the sun for a hundred years. I don’t have to look closely to see why, in the end, the Queen tumbled down so easily. Its interior is as crumbly as old cheese, broken down by a wood-eating hoof fungus, and what I’d always thought of as an indomitable matriarch was ready to fall apart with the lightest of summer winds.

What is striking is that the fallen Queen still has total command over the space it occupied while still vertical, and will continue to do so into the future. I don’t think this is just because it also has a lifetime’s occupation of my memory. The surrounding and still standing trees show the hollows in their crowns where they were shaded out, and which will become the templates for new growth. And a huge bank of data has fallen with the Queen. I find an area high on the trunk where the bark has been ripped off, and underneath the timber is inscribed with the beautiful pattern known as spalting, a lacework of dark lines that mark the frontiers in a long border squabble between another wood-rotting fungus and the tannin defences secreted by the tree. Close to are scores of ancient graffiti, hard to see when the tree was upright. One reads 18. V. 44. The letters are stretched enough to be Victorian, but this is almost certainly from 1944, when homesick US airmen were stationed nearby, and carved their names and townships on several of the beeches.

The Queen Beech, Ashridge, Hertfordshire. Before it fell, the tree was the model for ‘the Whomping Willow’ in the Harry Potter films.

The National Trust has put up a notice a little distance from the wreckage with the words ‘This famous tree has entered the next stage of its life’ – an ecocentric sentiment that would have been unthinkable on public display even ten years previously. But it’s a recognition of what is going to happen next. Beyond the Queen’s space there are dense patches of birch and young beech marking the sites of earlier pollard collapses, each one with the fallen tree surviving inside it as a dark, shrinking shell, home to fungi and wood-boring insects. This is what the Queen will become in a few decades. On the ground her roots are visible on the surface, as hard and rippled as limestone rocks. They remind me of stromatolites, the compacted clumps of silt and cyanobacteria that were some of the first living communities to form on dry land more than 3 billion years ago. Beneath them the complex mycorrhizal fungi that connected the Queen to the rest of the wood will be biding their time, waiting to hook up with the roots of first new beech seedlings – some of them maybe the Queen’s own descendants.

What is the lesson of this recumbent giant? Perhaps just the old cliché ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.’ That the original tree is no longer living is beyond doubt. Its tissues are moribund and decaying. But the legacies it has left in this corner of the wood – topographical, architectural, ecological, genetic – are ineradicable, except by some act of gross human intervention. Trees are used to catastrophes, big and small. They have been tacking around them for millions of years, living as they do in complex and mutually supportive communities, not as isolated individuals. At this moment their greatest threats are exotic diseases and predatory insects to which, as yet, they have no intrinsic resistance. This is what is happening with ash trees across Europe and North America. How the ashes themselves will adapt to their new travails is uncertain. But the message of this book has been that plants are never simple victims, passive objects, but vital, autonomous beings, and that listening to and respecting that vitality is the best way we can co-exist with them, and in their difficult times, learn to help them.