Laudator Temporis Acti

[Walter Scott], anonymous review of The Forester's Guide and Profitable Planter. By Robert Monteath. (With Plates.) Second Edition. Edinburgh, 1824, in Quarterly Review 36 (October 1827) 558–600, rpt. in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. I (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), pp. 32-49 (at 34, col. 2):

We have ourselves seen an account of a sale of growing trees upon an estate in this district where the proceeds amounted to no less than six thousand pounds, a very large sum considering that the country was overstocked with wood, the demands for it confined to those of rural economy, and the means of transporting it extremely imperfect. There must have been a fall of large and valuable timber to have produced such a sum under such circumstances. The guardians of the noble proprietor, when they made the sale, seem to have given directions for enclosing the natural wood, with a view to its preservation. Nevertheless, about seventy or eighty years afterwards, there was scarcely in existence, upon the whole property, a twig sufficient to make a walking-stick, so effectually had the intentions of the guardians been baffled, and their instructions neglected. It may be some explanation of this wilful waste, that a stocking of goats (of all other creatures the most destructive to wood) had been put upon the ground after cutting the trees. But to speak the truth, agriculture, as Mr Shandy says of the noble science of defence, has its weak points. Those who pursue one branch of the art are apt to become bigoted and prejudiced against every thing which belongs to another, though no less essential, department. The arable cultivator, for example, has a sort of pleasure in rooting up the most valuable grass land, even where the slightest reflection might assure him that it would be more profitable to reserve it for pasture. The store-farmer and shepherd, in the same manner, used formerly to consider every spot occupied by a tree as depriving the flock of a certain quantity of food, and not only nourished malice against the woodland, but practically laboured for its destruction; and to such lamentable prejudices on the part of farmers, and even of proprietors, is the final disappearance of the natural forests of the north chiefly to be attributed. The neglect of enclosure on the side of the landlord; the permitted, if not the authorized, invasions of the farmer; the wilful introduction of sheep and cattle into the ground where old trees formerly stood, have been the slow, but effectual, causes of the denuded state of extensive districts, which, in their time, were tracts of what the popular poetry of the country called by the affectionate epithet of "the good green wood." Still, however, the facts of such forests having existed, ought now, in more enlightened times, to give courage to the proprietor, and stimulate him in his efforts to restore the silvan scenes which ignorance, prejudice, indolence, and barbarism combined to destroy.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Arthur Stanley Pease (1881-1964), Sequestered Vales of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. 5:

From active life as a manufacturer he had retired to a good-sized white house close by the sidewalk as it passed over a knoll shaded by a magnificent and enormous elm tree. When the town fathers widened the street, cut some of the large roots of this tree, and thus led to its death, grandfather's regret was something from which I think he never quite recovered. It seemed almost as if the tree had been the residence of what the anthropologists call his "external soul."

Labels: arboricide

The Journal of the de Goncourts; pages from a great diary, being extracts from the Journal des Goncourt. Edited, with introduction, by Julius West (London: T. Nelson, 191-?), p. 91:

August 21. — In the Bois de Boulogne. To see all these great trees fall under the axe, with the quiverings of men wounded to death; to see these [sic, read there], where a green curtain was spread, this mass of sharpened stakes, shining whitely, this sinister harrow — you feel a hatred of the Prussians rising in your heart; they are the cause of these violations of nature.

21 août. — Au bois de Boulogne. À voir sous la cognée tomber ces grands arbres, avec des vacillements de blessés à mort, à voir là, où c’était un rideau de verdure, ce champ de pieux aigus, luisant blanc, cette herse sinistre, il vous monte de la haine au cœur pour ces Prussiens, qui sont cause de ces assassinats de la nature.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Thanks to Eric Thomson for the following:

C.R. Leslie R.A., Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896). p. 399:

On the 25th July, 1836, Constable delivered a lecture before the Literary and Scientific Institution at Hampstead, on the subject of landscape generally.

Id., pp. 403-4:

Constable then gave some practical rules for drawing from nature, and showed some beautiful studies of trees. One, a tall and elegant ash, of which he said, " Many of my Hampstead friends may remember this young lady at the entrance to the village. Her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing when she was in full health and beauty; on passing some time afterwards, I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters, 'All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.' The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spike nails had been driven far into her side. In another year one half became paralyzed, and not long after the other shared the same fate, and this beautiful creature was cut down to a stump, just high enough to hold the board.

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1069290/an-ash-tree-watercolour-drawing-constable-john-ra/?carousel-image=2017JV2712

Detail, with B (of BEGGARS?) and LAW legible:

The vagrant woman and child reminded me of the foreground of Dedham Vale in which sentinel trees equally afford some protection to the pair beneath.

Labels: arboricide

Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005), Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 167-168 (notes omitted):

For just as the flora has left its ghostly imprint embedded in so much fossilized matter, so, too, its memory has been sprinkled across the surface of innumerable church cartularies, bullaria, monastic records; been buried within the archival wealth of countless wills and testaments, marriage contracts, notarized deeds; or, occasionally, been inscribed across the surface of cadastral survey maps, outlining the limits of given properties. Within such documents, a stray phytotoponym—an oblique reference, say, to some olive grove offered up as part of a medieval dowry—gives researchers, on occasion, an invaluable aperçu of the floral environment of a particular locale at a given historical moment.

Fagus sylvatica, or common beech, is a perfect example in point. For the expanse that that tree once occupied can still be measured today, either by the lingering presence of ancient place-names in current usage or by the detection of such names in medieval records. In toponymic form, the tree appears under a variety of synonyms: Fage, Fau, Fagette, Fageas, Fayard, and so on. In each and every case, these place-names testify to a vanished environment. Infallibly, they indicate the exact location of forests that—in retracting—have left nothing for memento but their own estranged vocables. Among the many eloquent examples cited by Aline Durand, one in particular—drawn from a medieval cartulary— refers to a certain Faja oscura located in the Causse du Larzac. Faja signifies the tree itself, with all the nutritive oils inherent in its woody fruit, whereas oscura evokes the darkness, and thus the density, of those once-flourishing beeches. Long since converted into pastureland, that arboreal stand endures in a lone microtoponym: Lou Fagals. Mnemonic marker, it designates little more than a tiny ramshackle hamlet in the commune of Les Rives (Hérault).

The word—along with its residual counterpart, the fossil—bears witness to those vanished landscapes. Properly interpreted, its seemingly inconsequential particles, buried in so much somnolent documentation, allow one a glimpse—at least—of that lost ecology. It's as if the word, as a token of human consciousness, had withstood the retraction and ultimate disappearance of that dense sylvatic canopy—that Faja oscura—in order to preserve the wood's very memory. Even more, it serves to preserve our very own. For in that retraction and ultimate disappearance, the interface between culture and nature—cultum and incultum—has vanished as well. Only the word, it would seem, has withstood that spoliation. Having done so, it reminds us of a time in which the woods—the earth itself—hadn't yet been sacrificed, alas, for the sake of ourselves alone.

Labels: arboricide

Herodian 8.4.5 (tr. Edward C. Echols):

After the bridge had been completed, the army crossed over and marched to Aquileia, where they found the buildings on the outskirts deserted. The soldiers cut down all the trees and grapevines and burned them, and destroyed the crops which had already begun to appear in those regions. Since the trees were planted in even rows and the interwoven vines linked them together everywhere, the countryside had a festive air; one might even say that it wore a garland of green. All these trees and vines Maximinus' soldiers cut down to the very roots before they hurried up to the walls of Aquileia.

ἐφεστῶτος οὖν αὐτοῦ διαβὰς ὁ στρατὸς ἐπὶ τὴν πόλιν ἐχώρει. τὰ μὲν οἰκοδομήματα τῶν προαστείων ἔρημα εὕρισκον, ἀμπέλους μέντοι καὶ δένδρα πάντα ἐξέκοπτον, ἃ δὲ ἐνεπίμπρασαν, καὶ τὴν πρότερον τοῖς χωρίοις ὑπάρχουσαν ὥραν κατῄσχυνον. δένδρων γὰρ στοίχοις ἴσοις ἀμπέλων τε πρὸς ἀλλήλας δέσει πανταχόθεν ἠρτημένων ἐν ἑορτῆς σχήματι, στεφάνῳ ἄν τις τὴν χώραν κεκοσμῆσθαι ἐτεκμήρατο· ἅπερ πάντα ῥιζόθεν ἐκκόψας ὁ στρατὸς ἐπὶ τὰ τείχη ἠπείγετο.

Labels: arboricide

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), "Worth Forest," in his Poetical Works, Vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1914), pp. 14-32 (at 18-19):

I love the Forest; 'tis but this one strip
Along the watershed that still dares keep
Its title to such name. Yet once wide grown
A mighty woodland stretched from Down to Down,
The last stronghold and desperate standing-place
Of that indigenous Britannic race
Which fell before the English. It was called
By Rome "Anderida," in Saxon "Weald."
Time and decay, and man's relentless mood,
Have long made havoc of the lower wood
With axe and plough; and now, of all the plain,
These breadths of higher ground alone remain,
In token of its presence. Who shall tell
How long, in these lost wilds of brake and fell,
Or in the tangled groves of oak below,
Gathering his sacred leaf, the mistletoe,
Some Druid priest, forgotten and in need,
May here have kept his rite and owned his creed
After the rest?

Labels: arboricide

Louise Allen, "Waterloo Battlefield, the First Tourists & the Fate of Wellington's Tree," Jane Austen's London (June 19, 2020):

One significant victim was the ‘Wellington Tree’. John Scott, a journalist, described its significance in Paris Revisited, in 1815, By Way of Brussels: Including A Walk Over the Field of Battle At Waterloo. (Longman, Hurst etc. London. 1816).

“From St. Jean, the road immediately rises up the back of the ridge, on the height and in the front of which, the infantry of the Duke of Wellington’s army was formed in line. The cavalry, at the beginning of the battle, were posted on the St. Jean side of the eminence. The ascent is easy: you reach the top unexpectedly, and the whole field of battle is then at once before the eye. Its sudden burst has the effect of a shock, and few, I believe, are found to put any question for the first five minutes. The point from whence this complete view of the scene, so often pictured in imagination, first presents itself, is one of the most interesting that it includes. It is the summit of the ridge close to the road, over which hangs an old picturesque tree, with a few straggling branches projecting in grotesque shapes from its ragged trunk. The British position extended on the right and left of the road, for the extent of about a mile and three quarters, along the top of a continued line of gentle eminences, immediately confronted by very similar heights, distant from half to three quarters of a mile along which the French army was posted. … The tree, already mentioned, fixed on the bank above the high road from Brussels to Charleroi, denotes the center of, our position, and, the Duke of Wellington having been near it the greater part of the day, it goes by the name of the “Wellington tree.” I found it much shattered with balls, both grape and musket; all of which had been picked out by visitors. Its branches and trunk were terribly splintered. It still retained, however, the vitality of its growth, and will, probably, for many future years, be the first saluting sign to our children and our children’s children, who, with feelings of a sacred cast, come to gaze on this theatre of their ancestors’ deeds.”

But the tree was not to survive for long. The party with schoolmaster John Evans, author of An Excursion to Windsor in 1810…to which is annexed A Journal of a Trip to Paris in the Autumn of 1816, by Way of Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels and Waterloo. (Sherwood, Neely and Jones. London 1817) showed far less respect for the tree as a symbol than Scott did. “…we came in sight of WELLINGTON TREE, situated on a rising ground to the left of the road [seen from the south]. I took a Sketch of it, and some of my companions a bough or two. The bough immediately over the place where THE DUKE had stood, still bore the mark of a cannon-shot! This bough fell under the axe of an Irish officer in our party.” Charlotte Eaton [in The Days of Battle or Quatre Bras and Waterloo by An Englishwoman], returning to the battlefield for a second time, records the end of the tree. “*Footnote: It is on the left of the road in going towards Waterloo, behind the farmhouse of la Haye Sainte. But this tree, which ought to have been for ever sacred, has been CUT DOWN!!!”

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H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, Chapter XV ("Sorais' Song"):

On other days we would pay visits to the country seats at some of the great lords' beautiful fortified places, and the villages clustering beneath their walls. Here we saw vineyards and corn-fields and well-kept park-like grounds, with such timber in them as filled me with delight, for I do love a good tree. There it stands so strong and sturdy, and yet so beautiful, a very type of the best sort of man. How proudly it lifts its bare head to the winter storms, and with what a full heart it rejoices when the spring has come again! How grand its voice is, too, when it talks with the wind: a thousand aeolian harps cannot equal the beauty of the sighing of a great tree in leaf. All day it points to the sunshine and all night to the stars, and thus passionless, and yet full of life, it endures through the centuries, come storm, come shine, drawing its sustenance from the cool bosom of its mother earth, and as the slow years roll by, learning the great mysteries of growth and of decay. And so on and on through generations, outliving individuals, customs, dynasties — all save the landscape it adorns and human nature — till the appointed day when the wind wins the long battle and rejoices over a reclaimed space, or decay puts the last stroke to his fungus-fingered work.

Ah, one should always think twice before one cuts down a tree!

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

J.B. Trend, The Language and History of Spain (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953), p. 21:

Woods and meadows were found, too, in the Pyrenees and at the higher levels in Castille, with the great pinewoods of Guadarrama and Gredos, Urbión and Cuenca. The reaction of an average Spaniard of today, driving through a wood, is not "How beautiful!" but "How profitable!" (¡Que riqueza! What riches!) Yet replanting has never kept pace with cutting though some of the oldest documents in the language are warnings or penalties for the man who should cut down a tree. Qui pino taiare, inforquen-lo (Whoso shall cut down a pine tree, let them hang him), was a piece of customary law in a village on the borders of Portugal, and the legislators were right; the more the trees were cut, the drier the climate became and the typical vegetation turned to heath and moor. In some parts of Castille ilex (encina) is about the only tree left; with a carpet of those inconspicuous aromatic plants which the Romans hardly noticed but the Moslems used for medicines.

Labels: arboricide

Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), "The Fallen Oak" ("La quercia caduta"), tr. Arturo Vivante:

Where it cast its shadow the dead oak now
   Lies outspread, nor does it vie with whirlwinds anymore.
   People say: Now I see: it was really large!

Here and there the little nests of spring
   Droop from its crown.
   People say: Now I see: it was really good.

Everyone praises, everyone cuts. At evening
   Everyone goes home with a heavy bundle.
   In the air, a cry...of a chickadee

That seeks the nest she will not find.

---

Dov'era l'ombra, or sé la quercia spande
   Morta, né più coi turbini tenzona.
   La gente dice: Or vedo: era pur grande!

Pendono qua e là dalla corona
   I nidietti della primavera.
   Dice la gente: Or vedo: era pur buona!

Ognuno loda, ognuno taglia. A sera
   Ognuno col suo grave fascio va.
   Nell'aria, un pianto...d'una capinera

Che cerca il nido che non troverà.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson †.

Labels: arboricide

C.H. Sisson (1914-2003), In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems & Selected Translations (1974; rpt. Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1975), pp. (a very free version of Horace, Odes 2.15: Iam pauca aratro iugera regiae), pp. 226-227:

There will be nothing soon for the plough
But huge bulks everywhere. On all sides
      Wider than lakes, the city
      Lamp-standards drive out the elms,

Planes, beeches. Once it was fertile here.
Edges of violets circumscribed
      The grove; there was everywhere something for the
      Nostrils, but now there is nothing.

Where there were once forests a region of
Concrete. Until quite recently
      There were meadows at Westminster.
      The salmon leaped where Raleigh was beheaded.

Once there was only nature for ornament.
Then there was ornament and art flourished;
      Now there is only the South Bank
      And, of course, the Arts Council.

It was not laws but a less abstract
Technology made the turf spring.
      The churches in those days, you may
      Remember, were built of stone.

Labels: arboricide

Amelia Wynne, "Homeowner is fined £60,000 because he deliberately damaged 90-year-old protected cedar tree on street outside his house forcing the council to fell it - after his requests to chop it down were twice rejected by authority," Daily Mail (December 22, 2019):

A homeowner who damaged a 90-year-old tree so badly it had to be felled has been fined over £60,000.

Stephen Lawrence, from Chelmsford, Essex, had made two applications to the council to fell the mature protected cedar, but both were refused by the council.

Despite warnings, he stripped the bark off the lower trunk, according to the council, and holes were drilled into the wood.

Chelmsford City Council said the damage was so extensive it had to be felled - and took him to court.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who adds:

I think the 'lex talionis' requires that a person found guilty of debarking a tree and causing damage sufficiently serious for the tree then to require felling, should not be given a mere fine, even of £60,000. He should be debarked himself, i.e. flayed alive, or failing that, hanged from the branches of the aggrieved tree or, failing that, crucified on a cross made from its timber. Rhadamanthine Lord Braxfield would have meted out such a sentence without batting an eyelid.

Labels: arboricide

Council of Carthage (September 13, 401), in C. Munier, ed., Concilia Africae A. 345 - A. 525 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1974 = Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 149), p. 205 (from Registri Ecclesiae Carthaginensis Excerpta):

DE IDOLORVM RELIQVIIS EXTIRPANDIS.
84. Item placuit ab imperatoribus gloriosissimis peti, ut reliquiae idolatriae non solum in simulacris sed in quibuscumque locis uel lucis uel arboribus omnimodo deleantur.

Translated by Henry R. Percival, in The Seven Ecumenical Councils (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900 = A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. XIV), p. 482:

Of extirpating the remains of the idols.
Item, it seemed good to petition the most glorious Emperors that the remains of idolatry not only in images, but in any places whatever or groves or trees, should altogether be taken away.

Labels: arboricide

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), The Rings of Saturn, tr. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 169-171:

It had grown uncommonly sultry and dark when at midday, after resting on the beach, I climbed to Dunwich Heath, which lies forlorn above the sea. The history of how that melancholy region came to be is closely connected not only with the nature of the soil and the influence of a maritime climate but also, far more decisively, with the steady and advancing destruction, over a period of many centuries and indeed millennia, of the dense forests that extended over the entire British Isles after the last Ice Age. In Norfolk and Suffolk, it was chiefly oaks and elms that grew on the flatlands, spreading in unbroken waves across the gently undulating country right down to the coast. This phase of evolution was halted when the first settlers burnt off the forests along those drier stretches of the eastern coast where the light soil could be tilled. Just as the woods had once colonized the earth in irregular patterns, gradually growing together, so ever more extensive fields of ash and cinders now ate their way into that green-leafed world in a similarly haphazard fashion. If today one flies over the Amazon basin or over Borneo and sees the mountainous palls of smoking, hanging, seemingly motionless, over the forest canopy, which from above resembles a mere patch of moss, then perhaps one can imagine what those fires, which sometimes burned on for months, would leave in their wake. Whatever was spared by the flames in prehistoric Europe was later felled for construction and shipbuilding, and to make the charcoal which the smelting of iron required in vast quantities. By the seventeenth century, only a few insignificant remnants of the erstwhile forests survived in the islands, most of them untended and decaying. The great fires were now lit on the other side of the ocean. It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France and Spain, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished.

Labels: arboricide

Francis Kilvert, Diary (March 4, 1872):

What a superb day it has been, almost cloudless, brilliant hot as late May and the warm south wind blowing from the Black Mountains. Cwmgwanon Wood is being murdered. As I walked along the edge of the beautiful dingle and looked sadly down into the hollow, numbers of my old friends of seven years standing lay below on both banks of the brook prostrate and mutilated, a mournful scene of havoc, the road almost impassable for the limbs of the fallen giants.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Dear Mike,

I wonder if Rowse was thinking of the section below?

W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), pp. 231-232:

The industrial revolution and the creation of parks around the country houses have taken us down to the later years of the nineteenth century. Since that time, and especially since the year 1914, every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning, or both. Of all the changes in the last two generations, only the great reservoirs of water for the industrial cities of the North and Midlands have added anything to the scene that one can contemplate without pain. It is a distasteful subject, but it must be faced for a few moments.

The country houses decay and fall: hardly a week passes when one does not see the auctioneer's notice of the impending sale and dissolution of some big estate. The house is seized by the demolition contractors, its park invaded and churned up by the tractors and trailers of the timber merchant. Down comes the house; down come the tall trees, naked and gashed lies the once-beautiful park. Or if it stands near a town, the political planners swarm into the house, turn it into a rabbit-warren of black-hatted officers of This and That, and the park becomes a site for some "overspill" — a word as beastly as the thing it describes. We may indeed find the great house still standing tidily in a timbered park: but it is occupied by what the villagers describe detachedly as "the atom men," something remote from the rest of us, though not remote in the sense they themselves like to think. And if the planners are really fortunate, they fill the house with their paper and their black hats, and their open-cast mining of coal or iron ore simultaneously finishes off the park. They can sit at their big desks and contemplate with an exquisite joy how everything is now being put to a good use. Demos and Science are the joint Emperors.

Beyond the park, in some parts of England such as East Anglia, the bull-dozer rams at the old hedges, blots them out to make fields big and vacant enough for the machines of the new ranch-farming and the business-men farmers of five to ten thousand acres. Fortunately, the tractor and the bull-dozer cannot easily destroy the great hedgebanks and stone walls of the anciently-enclosed parts of England; nor is it worth doing, for the good farmer knows the value of these banks and walls as shelter, and of the hedges for timber. Much of the old field pattern therefore remains, with its tangle of deep lanes and thick hedges.

What else has happened in the immemorial landscape of the English countryside? Airfields have flayed it bare wherever there are level, well-drained stretches of land, above all in eastern England. Poor devastated Lincolnshire and Suffolk! And those long gentle lines of the dip-slope of the Cotswolds, those misty uplands of the sheep-grey oolite, how they have lent themselves to the villainous requirements of the new age! Over them drones, day after day, the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable's and Gainsborough's sky. England of the Nissen hut, the "pre-fab," and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment; England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil, murderous with lorries; England of the bombing-range wherever there was once silence, as on Otmoor or the marsh-lands of Lincolnshire; England of battle-training areas on the Breckland heaths, and tanks crashing through empty ruined Wiltshire villages; England of high explosive falling upon the prehistoric monuments of Dartmoor. Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians: let us turn away and contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals.

In a similar vein, he excoriates 20th century Exeter (his native city).

W.G. Hoskins, Two Thousand Years in Exeter (Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1960; rpt. 1974), pp. 133-135:

Eighteen years and more have gone by since the city was devastated. Much has been rebuilt in a commonplace style that might belong anywhere: it is not distinctive as the old Exeter was, with its rich regional flavour. Once more Exeter is the capital of South-Western England, and its shops and streets are as crowded as they ever were. It is still the same kind of city, with seven out of ten of its occupied population providing services of one kind or another. In numbers it grows very slowly, but with the clearing of the congested areas it spreads more and more into the surrounding country. Yet green fields are still visible from most of its streets even today, and it remains one of the most attractive cities in England to look at and to live in.

Its two greatest enemies are the motor-car and the speculative builder. In 1947 there were rather fewer than four thousand private cars registered in the city. Now there are more than twice as many, and more than twice as many commercial vehicles. The narrow streets are being torn apart and much of old Exeter is being lost because everything must be sacrificed to enable the motorist to go one mile an hour faster or to save his withered legs from a moment's walking. The motorist's demands upon our city are endlessly greedy and selfish. But people are more important than vehicles. The motorist must be kept firmly in his place, for he brings the kiss of death wherever he goes.

As for the speculative builder, he seizes daily upon the large houses that were built in late Georgian and early Victorian days, in their large, well-tree'd gardens, and clears the whole site in order to make the maximum profit. The old house comes down, and the beautiful trees, inherited from our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, are sacrificed in order to cram two or three more tatty little houses into the old garden. In twenty years' time, the opulent and seemly houses that were built in an age of elegance will have been replaced by a desert of bricks and concrete.

There is another profound difference between the city of 1960 and that of a hundred years ago. A century ago, two centuries ago, Exeter was a cultured place, the social and intellectual capital of a rich and varied province. Look how highly Richard Ford spoke of it in the 1830s, when he came to live here! Today the city library, burnt out nearly twenty years ago, is still a shambles. The failure to rebuild it is the greatest disgrace in the post-war history of the city. It is clear that books are not considered to be important in modern Exeter. How vastly different from our Victorian forefathers when they founded the Free Library in 1869! (see the Preface)

This failure to provide a good library for the people of Exeter is only the most obvious symptom of some obscure disease that goes very deep. Somewhere between 1860 and now, Exeter ceased to be a cultured city. It would be instructive to trace exactly when and how this profound rot set in, a fascinating and melancholy problem for some social historian. I suspect that the rot was going on rapidly during the later years of the nineteenth century: but what brought it about? Were late Victorians so different from their fathers and grandfathers? Why did the learned societies of Exeter disappear one by one? Why does the Devon and Exeter Institution, that learned library which Richard Ford so greatly admired, gather dust silently, and struggle to make ends meet? The people of Exeter seem to be able to exist happily without any good music: the theatre, centuries old as a tradition in the city, staggers from crisis to crisis. We cannot blame the cinema or television: the rot had set in long before either made its appearance. George Gissing noted in the early 1890s that Exeter people did not support good music even then. In a letter to his sister (December 30, 1892), written from No. 1, St. Leonard's Terrace, where he was living, he says: "We went to hear the Elijah, but it was very poorly done. Curious that the people of Exeter will not support anything good in drama or music." In another letter he complains of Exeter that "intellectually it is very dull". This could never have been said forty years earlier.

For the last two generations or more Exeter has ceased to care about any of these things. It has changed greatly for the worse in this respect. The new university, established in 1956 after its abortive start so many centuries ago, cannot fail in time to bring the ancient culture of Exeter back to life. Two or three generations are after all a very short time. Caerwysc, Isca, Exancester, Exeter — more than seventy generations of people have opened their eyes and closed them for the last time in this ancient city of ours.

And there remains much that is beautiful to look at. There are still dark ilex trees overhanging old stone walls, and there are the little sandstone churches up and down the main streets, with their startling red towers against the blue-and-white sky. And though the river-front has been despoiled in part, there is still the long-deserted quay with its noble Warehouses, built just before the coming of the railways; and the canal, probably the most beautiful ship-canal in England, carrying very little traffic but providing the most peaceful of walks along its banks down to Topsham and beyond, to, where the Exe scents the open sea: the same shining river that brought the pre-historic ships up to earliest Exeter more than two thousand years ago.

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

Labels: arboricide

Rebecca West (1892-1983), Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 116:

The human animal is not competent. That is the meaning of the naked Dalmatian hills. For once they were clothed with woods. These the earliest inhabitants of Dalmatia, the Illyrians and Romans, axed with an innocent carelessness; and the first Slav settlers were reckless too, for they came from the inexhaustible primeval forest of the Balkan Peninsula. Then for three hundred years, from about the time of the Norman Conquest to 1420, the Hungarians struggled with the Venetians for the mastery of this coast, and the nations got no further with their husbandry. Finally the Venetian Republic established its claim, and thereafter showed the carelessness that egotistic people show in dealing with other people's property.

They cut down what was left of the Dalmatian forests to get timbers for their fleet and piles for their palaces; and they wasted far more than they used. Venetian administration was extremely inefficient, and we know not only from Slav complaints but from the furious accusation of the Republic against its own people that vast quantities of timber were purloined by minor officials and put on the market, and that again and again supplies were delivered at the dockyard so far beyond all naval needs that they had to be let rot where they lay. After this wholesale denudation it was not easy to grow the trees again. The north wind, which blows great guns here in winter, is hard on young plantations; and the peasant as he got poorer relied more and more on his goat, a vivacious animal insensible to the importance of afforestation. The poor peasant is also sometimes a thief, and it is easier to steal a young tree than a fully grown one. So, for all the Yugoslavian Government can do, the mainland and the islands gleam like monstrous worked flints.

Labels: arboricide

R.B. Outhwaite, Scandal in the Church: Dr Edward Drax Free, 1764–1843 (London: The Hambleton Press, 1997), pp. 13-14:

In March 1811 the College [St John's, Oxford] wrote to the Bishop of Lincoln enquiring whether he or his officials had given the Rector permission to cut down trees at Sutton. The Bishop replied that not only had no such application been received, but if it had been he would have appointed a person to ascertain whether there were any trees in a fit state to be cut down for 'useful and necessary repairs or improvement of the premises'. He emphasised that incumbents did not have the right to cut down and sell timber, using the purchase money to repair buildings. The timber itself had actually to be used on the premises. If Dr Free had been exceeding his powers, then the patrons must proceed against him as having committed 'waste', and he advised the College to take legal counsel on this.

No immediate action appears to have been taken by the College, until in June 1812 they received a request from a solicitor employed by Free, asking for the remaining £150 to be paid to him. Their reply was that the remainder would be handed over when the College surveyor had certified that the repairs and alterations were finished 'according to the Plan'.

In October 1812 Mr Hudson made his way to Sutton where 'Dr Free ... refused him admission into the House', so that the surveyor could not ascertain what repairs or improvements had been under-taken. He made enquiries in nearby Biggleswade, however, where he learnt that very little work had been done in the Rectory and that only a few fences around the glebe had been repaired. When Hudson was previously in Sutton, moreover, there had been a copse near the Rectory full of fine young timber. By 1812 most of this had been chopped down and taken away. The man who bought this timber from Dr Free admitted to the surveyor that 'they were the finest thriving Trees he had ever seen, and that it was a shame to cut them'. Hudson believed that there had been between two and three hundred oaks, elms, ashes and alders, worth about £20, and now only about a dozen of the smallest were left. In addition to this, Hudson thought that from twelve to fifteen large ash and fir trees, worth about £6o, had disappeared from the churchyard. Fifteen ash trees, taken from other parts of the glebe, were lying by the roadside waiting to be carted away.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who writes:

He was killed by a cart as he was coming out of a tavern. So the words used of fifteen felled ash trees – 'by the roadside waiting to be carted away' – come full circle.

If we take OED free in senses III 18 a and b, I think we'd have to say it's an aptronym.

a. Acting without restriction or limitation; showing a lack of moderation in doing something.

b. free with (also †of): using without reserve or restraint.

Labels: arboricide

F.L. Lucas (1894-1967), Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (London: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1939), pp. 130-131 (March 30):

It must be seven years since I first came here [County Derry], to P's home. Yet here time seems to have stood still; save for a merciless felling of trees that makes one sad and furious. How many of us produce in our whole lifetime as much beauty as the tree we destroy in an hour and cannot replace in a generation?

Hat tip: Ian Jackson (†).

Labels: arboricide

James C. Humes, The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 140 (in the chapter titled "Coiner of Phrases"):

When his wife had chopped down a favorite elm tree at Chartwell, Churchill said to her, "Clemmie, you are guilty of arboricide!"

The implication is that Churchill coined the word. He did not.

Also incorrect is the claim in the New Republic magazine (May 19, 1997, p. 12) that August Heckscher (1913-1997) "coined the word 'arboricide' for the crime of killing trees."

The first citation (dated 1899) in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word is H.G. Graham, Social Life of Scotl. 18th Cent. I. v. 199: "This crime of arboricide was distressingly frequent."

But the word can be found more than half a century earlier. See Asa Gray, "The Longevity of Trees," North American Review, Vol. 59, No. 124 (July 1844) 189-238, rpt. in Scientific Papers of Asa Gray, Vol. II: Essays; Biographical Sketches: 1841-1886 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), pp. 71-124 (at 84):

[T]he age may be directly ascertained by counting the annual rings on a cross section of the trunk. The record is sometimes illegible or nearly so, but it is perfectly authentic; and when fairly deciphered, we may rely on its correctness. But the venerable trunks, whose ages we are most interested in determining, are rarely sound to the centre; and if they were, even the paramount interests of science would seldom excuse the arboricide.

---

Humes, id., also falsely states that Churchill coined the word "benignant." I haven't bothered to check any of the other supposed coinages, but obviously Humes' claims must be taken magno cum grano salis.

Labels: arboricide