Some people talk to trees. Most of us are content to plant them, watch them grow, to enjoy their shade and their presence generally; but there are people who tell us that trees talk to them. Or rather that they can distinguish the sounds made by individual trees in the wind. David Edelsten, writing in a recent Country Life, told of the comfort given by an old copper beech beside his house. "Even on the stillest night, even when leafless in winter, it had comforting things to say to sleepless children; in a gale it was heroic." He confesses to being somewhat hard of hearing, due to wartime service in armoured vehicles carrying two-pounder guns. "But if I were to be entirely deaf, I think I would miss more than any other sounds, that of the wind in the trees, particularly after dark." Even when he is out riding on a breezy day past a copse, he finds that he can shut his eyes and make out "something of the different languages of, say, spruce, holly and broadleaf."
The latest issue of the Crann newsletter has just come in. Perhaps some of those wise, patriotic people will share a thought with us on this. Anyway, while David Edelsten quotes a few lines of Keats as the height of celebrating the poetry of trees, most people would give the palm to Hardy, whom Edelsten also quotes. Here is a bit, taken from David Cecil's Library Looking Glass, a personal anthology. It comes from Far From the Madding Crowd. "It was nearly midnight on the even of St. Thomas's, the shortest day in the year ... ..." There was a fierce wind. "The instinctive act of human kind was to stand and listen and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chanted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and now the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more."
Somewhere else Hardy writes of "the baritone buzz of a holly tree." His novel "The Woodlanders" is full of tree sounds. The young girl Marty helps Giles Winterbourne in planting trees. She holds them perpendicular while he throws in the mould. Says the girl: "How they sigh directly we put 'em upright, though while they are lying down they don't sigh at all." Giles hadn't noticed. "It seems to me, the girl continued, as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest - just as we be." Y