We have had our Tree Week. We are still working on the Tree Register of Ireland. And then along comes a cutting from a Swiss paper telling of a man who seems to be working on a tree register of half the world. A modern Indiana Jones, runs the heading, and the reporter covering a lecture this man gave in the University of Geneva says his eyes have that long-distance look. The traveller is Jerome Hutin-Koechlin, whose passion is for ancient living trees - hundreds and thousands of years old. His seminar given in the bio-energy laboratory was described by the Director thus: "He is an excellent photographer, willing to walk for days to view specimen trees. He is a pioneer." Already he has travelled North and South America and the South Sea Islands (or Oceania). He has still Asia and Africa in front of him, in order to publish a book at the end of this year of one hundred of these ancient giants.
He has been taking photographs since he was eight years old and soon came to the conclusion that we do not take sufficient notice of Nature about us - animal life, trees. From this eventually emerged the passion for old trees, monumental trees. But where are they? In French-speaking Switzerland (Suisse Romande) he mentioned one ancient called the lime-tree of Marchissy, which dates back to 1380 and some old oaks nearby. But it was farther away that he found the extraordinary specimens. In Sicily, for example, a chestnut with a circumference of fifty metres. In California there are the well-known bristlecones of some 5,000 years of age, but the oldest known tree is in Tasmania. It is a pine tree, said to be 10,500 years old, and its name in French is pin huon (can't find it in the books).
Plenty of hundreds-of-years-old trees: baobabs in Africa, red cedars in Canada. He is asked if it is hard to find these, and replies that there are many inventories, sometimes old, but they are often proved inexact when the tree has been cut down and the rings counted. He asks that historic trees should be preserved. Trees of four or five metres in diameter are felled by the thousand in Canada and Australia in clearances. He is looking for financial help now to be able to photograph the 3,000-year-old ginkgos of Japan and its camphor trees. Geneva, by the way, has fine parks with trees of some antiquity, not enough perhaps to excite our friend, but well worth admiring by amateurs.