Putting down roots
Alex James
The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet: a tree. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They’re indigenous to North West America but, far from uncommon in this country, great avenues of them are lining drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything; odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. I reckon I’ve got the tallest one in Oxfordshire. Mr Taplin said it was the tallest tree in Oxford when he sold me the farm, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford — Oxford is 20 miles away — but it is definitely tall, visible for miles around, straight and narrow as an arrow but leaning gently to one side, setting the tone for the place where I choose to spend my days: one can’t be precious living in the shadow of a vast, beautiful but lopsided tree.
My father took great delight in measuring it with his sextant for a Christmas Day sweepstake three years ago and it was 137 feet tall then, as tall as a cathedral. It’s a mere sapling, too. They can live for up to two and a half millennia. I reckon this one was probably planted in the Twenties. Some people came round a few months ago. They said they wanted to tell me that the man who planted the tree had died. I wanted to say, ‘Did you ask him why he planted something that will be as large as the Eiffel tower one day quite so close to my house or will I never know now?’ But it wasn’t really appropriate. It does baffle me. Still, so many of the problems faced by farmers are due to the short sightedness of previous generations. This colossal thing is on our very doorstep and there were so many other places it could have gone. That was the perfect spot for a magnolia, not for the tree-rex. Ours is the sole survivor of six planted on each of the neighbourhood farms. They get struck by lightning and fall over, which was why my man Paddy and I spent Friday morning craning our necks and stroking our chins. If it fell on the house it would be catastrophic, needless to say. Although it’s leaning away from us and is unlikely to topple in the wind, who knows what would end up where after a lightning strike. The trouble is, as Paddy said, if you consult a tree expert and he says the thing poses any kind of risk, it invalidates your insurance. I can’t see anyone looking at that tree and telling me that there is no chance it could fall on the house, a child could confirm it’s a possibility. I really need to know how much of a chance, but if I call the expert guy it’s almost definitely going to be curtains.
We gradually came under its spell as we stood there. I love that tree. It’s the first thing I look for when I’m coming home, the first thing I see in the morning. So far we’ve managed to get as far as two thirds of the way up to the top with climbing tackle, and it’s always been my plan to build a lounge up there, with a throne. Altitude is a drug: not just the exhilaration of deadly heights — that soon passes — but also the new sense of perspective, a bird’s-eye view of one’s own life. It’s better than any amount of other people’s art.
I think about that tree a lot. I have lots of idle dreams for it. The latest one being that if I got right to the top and ran a long wire to the ground I could attach the wire to a magnet surrounded by copper coils and generate electricity as the thing swayed in the breeze. There is no simpler, greener way of doing it. It would be much better than building a wind turbine — the thing’s already built, in fact it was carbon negative to build, and it doesn’t spoil the landscape or bash birds. Birds live in it.
‘We had these trees at school,’ Paddy said. ‘Loads of them. As they get older, the bottom of the trunk starts to spread outwards as it meets the ground, so you can run quite high up the sides. You had a knife and you had to see who could stick the point in furthest up the trunk. God, that was a good game.’ I tried it with my finger. It is a good game. And what could be better than that?
‘Yep. We’d better call the tree man,’ I said.
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