10 Families, 17 Species: A Book About the Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary Trees

An impassioned, loving letter to trees, which stresses the long history of how we and trees have shaped each other, from the past to the present … Trees live in extremely fragile conditions, and the book warns that we should stop ignoring the problem. — Clare Hickman, BBC History Magazine

About the author:

Fiona Stafford is a professor at the University of Oxford, in England, working on English literature. Her research covers writers such as Ossian, Austen, Wordsworth and Shelley; Romantic-period literature; the literature of place; nature writing; Scottish poetry after 1700; the dialogue between Irish and Scottish literature; literature and the visual arts; and contemporary poetry. She writes on poetry, fiction, identity, literary history, art and the environment, and she edits classic novels. She loves walking in the woods. She has published several books, among them A Short Life of Jane Austen, from Yale University Press. She wrote and read the widely praised series The Meaning of Trees for The Essay on BBC Radio 3. She is married with two sons and lives in Buckinghamshire.

Book excerpt:

Cherry (excerpt)

The Tree Cathedral at Whipsnade was planted in the aftermath of the First World War. Captain Edmund Blyth, who had come through the slaughter like many other lucky men, felt he had to raise a memorial to his dead comrades, but at first he could think of nothing able to carry a loss that large. A few years after the armistice, Blyth and his wife went to Liverpool to see the new cathedral that had been going up since 1904 — already consecrated, though only half built. The work was still under way; for its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, it was the labour of a lifetime and an act of faith, through which he slowly turned the vision in his head into a lasting statement for the people of Liverpool. On the way home, passing through the Cotswolds, a marvellous sight stopped the Blyths in their tracks. Flickering sunlight fell all at once on a stretch of otherwise ordinary woodland — both a transformation of nature and a startling vision. Blyth realised that he too could build a cathedral, made not of brick and glass but of trees and sky. His open-air cathedral would be lovelier than any building, and it would never be finished, because its growing pillars would go on throwing out arched branches, their boughs hung with ever more budding tracery. It would be a memorial to Blyth's friends, and to a generation of young men whose lives were cut short on the battlefield, but it would also be a vivid statement of confidence in the future, raised in a spirit of hope and harmony. In 1927 Blyth bought a farm at Whipsnade on the Dunstable Downs, and by then he knew what to do with the land.

Eighty years on, Captain Blyth's saplings have reached the height he once imagined. Beside the tall birches that form the nave and the chancel stands the first of his chapels, the Easter Chapel, made of cherry trees. In this quiet place for thought there is usually nothing but bare trunks and branches hanging in the air, but every year it fills all at once with dazzling clouds, white as heaven, set against the pale blue sky of spring. The yearly change is most memorable when Easter comes late and the chapel lights up for the festival. Even when Easter falls in March the bare cherries still stand there, easy to overlook but impossible to mistake, waiting patiently for their moment of glory.

Wild cherries light up woodland paths too, like a sign that the sun is coming back: white light suddenly brims over, and the flowers fall as fast as they came. When A. E. Housman called this the "loveliest" of trees, nobody argued. It has rivals, but a cherry in flower is such a shock to the eye that for a few days at least no other tree can stand beside it. Ted Hughes took the arrival of cherry blossom as an invitation to a spring party, and ended up rather let down, because by the time the guests arrived, "she ran past us and dashed out, hiding her face and weeping, her clothes torn and stained." These lovely flowers are usually wrecked by the wind and rain that spring keeps in stock, and lie scattered on the ground before many people have had a chance to look at them. And yet, if we think the bright flowers of the wild cherry — the European sweet cherry — are the essence of an English spring, we ought to think again. Fresh, brief, impermanent, cherry blossom is the best-loved flower in the world, and also the most fleeting.

In Washington, D.C., the excitement builds through the last week of March, as the great stands of cherry trees around the Tidal Basin come into flower. The cameras are in place before the buds have opened. Cherry blossom is a celebrity of the natural world, and nobody wants to miss it. The flowers last only three weeks: first a scatter of white snow, which soon turns into a rich pale-pink mist, and finally a rain of countless petals drifting down. American blossom-viewing is anything but a quiet communion between people and nature. It is warm, sociable and, unexpectedly, athletic, because every year at the height of the bloom the city holds a ten-mile Cherry Blossom run. People line the route to admire the flowers and cheer on the runners panting past.

Cherry trees seem to travel in great numbers, and blossom-watchers follow in their tracks, as though once word gets out nobody is willing to fall behind. In Japan, cherry blossom is like the weather in England: at a fixed point every year it sends everyone into a frenzy. Blossom-viewing marks the start of the Japanese spring, and comes with music, picnics and tea parties in honour of the display. For about two weeks each year the perfectly symmetrical Mount Fuji stands like an island in a snow-white sea of flowers, photographed by tens of thousands of amateurs. The bloom moves like a heavyweight concert tour: as the temperature rises it opens first on the southern island of Okinawa in January, then works its way north, reaching the far tip of the Japanese archipelago in May. Every stand of cherry trees gets its few weeks in the spotlight each year.

The famous Washington cherries actually came from Japan; they did not reach the city until 1912, a gift from the mayor of Tokyo. Helen Taft, the First Lady, and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese ambassador, each planted a tree at the presentation, leaving the other 3,000 saplings for the city's gardeners to deal with. (This was in fact the second attempt to plant Japanese cherries in Washington; the first batch arrived infected with disease and had to be destroyed.) Those two trees still stand today, among many handsome descendants. After the Second World War, when the broken relationship between the United States and Japan looked past repair, another consignment of cherry trees arrived on a diplomatic errand and helped the two countries make up.

As the flower named a favourite by Japan's imperial family, the oriental cherry is one of the defining features of Japanese culture. Pink or white, pure and flawless, the Japanese cherry has swept the world as a stylised pattern on prints, cloth, porcelain and paper. The tree itself needs only the right soil to take root and grow thickly. On the Korean peninsula after the Second World War, every cherry planted by the Japanese occupiers was destroyed and replaced with a native species. These trees stood for Japanese military power — the cherry pattern was even painted on Japanese bombers, as a symbol of how fierce and how short life is. Cherries have been replanted in some places, since Korean botanists now argue that the ornamental cherry came originally from Korea, but the question is tangled up with a bloody colonial history and is still disputed. China has recently made the opposite claim, that it is the tree's country of origin. The beauty of these trees does, in a sense, depend on who is looking.

That particular beauty has also invited human meddling. As cross-breeding went on, growers produced a great many cherry varieties that differ only slightly in their flowers, which has made the family tree hard to follow. Japan's Sato-zakura cherries were a state secret until the early twentieth century, but Japanese gardeners had been raising exotic varieties for many years before that, so it is now hard to say which are native and which are hybrids. The "Fragrant Name" cherry, for instance, is a classic and easily recognised Japanese cherry, with heavy flowering, pale five-petalled blooms and a golden centre; it can be dated with reasonable confidence to a nineteenth-century cross. The latest results from experiments on the International Space Station suggest that cherry trees may still be evolving fast. Seeds sent into space some years ago grew into a cherry that put on height at an astonishing rate and flowered four years earlier than it should have. Cherry blossom, clearly, will go on being the most fleeting of all flowers.

Japanese cherries usually flower more fully than their European cousins, and their first appearance in Britain, late in the Victorian era, caused a stir. Their slender twigs carried egg-white flowers with a lightness this garden-loving country had never seen. Parasols and kimonos were suddenly in fashion, The Mikado was selling everywhere, and planting cherries was how landscape designers followed the trend. Soon these trees, with their bright, boldly striped trunks, were spreading across Britain, planted even on the dreariest streets.

Dazzling as the ornamental cherry from the East was, Britain's native cherry kept an appeal of its own that has never faded. It stands in the woods, known for the white it wears at Easter, but by July it has turned wholly green and red. It is the native cherry's summer dress that has always given it a special place in the hearts of the British — or, more exactly, in their mouths and stomachs.

Medieval castles and monasteries often planted cherries, because the trees supplied precious fruit. Medieval cherry orchards were once thought to be one of the rich legacies of the Roman occupation, but archaeologists studying a Bronze Age site in County Offaly have found traces of prehistoric cherries. Long before the Romans reached England with their Mediterranean cooking, the ancient Irish were already feasting on them. This fruit is a jewel of the kitchen. Sweet cherries are delicious straight off the tree; sour ones make fine pies and puddings. Cherries can be bottled in brandy, or baked into cakes, clafoutis, crêpes or Black Forest gateau. In many cherry-growing countries they turn up in main courses too, cutting the fat of a roast duck or adding fruit to saffron rice. Liqueurs such as cherry brandy and kirsch catch the indescribable taste of sour cherries and keep that flavour for years.

The sticky, dark-red glacé cherry looks like a symbol of the supermarket age, but the Tudor court was already eating cherries preserved in sugar. Henry VIII was so fond of these juicy little spheres that he ordered the royal fruiterer to plant vast cherry orchards, which turned Kent into "the garden of England". For centuries afterwards Kent kept that Edenic look, and older residents still remember the spectacle of cherry trees stretching into the distance, and the tall ladders brought out every summer for the picking. But Britain's cherry orchards fell away fast after the Second World War, and cherries from Turkey, the United States and Germany entering the British market made things worse; those countries now dominate the world cherry trade. In only twenty years, 90 percent of Britain's cherry orchards disappeared — a shocking figure. By the 1970s most people were likelier to be driving a Datsun Cherry than planting a cherry tree. In the modern city a ladder is a potential claim waiting to happen, and officially approved cherry pickers now raise nothing more than a wistful memory of England's cherry orchards and the natural rhythm of the picking season.

To fight this sad reversal, people have been working in recent years to restore the cherry's glory, using dwarfing fruit trees and polytunnels along the way. The new methods may add nothing to the tree's traditional charm, but they get the most out of it. Steady growth in demand from makers of high-end furniture, who want cherry wood for its close grain and deep colour, is also encouraging sustainable planting. Cherry wood is in fact so valuable that the whereabouts of mature timber trees are kept very quiet. Happily, the cherry's sociable side has not been altogether suppressed. From Kent to the old growing districts of Worcestershire, the traditional summer cherry fairs are busy again, and stirring fresh enthusiasm for local fruit.

Some inventive growers have even started a new business renting out cherry trees, which means you can enjoy blossom of your very own in spring and then eat freshly picked, glossy strings of black fruit in July. Is this one more sign that our way of life has become too tense and too busy? Are we too busy, or too impatient, to grow a cherry tree ourselves, and would rather pay a small sum to borrow someone else's? Or is it a way of encouraging people to repair a relationship — between growers and consumers, between the chilled packaged punnet and the living tree, and between humanity and Mother Earth? The cherry's usefulness against a range of ailments should not be underrated. Henry VIII may not be the best advertisement for the health benefits, but cherries really are a traditional remedy for gout, fever and the aches that follow a virus, probably because they are rich in vitamins, red anthocyanins and fibre. Researchers are now studying their antioxidant and anti-infective potential, and their possible use in losing weight. Cherry stalks were once steeped to make an infusion for bronchitis, anaemia and diarrhoea. In recent years extract from the bark of the African cherry has been found to treat prostate problems effectively. Unfortunately the bark has been stripped so heavily that the remedy is no longer available. A considerable quantity of cherry stones, meanwhile, ends up as a loose stuffing, packed into pain-relief pillows and sold. And because cherries make natural melatonin, a few before bed will help you sleep.

To meet the threat from the German air force, cherry trees were planted wherever Royal Air Force stations sprang up around the country. Many of these well-matched trees still stand to attention on the same spots, though their girths are no longer so uniform and the horizontal lenticels on their bark have widened a little. Even so, once a year they put on a plumed helmet, to go with the tidy white kerbstones and gates. Did they stand for something precious and precarious in the garden of England, meant to send those young men climbing into the sky? Was the cherry still seen then as a tree sent from heaven? Or does the fleeting beauty of the blossom simply remind us how short life is?

Whether life is a bowl of cherries is a question that has bothered us for a long time.

Cover image from: pixabay