Strix
The Little Christmas Trees
WHEN I was a boy 1 believed in misers, I mean I believed that there existed people, like Scrooge, who hoarded money and spent much of their maladjusted lives gloating over their hoard; I thought of them as con- temptible. Today miserhood must be exceedingly difficult to attain. You can, or anyhow some people do, acquire large numbers of pound notes, but there is not much future in gloat- ing over pound notes. You cannot (whimpering with satisfac- tion the while) let them trickle through your fingers, a favourite indoor sport among misers when the currency was gold and silver; and if you hang on to them until you die we all know what happens. One is forced to the tentative conclusion that the true miser has been driven out of business, and survives only as a figure on a story-book tapestry, along with swine-herds, goose-girls and troubadours.
If anybody had told me that I was a miser I should, until the other day, have referred him with a curt, mirthless laugh to my bank manager. But last week, while doing something that I quite often do, 1 realised that I was going through all the motions of being a miser. I had not, it is true, got my hands on any legal tender and I was not whimpering with satisfaction; but most of the other symptoms were in evidence.
I was looking at some Christmas trees. Six winters ago I planted up two and a half acres of sour land, which had never grown a crop worth having since anybody could remember, with Norway spruce. Like most people, we normally use these trees in a mixed plantation, where they are useful as nurses for the slower-growing hardwoods and can be taken out and sold as Christmas trees at any stage of their development. But in this particular plot we planted them solid, as a cash-crop, with only two feet between the rows and one foot between the trees in the row. 43,500 seedlings, about as high as a man's finger, went into the two and a half acres, which is roughly ten times the density of an ordinary plantation where the trees are four or five feet apart. This was done in February, 1949.
The seedlings, the planting and the fencing cost about £300. In the next two years we spent a further £120 on cleaning- i.e., cutting back grass and weeds so that the little trees did not get choked—and on 'beating up,' which means replacing casualties. So the total outlay was roughly £420.
Some people think of Christmas trees, when doing duty as such, as tall, imposing growths, to whose apex the fairy can only be affixed with the help of a step-ladder. But in fact, of course, only a small minority of the population lives in homes capable of accommodating such massive symbols of festivity, and Christmas trees become marketable when they attain a height of eighteen inches. I started selling mine two years ago, when the best of them had passed that size. These sales were dictated not so much by the desire to get a quick return as by the fact that, with irees planted so close together, the biggest must be taken out or they suppress their neighbours.
In 1953 we sold 7,400 trees for £650; in 1954 we sold 5,600 slightly larger trees for £580 (the price dropped a bit last Christmas); and in the course of the next three weeks we shall take out another 4,000 or 5,000 trees, which—once more—will have a greater average height and therefore a greater average value. The cost of lifting and grading the first two crops was £120, so that the net receipts from sales up to last Christmas were £1,110. By Christmas of this year the profit on my original £420 should, after six years, be roughly 300 per cent.; and there will still be some 25,000 Christmas trees left.
But where (asks the insufferably perspicacious reader) does the miser come in? From the data with which Strix compla- cently provides us it is easy to reconstruct the even less attrac- tive figure of a profiteer, of a bloated, anti-social landowner growing rich by pandering to a bourgeois tradition with its roots in paganism, selfishly misusing land which might surely be induced, at whatever expense, to grow a few nourishing potatoes. A miser is not a miser because his gains, like Strix's, are ill-gotten; a miser is a miser because he hoards his gains and periodically gloats over them. Strix may gloat, but on his own admission he does not hoard his beastly Christmas trees.
This is perfectly true, as far as it goes. But it is not over the spruces that I gloat; it is over the other trees with which the two- and-a-half acre plot has liberally stocked itself. It is surrounded on two sides by woodland—on one by a plantation of mixed softwoods established about forty-five years ago, on the other by a much older wood of beech and oak. Seed from these woods —helped, latterly, by the scarification of the ground where Christmas trees have been lifted—has taken root among the still serried, waist-high ranks of spruce; and some of the new- comers have already outstripped their hosts, the tips of larch in particular showing at this season like pale -candle-flames above the dark green spikes of the spruce.
Two or three years ago, when I first noticed this natural regeneration, I made some effort to count the new arrivals, not realising how numerous they were going to be. Now I only count the species, of which to date there are nine, not counting birch, which has only just begun to appear: oak, ash, beech, wild cherry, sycamore, larch, Scots pine, Douglas fir and horn- beam. As far as I can see, no amount of neglect can prevent this small plot of ground from becoming—without any charge on its present or future owners—an interesting, and valuable, area of what is known in silvicultural circles as 'high forest.'
I don't think I should particularly enjoy letting sovereigns trickle through my fingers. But I do, rather guiltily, enjoy walking among the little spruces and counting (or anyhow roughly assessing) gains which can hardly be called ill-gotten, for they were not really gotten at all.
I like all the woodlands that I am lucky enough to own; indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I love them. If after death the soul is still fettered with curiosity, as a falcon is with jesses after she has been released, mine will hanker above all to see, after many decades, what has happened to those wood- lands, both the old ones and the new plantations which replaced the ravages of a war by that time half-forgotten. A century hence on this particular plot a veteran handful of the original 43,500 Norway spruce will, perhaps rather groggily, survive, and with them a few of the larch, Scots pine and Douglas fir whose tips brush my gum-boots today. But the main crop will be oak, beech, cherry and sycamore growing slowly towards maturity; and although it would be hubristic to hope that even- tually a descendant of mine will fell them and benefit thereby, I should like, at least, to feel that some old, old man will retail (and, preferably, dismiss as moonshine) the legend that this little wood, many years ago, was nothing but a mass of Christmas trees. Whether by virtue of these dreams I qualify as a miser I am not sure; I do know that I shall not make the grade in any other way.
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