In Memory of the Elm Tree

I sat down to write something about my beautiful elm tree (now deceased) the other day, but I got waylaid.

Someone had left a comment on my post Picture it in your own words - Regret, in which they said: 'I hope you have a picture of your beautiful tree', so I fished out my old shoeboxes of photos, but then - immersed in a zillion captured moments of my life, I ended up writing On Reflection... instead.

But I am shocked to discover that - so far - I have only unearthed one photograph of my elm tree. A winter picture.

My beautiful elm on the left of the gate, clothed all in white, it's younger sibling standing to attention alongside

The picture is appropriate to the time of year, and beautiful withal, but it doesn't speak eloquently of the elm's soft summer grace, its bountiful green shade, or the delicate elegance of its long, serrated leaves.

How can there be no pictures of my elm? It stands (its poor amputated limbs pleading with the sky) outside my bedroom window, and even more significantly, in full view of the place where I work. I gaze at it every day either consciously or unconsciously. The rooks squabble noisily in its branches every spring, vying for the prime real estate sites - south facing but with the full sea view. Many have had to settle for second best - a grand sea view, but north facing.

Pleading, but to no avail

And here I am, still thinking about it, and writing about it, in the present tense. Because the trunks of both trees still stand, savaged and mute. Any day now, they too will be felled and I shall have to get used to the past tense.

The day he came to remove its crown

I fell in love with the elm tree as instantly and as completely as I fell in love with the house. Except the tree came first, by a whisker. The ash, on the other side of the gate, is also magnificent, and its status has now been bumped up considerably, in the face of my loss. But the elm was always the one.

The butchery begins

In my mind, the tree is soft and green and overshadowing. The sentinel at the gate, the bower of rippling shade that marked our comings and goings, that fretted the early morning sky with filigree lace, that held the evening sun like a great, glowing bowl of light. And in winter, night and morning, the rooks would blow in on the wind like wisps of torn paper, and perform their ritual dance up and down the four corners of heaven before settling on every branch, filling the tree like an outrageously vast crop of fat, black pears.
And its singing has become the music of my life. Flailed by the winter storms, its song was loud and plaintive and robbed my sleep of comfort, but in summer rain, or a summer breeze, there is no better sound than the whispering of a tree - with or without the birdsong.

It is all in my head, but no photographs. Just an abiding familiarity, like an old friend, or the bed you creep into every night. As I said in On Reflection, the best memories, and the stalwarts of our lives aren't necessarily the things we snap. I have spent the last 18 years loving the elm tree, seeing it sometimes more often than members of my own family. It is part of who I am, but there's no photographic record.

I suppose I never needed one. I just had to look out of the window.
But no more.

I am very sad.
Kahil Gibran wrote: 'Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.'
How true, how true.

A lovely friend sent me this poem. She said it had consoled her when she also lost a tree she loved.
I think it is beautiful. Thank you, my friend.

 
The Tree Speaks   by Cathal O Searcaigh

I am the tree that will be destroyed,

tomorrow I will be cut and laid low.

My dignity will be hacked at;

my limbs will be strewn

in the dirt of the street –

my strong limbs.

The white blossom of my laugh will be stolen.

Everything I have stored

in the marrow of memories will be destroyed;

my first tears of joy; my first leaves of hope;

the first syllable of music pulsing through my branches;

the first Spring which clothed me in a green dress.

The tales of adventure related to me

by the birds; the nests that flourished

in the leafy shelter of my eye,

the storms I calmed

in the softness of my embrace.

The children who swung between life and eternity

in my branches; the whispered secrets

breathed to me in the night shadows;

the moon who dressed me in the golden lace of autumn;

the angels who alighted on me with the snow.

With the fluent tongue of my leaves

I defended, passionately,

this space in which I thrive;

in which I spread with wonder

the green thoughts  that come to me in Spring.

With bounteous seeds I covered

this earthly space around me with certainty,

in celebration of the Tree Spirit

that quickened firmly in me

as I came of age.

And tomorrow when they burn me,

when my bones will smoke,

I will become one with the Sky, the Fiery Sky!

that has fuelled my imagination from dawn to dusk

With brightness, with Light

How beautiful the colours and textures of these elm logs are

 Another kind comment I received expressed the sanguine hope that Spring would put new branches and leaves on the elm's severed limbs. Sadly, even if they did, they would die. Dutch Elm disease is carried by a beetle that gets under the bark. Apparently it flies at a certain height, and once the tree is infected, that's it. Curtains - eventually, although it takes a few years. This poor tree has been green and dying for some time. But there is hope that some young, smaller trees, if kept coppiced, might become immune, if they don't grow up to 'beetle flying height'.

The trunks of my trees are going to a friend who will wait patiently for them to season and then use them to make something beautiful - floors or furniture. And I have already kept several pieces that another friend is going to make into something for me to keep as a memento. I will treasure whatever he reveals from the wood.

But, sad as I am now, the future beckons. I am planning to plant two blossom trees where the elms stood. It will take them a few years to grow, but they will have their own identity and be beautiful in their own right. And as I plant them, I shall think of Henry van Dyke's words: 'He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.'

As I have done, all these years past, as I have done.

I will also remember the Chinese proverb.
'Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.'

There will be singing again, one of these days.

Perhaps I'll plant something like this - not an elm, but beautiful in its own right