An article in the latest edition of The Author caught my eye. Let’s face it, “Tree planting with Thomas Hardy” is an intriguing title by anyone’s standards. The content of the article did not disappoint, though it turned out to be something a little different from what I had initially expected.
Some followers of this blog may recall me writing, way back in 2014, about the "Hardy Tree" at St Pancras Old Churchyard in London, where Thomas Hardy, then a junior architect, was given the task of relocating a number of graves, and placed them in a circular pattern around an ash tree. What I had not realised was that several of Hardy's works contain what the author of the article calls handy tips on tree-planting.
Jonathan Tulloch is a novelist, journalist and musician who has an unusual hobby - planting trees. I say unusual because it is not part of his job. He is what he calls a "guerrilla treeplanter", going out at night to repopulate the British countryside by means of random acts of propagation. Rather like Admiral Collingwood, who used to go around with a pocketful of acorns and distribute them at the roadside in the hope of raising new oaks (presumably for shipbuilding purposes), Tulloch considers it his duty to take a role in raising a new generation of trees to replace the ones repeatedly being mown down by mechanical excavators.
This idea appealed to me somewhat, and also reminded me of the talk given by Anne Powell at our legendary Cardiff conference in 2013. Anne has taken an interest in the "gardens" created and tended by soldiers of the First World War. Apparently there are photographs of soldiers with watering cans, caring for plants at the Front, sometimes even in the trenches, where it seems that celery grew particularly well! I can only assume that this was during the summer in places where there was not much fighting going on; I can't imagine that anything pleasant could have been grown in the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele at the height of battle. The article in The Spectator from which I derived this interesting information also tells me that the Imperial War Museum holds among its collection a medal for prize-winning tomatoes submitted to the Le Havre horticultural show of 1918.
Philip Gosse (1879-1959), a family friend of Siegfried Sassoon, took after his grandfather and namesake, the great naturalist (and Darwin denier) whose biography was written by Ann Thwaite in 2002. Gosse junior - of course the son of Edmund - served with RAMC and spent his time on the Western Front collecting rare species for the Natural History Museum. His 1935 memoir, modestly titled Memoirs of a camp-follower, gives an entertaining account of his efforts to keep his specimens safe and find the required materials for taxidermy when appropriate.
Such were the lengths taken by First World War military personnel who loved the natural world and could not bear to see it laid waste by the activities of both armies. Sassoon, Blunden and Graves were among those who witnessed and commented on the work of nature at the Front. For those not brought up in the inner cities, there was little beauty to be seen in the trenches and they longed for the rural idylls that many of them had known as children.
