National Tree Week: time to love your nearest tree

It’s National Tree Week in Britain again, time to celebrate one of the most ancient and majestic living things on Earth. From 27 November to 5 December, the Tree Council, the begetter of Tree Week, encourages us to plant, plant, plant for a better future.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

I love how the silhouettes of winter trees give the skyline a jaggier rhythm, unlike the smooth legato of summer lushness. As I look out from my second-floor study, I feel airborne, level as I am with the middle branches of the beech trees in the grounds behind our house. Mercifully, they are protected by TPOs (Tree Protection Orders).

Heart of oak are our ships, Jolly tars are our men

However, it’s not beech but oak that is the tree most redolent of Englishness. In fact, Quercus robur, the common oak typically found on these islands, is known also as the English oak. Druids performed their rituals in oak groves. It was in an oak that the future Charles II hid when on the run after the battle of Worcester; in commemoration, the Royal Oak is one of the most widespread English pub names. Oak timber was crucial for naval shipbuilding until the mid-nineteenth century, and the march ‘Heart of Oak’ is still the Royal Navy’s official march.

Oaks appear in English language as well as culture – in disguise. When politicos, as is their wont, or pundits have a robust discussion, they are unwittingly paying homage to the oak and to a deeply buried metaphor For robust comes from the Latin rōbustus, ‘steady, firm, strong’ which in turn comes from the Latin for ‘oak’, a word which we found in the botanical name above for English oak, rōbur. Oak being such a dense, solid wood became a metaphor in Latin for ‘firmness, steadiness’.

Almost as typical of the British countryside is the ash, now sorely afflicted by ‘ash dieback’ caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, originally from Asia, which will kill an estimated 80 per cent of British ash trees over the next several years and is a problem in the U.S. too. In Old English the name of the tree was æsc, pronounced very much like its modern version. That æ symbol, consisting of an a with an e strapped to its back, was a letter in Old English, the transliteration of the earlier runic character ᚫ, standing for… an ash tree.

Technically, æ is known as a ligature or digraph and was once used to print words like aesthetic or alumnae. Its main modern use is the IPA phonetic symbol for the a sound of cat as it might have been pronounced by the Queen or a BBC presenter 60 years ago. (On the chart it’s the near-open front unrounded sound, bottom left.) And that phonetic symbol is known as an ‘ash’.

As a child visiting my grandparents in Wales, I was fascinated by the name of a nearby town, Mountain Ash. It sounded so wild, so untamed, so romantick. Sadly, it really isn’t. Only later did I discover that mountain ash is one name for the rowan – which can be pronounced in two different ways – Sorbus aucuparia. Its glowing red or orange berries delight bird’s bellies and human eyes.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

The word tree is Germanic in origin and cognate with words in several Indo-European languages such as Greek, Russian and Welsh. In Old English tree could denote both the plant and the wood derived from it, a duality its Danish relative træ retains. Sinisterly, when hanging was a thing, tree could be used to refer to the gallows.

While writing this I wondered how German Baum related to English. And then – d’oh! – the penny dropped: beam. In Old English it denoted a ‘tree’ and then by a process of semantic narrowing came to refer only to a piece of cut and shaped wood. However, the original meaning lives on in the names of trees such as hornbeam and whitebeam.

Trees thrive in English in a range of metaphors that fulfil two overarching conceptual metaphors or ‘root analogies’, namely, human is plant and abstract complex systems are plants. In the first category fall such metaphors as wooden (acting, performance), to shoot up (= to grow quickly), our trunk (= body, a metaphor that goes back to Latin), to wither (= ‘to grow feeble’), to put down roots (= to settle in one place), and many more.

Under the second conceptual metaphor sit expressions such as a branch (of a bank, organisation, etc.), deadwood (= non-performing staff), root and branch (=completely), to be thin on the ground (= to be scarce), logjam (= delay, obstruction) and so forth.

Nothing remains for me to say other than to finish with a poem – well, two actually.

I’ve balanced Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, of which there’s a rather nice analysis here, with A.E. Housman’s wistful ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ to give us something to look forward to in the spring. I realised after I read the Frost that at the back of my mind I had seen and heard the scene. What more can one ask of a poem?

(Well, actually, quite a lot, but that’s another story.)

Whose woods these are I think I know.  
His house is in the village though;  
He will not see me stopping here  
To watch his woods fill up with snow.  My little horse must think it queer  
To stop without a farmhouse near  
Between the woods and frozen lake  
The darkest evening of the year.  He gives his harness bells a shake  
To ask if there is some mistake.  
The only other sound’s the sweep  
Of easy wind and downy flake.  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman