I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary. Trees are the lovely works of God, still living in every city among the ugly works of man. These large friendly vegetables are not just plants, but stores of goodness, peace and calm. I once tried hugging one and got nothing out of it. But a walk amid great woods will always mysteriously refresh my spirit. If ever I hear chainsaws nearby, I fear the worst. 

I have long assumed that England is, for the most part, a tree-hating country. I meet perfectly civilized people who move into houses and immediately complain that they are too dark because of nearby trees, or who moan about how the roots menace their foundations. Well (I think but do not say), that is tough. You should have thought of that before you bought the place. But what use is it to argue with people who behave like this? They are like the urban dwellers (this is quite common) who seek the supposed deep peace of the countryside, move in next to a village church and then start demanding that the bells be silenced. They dwell in the same world and country that I live in, but they are as different from me (more so in fact) than a Taliban fighter is from a Church of England parson.

There are rules here to stop the butchery of trees, but how much use are they in practice? There is a zone of very expensive houses near the sea in Southern England where there have been several cases of very rich people being fined for destroying protected trees, but did these fines really hurt them, or did they think them a reasonable price for the horrible things they wanted—more glaring light, less shade, a better ”view” of something or other? In England now, a chain of restaurants is being criticized sternly for hacking down most of a five hundred-year-old oak in the London suburb of Enfield. The tree (unprotected by law, though some are) had achieved a girth of twenty feet and was planted before most of the nations in the world even existed. Pictures of the massacre show a very healthy-looking, utterly desolate stump surrounded by equally healthy-looking pieces of trunk and branches. The restaurant chain made the excuse which always works in the modern world—“we were advised that it caused a serious health and safety risk, and so this was an essential action to protect our employees and guests, to whom we have a duty of care.” Well, indeed. 

Since Margaret Thatcher unforgivably introduced ambulance-chasing lawyers into England as her parting gift at the end of her premierships, every tree has been in danger from safety inspectors. What if a limb, or the whole tree, fell over in the wind, or indeed on a calm day, when a person was beneath. The tree inspector who had passed the tree as safe, and the authority he worked for, would struggle to escape the expensive blame. Parks in England nowadays often close completely on windy days, when they are at their most enjoyable, presumably on the advice of their lawyers. How distressing that parks—and trees—should now need lawyers.

Since in the imagination of many England is a land of dense greenwood, in which the future King Charles II hid from his republican pursuers in a great and royal Oak, and full of ancient forests sheltering outlaws, its actual scraped, sawn-off bareness can come as something of a surprise to romantic visitors. Some of this is due to the plague which destroyed legions of elms fifty years ago, from which we shall never fully recover. More of it is the fault of crude development, and of the growth of hedgeless, treeless agribusiness so ruthless that many birds and small creatures now seek refuge in the suburbs from a blighted countryside.

Many great men have feared for our trees. J.R.R. Tolkien once said rightly, ”Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate.” He famously depicted the spiteful destruction of trees during the Scouring of the Shire, the ruination of that small land by enemies within, an episode which was mysteriously omitted from Peter Jackson’s film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Was it, like Tolkien himself, too conservative? But he allows magic to restore the lost trees, presumably unable to bear the decades of glaring ugliness he would otherwise have had to inflict on the Hobbits. It is an interesting example of just how limited our scientific achievements are that nobody has yet developed a method of making great broad-leafed trees grow faster. But who would invest in that, which would create real lasting joy, when there is so much more money to be made out of ”antidepressants,” which claim to alleviate gloom with chemical happiness?

C.S. Lewis listed keeping “good trees from being unnecessarily cut down” as one of the duties of the Kings of Narnia. The coinage of Narnia was made up of ”Lions” and ”Trees” (I suspect it was twenty Trees to a Lion, and perhaps twelve Hedgehogs to a tree). Kingsley Amis makes more than one biting reference to the tree-hatred of modern England, describing (I think, in Jake’s Thing) the unusual energy of public authority workers whenever they are asked to hack down trees, compared with the immense slowness and reluctance they display when fixing potholes or defunct streetlights. In his much-misunderstood satire Russian Hide and Seek, in which he used a Soviet invasion of Britain as a metaphor for national, cultural and moral decline, he depicted a country without any trees at all, just countless thousands of stumps, because the conquerors had sawn them all down and carried them off to destroy the morale and national feeling of their new subjects. These authors are obviously right. Trees lift the spirit and strengthen the heart. Those of us in Britain who lived through the dismal, slow-motion catastrophe of Dutch Elm Disease sixty years ago, in which the whole landscape was denuded and despoiled, as if it had been cursed, were all marked by it.

So imagine my concern when death warrants appeared pinned on trees not far from my home. The condemned ones were horse chestnuts just coming into leaf, one of them creating a great green arch of shade, beauty and birdsong over the road. It was claimed that they were in some way rotten and must come down. Well, perhaps, but didn’t we need to know more? I pestered my neighbors and pestered town and county authorities. I thought, and still think, that authority should be a bit scared of cutting down trees, as they will then be more careful to do it only when necessary, as in Narnia. I confess I was hostile to and suspicious of the officials involved. And then they offered to meet me at the scene. They were of course emissaries of modern power, wearing, as English public servants now often must, lanyards decorated with the flag of the Republic of Transgendria. They talked annoyingly of French Republican “meters” and “centimeters” instead of English Royalist yards, feet, and inches. But this was not their fault. They were charming, gave a good impression of liking trees as much as I do, and said they wished more people cared about them. And then they produced two implements. The first was a special hammer which, when bashed against a tree, produced a hollow echo when it hit rotten wood and a solid sound when the wood was firm. The second was a curious space-age device called a “resistograph,” which plunged a needle into the trunk and, so its operator assured me, detected rotten and hollow bits. Both claimed to be able to see trouble where it was not normally visible, without harming healthy trees. 

I had been prepared to doubt them. But they were really quite convincing. And, oh misery! The tree I sought to save showed up as deeply rotten. My guess is that its roots were wrecked a few years ago by somebody digging a ditch for a cable or a pipeline. I had to concede it. And so the day will soon come when I hear the hideous whine of the saws, and of that thing that grinds trees into powder, and the shouts of men in hard hats as they destroy a thing of beauty which will take at least eighty years to replace, if it is ever replaced at all. And I will be able to say and do nothing to prevent it, even though I hate it. My only solution to this is a resolve to carry on protesting, in case they have it wrong, and to plant trees whenever I can, in the hope of restoring that which was lost, for those I shall never meet.