A tree’s meat, you once told me, bears the same name as the tree, unlike animals whose names are English (like sheep) and whose meat is described in French (like mutton), a legacy of the Norman yoke (though the Normans were not French but Vikings, you told me). You loved English trees: you felt as if they held things together, their roots underpinning the whole country. Without trees, you said, it would be possible to have America, and even France, but England could not exist.
A tree’s meat, you once told me, bears the same name as the tree, unlike animals whose names are English (like sheep) and whose meat is described in French (like mutton), a legacy of the Norman yoke (though the Normans were not French but Vikings, you told me). You loved English trees: you felt as if they held things together, their roots underpinning the whole country. Without trees, you said, it would be possible to have America, and even France, but England could not exist.
Sycamore
A sycamore is a type of maple, you said.
We ate fruit for breakfast together, on the roof terrace of your flat, the terrace without support or insurance, onto which you dragged lightweight white patio furniture which you bought from the market at Waterden Road. The air smelled of the city but it was early and the mist would soon burn off to make way for the beautiful day we would spend lounging in Victoria Park. Fresh pineapple, grapes, strawberries and melon, covered in thick yogurt, laced with maple syrup because you don’t like honey.
You grew up in a place like this, you said. Not here, but similar, a place of streets and houses, a small park, and green spaces where ball games were not allowed. Sycamore trees grew there. In the autumn they released hundreds of lopsided seeds with wings, paired to fall twisting like rotor blades. Watching them descend was not enough, and you and your friends would cup double handfuls from the pavement and throw them in the air, shouting ’Helicopters! Helicopters!’
At Sunday school I learned that it was a sycamore tree which Zaccheus climbed to get a better view of Jesus. ’Zaccheus was a little man with a big problem,’ said Miss deWinter, leaning forward towards the class.
You are not a little man, you are long and tall, almost gangly and I think of you sometimes as a marionette made of matchsticks and pipecleaners dancing to a tune that only I can hear.
Ash
Like sycamore seeds, Ash leaves grow in pairs. You played a CD that I had never heard, by a band called Ash. A boy sang:
Do you remember the time I knew a Girl From Mars?
I don’t know if you knew that.
Oh we’d stay up late playing cards,
Henri Winterman Cigars.
You said that this was one of your favourite songs ever, that it wasn’t about a girl, it was about all girls, it was about how it felt to be young and completely mystified by other human beings, and how quickly they could become no more than a memory. You said that it was always possible that you could lose me too, that one day I would be just another girl from Mars.
Baseball bats are made of ash. When I was a girl my father used to take me to baseball matches, to see the Cleveland Indians. Baseball is a game of numbers and averages and I am still very good at mental arithmetic.
The Indians’ logo is a grinning redskin, a single feather rising from the back of his head. The first time you saw it on an old t-shirt, you expressed surprise at racist images in mainstream North American culture. We had to get rid of the gollywogs on our jars of jam, you said. You couldn’t do that anymore, you said, not in England.
Elm
An Elm tree in profile seen across a freshly-harvested field of corn on the South Downs in early autumn looks like an unwieldy bunch of flowers roughly proffered by a teenager on a first date. I didn’t tell you this, because you never bought me flowers.
You told me that Elm is the name of an early email client, which you used in the days before webmail, in the days before the web, when your brother went to California to study. You said it was hard now to understand the excitement that you had found a way to send letters for free.
We held elm leaves in our palms, which are not as symmetrical as they first look. They have the shape of an eye, or an almond.
Beech
The European Beech grows faster than the American Beech, and is more tolerant of urban conditions. I have noticed that the branches of a full beech tree sometimes grow upwards like an afro, and I noticed that Hackney is an area in which black and white people mix more socially and live closer together than they do in Cleveland.
You told me that Londoners are colourblind, that you don’t notice the colour of people’s skin any more than the colour of their eyes. Your eyes are delicious and brown, chocolate pools in your chalk face.
A new shop opened near your flat where an old shoe store was: a showroom selling expensive wooden flooring. You looked in the window and said that this is what is wrong with Hackney now, that this gentrification is starting to be a real pain, that perhaps you should move somewhere else, but you did not disagree when I said how nice it would be to have a solid beech floor.
Cherry
Cherry blossom is synonymous with Japan. The poet Basho wrote:
Clouds of cherry blossoms!
Is that temple bell in Ueno
or Asakusa?
Clouds of cherry blossoms! I said that I would like to go to Tokyo with you. Ueno and Asakusa are both in the part of Tokyo known as shitamachi, the lower-lying old town of Tokyo, where there are temples and single-storey wooden houses rather than skyscrapers and pachinko parlours. You said that you would also like to go to Tokyo but that the part you loved most by reputation was Shinjuku, the home of gangsters and neon.
When a man asks how you lost your virginity it can be salacious, but you did not ask and so I told you that it happened in a car, that I was too drunk to tell whether it hurt, and that I am still in touch with the boy. You had to be asked and you replied that it took place above a tube line in a small grove of trees (which you did not name) on the edge of a school playing field during a lunch break.
Pine
The archetypal Christmas tree is a pine. Its roughly triangular shape makes it easy to replicate and recognise in children’s collages, or spraypainted in fake snow on shop windows in November. You said that wintery images of Christmas like pine trees, snow and robins were culturally specific to Northern Europeans, who had colonised the worldwide imagination of a universal midwinter festival, but I do not recall ever seeing snow as deep in London as in Ohio.
Pine is the name of the email programme that I used at college before there was a worldwide web, but I continue to send postcards and letters to people that I love.
Christmas is a time for families, and at Christmas you went to stay with your family but I did not. We exchanged presents in cardboard boxes and kissed on your doorstep: I stayed in your flat over the holidays, away from my flatmates, wrapped up in your bedclothes and watching television. You phoned on Christmas eve and Christmas day but not Boxing day and when you returned I was asleep in front of a television comedy about a family who lived in a towerblock that looks like the one which we can see from your bedroom window.
Willow
The branches of a willow look to me like a muppet, a character from Sesame Street. You said that salicylic acid, the basis of aspirin, is found in willow bark.
I said that the Weeping Willow is not truly an English tree: it is a cultivated hybrid of the Chinese Peking Willow and the European White Willow. You replied that nothing could be more English than to create a hybrid in such melancholy form, a combination of fearless experimentation with nature and the sadness that accompanies knowledge. Look, you said, pointing to the willow in question, which sat beside an ornamental lake in the National Trust-owned garden where we ate the cheese and chorizo baguettes we had made that morning. That willow is its own triumph and regret all at once.
Oak
The Latin for acorn is ’glans’, which is also the name used to scientifically describe the penis. I have never scientifically described your penis, but when I suggested that its head resembled an acorn you took a strange kind of wordless offence.
The logo of the National Trust is a twig bearing oak leaves of different sizes. English Heritage is the government body which is responsible for looking after the bits of England which people don’t live in; the National Trust is a private charity with a similar purpose which owns old houses, chunks of countryside and stretches of coastline.
If it is the trees which hold England together, the coast is where it is falling apart. We walked high on the chalky cliffs on the edge of the South Downs where a whole lighthouse had been rolled back from the edge of the cliffs to save it from the peril of coastal erosion.
Looking down to the sea writhing on the rocks below, you said that heights make the soles of your feet hurt. You said that this is less to do with the fear of accidentally falling than it is to do with the fear of wanting to jump.
Alder
Alder bark is used to tan and dye leather. I still have a leather jacket of yours, its lining is a kind of check, and I do not know how it was tanned or dyed. A stratocaster guitar’s body is made of alder. Charcoal used in the manufacture of gunpowder was frequently made from alder. Alder wood is used to smoke meat and fish.
Without you, these facts pile up on me like a snowdrift. I can’t make sense of them. You were so confident in the way that you linked one fact to another, keeping up a narrative of connection: you remembered things not as if you were regurgitating things learned from an encyclopaedia, but as if you had learned these things only in order to tell the story which you were telling. I used to accuse you of making things up, but I never once found that you were wrong when I checked.
Alders bear tiny cones, like miniature pine cones. They grow quickly in dangerous and infertile areas.
Yew
Yew is an ancient English wood. Medieval English archers’ bows were made from yew, a durable and elastic wood, but it is a myth that English archers at Agincourt made V-signs towards the French in reference to the mutilation of English archers. Captured archers were simply killed.
Yews also grow in churchyards: this may be because existing sacred sites were adopted by the early Christian church; it may be simply because the light and air in a churchyard allows the tree to grow wide and old as it could not in a forest. It is also said that the poisonous leaves of the yew discouraged farmers from grazing animals within the walls, from turning their sheep into mutton prematurely.
According to the wishes of your family, you were cremated. I would have buried you in a churchyard, a churchyard on a hillside with a view of a valley and an ancient stone Saxon church. A place where few people come, where services are held rarely, a place where I could have come alone and sat beside you for an hour without seeing another person.
I would have buried you in the wide shadow of a spreading yew, to keep your pale skin safe from the sun, to protect and shade you because I too now understand that it is only trees that hold England together.
© Danny Birchall, 2008
Ten English Trees was read by Clareine Cronin at the Liars’ League Lore & Legend event on Tuesday March 11th, 2008.
Danny Birchall divides his time between SE4, W9 and SW1. His work has been published in nthposition and The Mechanics Institute Review, and read at writLOUD and Tales of the DeCongested. He blogs at squaresofwheat.wordpress.com
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