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Tall, majestic, hardy – the British beechis the king of the forest, argues our leading naturalist (Richard Mabey, Rob Sharp, 24 September 2007, Independent)

The most striking piece of trivia about the Queen beech, a gnarled, knotted old tree in an ancient Hertfordshire woodland, is that it was once a character in a Harry Potter film. The landmark at Frithsden Beeches, just outside London, took a turn as the sometimes violent Whomping Willow in The Prisoner of Azkaban. You can see why the film-makers were struck by it: it looks good for a 350-year-old. Regal limbs creep out from its centre; it has the grandeur of a seen-it-all veteran that has lived since before the Great Fire of London, and taken in plenty more besides.

If one could pick the ideal companion with which to encounter this majestic and spooky scene, it would surely be Richard Mabey. Softly-spoken, intense and erudite, he is one of the "wild bunch" of lyrical writers currently riding a wave of interest in man's relationship with the landscape. His drinking buddies include Crow Country scribe Mark Cocker and Cambridge University don Robert Macfarlane, author of the recent hit The Wild Places. Among his peers, Mabey's name is uttered with a hushed reverence. In the world of the green-fingered literary gurus, he is king.

The beech is Mabey's favourite tree. He spent much of his childhood playing in the beech woods of the Chilterns, and once owned a beech wood himself. He admires the tree's amazing ability to respond to catastrophe. Today, beech woods criss-cross southern England, from Burnham Beeches to the New Forest and the Chilterns.

Unlike the high-profile oak, Mabey calls beeches the "workhorses of the forest". They provide firewood and furniture, and epitomise nature's capacity to respond to change. They also play host to many organisms, from hawks in their branches to toadstools on the ground. The Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows is, inevitably, a beech wood.

All this is chronicled in Mabey's eagerly-awaited new book, Beechcombings, the Narratives of Trees. Released next month, it describes the beech's characteristics, habitat and mythology, and explores what we, as humans, can learn from the world of trees.

Most people, of course, take beeches for granted. They are viewed as biological barriers to motorway construction. But throughout history, natural selection has provided them with a long-standing ability to adapt to day-to-day environments (an adaptability that makes humans look like sallow, spluttering wrecks in comparison).

Yet, while the whomping capability of trees is imaginary, the chainsaw is a reality.

MORE:
Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees: 'I see the tree through a mist, astonished I could be so moved' (Richard Mabey, 24 September 2007, Independent)

Back in Burnham, I'm looking at a spectacularly tilted beech, a high-wire balancing act. It's sloping away from me at an almost impossible angle, about 40 degrees to the vertical – as far as it could go, I'd say, without collapsing under its own weight. Hard to guess how it got into this position. First tilted in a gale maybe, then slowly sinking as it tried to grow itself back to uprightness. The whole core of the tree is missing, maybe discarded as useless ballast, so that the trunk is like a trough. The rims of the trough are massive tension-wood muscles, hauling it back. There is a twisting mesh of crooked branches at the top end pulling it the other way, down towards the ground, so the tree has responded with flaring root hawsers and a long single branch, both growing against the direction of the tilt. The trunk has become a lever, perfectly balancing weight with muscular tension.

I try it myself. I lean forward at the same angle as the tree, imagining my feet pinned down by straps, and trying to pick up a huge weight with my hands. It's a ludicrous posture, and I know it would break my back if I tried it for real. Unless I had tension wood up my spine, doing the pulling.

Burnham is full of humanoid trees like this Weightlifters' beech. A League of Health and Beauty tree, doing an elegant midriff twist. A Stilt-walkers' tree. A beech with a wooden Zimmer frame. All of them are exercised, like us, with the business of keeping a rather disorderly mass of tissue upright in a turbulent world. You are beyond anthropomorphism in Burnham, into a place of more mutual metaphors.

But a few of the pollards have picked up names because of another kind of human association. Gray's beech, supposedly the subject of one of the final stanzas of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", went down in the 1930s. The remains of a tree called Jenny Lind, on whose roots the Swedish Nightingale used to perch when she was staying at East Burnham Cottage, is surrounded by a safety fence. Mendelssohn's tree, whose dappled shade is said to have inspired him while he was writing the incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, had its top blown off in the gale of January 1990.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2007 7:27 AM