An Act of Cruelty I feel particularly sore about this
because of a personal bereavement. At the bottom of the hill below my house the lane curves round a dell where sand used to be excavated. The farm, which occupies the whole valley, deposits its hedge-cuttings here every year, and burns them. Through the potash, nature sends up again a wild garden of bramble, thistle, nettle, bracken, figwort, mullein and the rest of Titania's rout. Presiding over this fairyland is an ancient willow, a giant with double trunk, whom I can see from my window. He has been a dominant feature of our countryside.
Last year the two ex-service men employed solely in fruit-picking and hedge-hacking (practically no layering of hedges is done in Kent) piled cuttings round the bole of this tree and fired it, burning the bark. It put out a few catkins and leaves, but died during the summer, and now stands as a scarred corpse. Could I have prevented the brutal act, I wonder, by endowing my friendly willow (and many warblers and wagtails will share my mourning) with an annual income, following the example of the Danish doctor who thus protected a linden-tree in Copenhagen forty years ago?
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