Long-standing companions: collectively, trees dominate their environment, but they also grow to be craggy and eccentricidividuals

摘要

The traffic slowed to a crawl, then stopped. A trail of crimson brake lights ended at a duster of flashing blue beacons. As the policeman waved us past in single file, no one could resist the temptation to look. A barely recognisable car, crushed against a tree. Sleet swirled around a group of firemen. They were sawing through door pillars, peeling off the roof. I passed the tree again the next morning. A great gash of bark was missing. I've passed it twice a day now for the past 17 years, and though the callused bark has slowly covered: the scars, the tree is - and always will be - the fatal whitebeam. Like a score of other trees that mark the route of my daily journey, it has an individual identity. I can plot my route home, tree by tree. A horse chestnut that sweeps down over a wall; a poplar with a heart-shaped crown, its symmetry spoiled by a notch worn by passing bus roofs; a sycamore that stands alone in the centre of a field, silhouetted against the skyline; the fatal white-beam; a badly-grafted roadside ornamental cherry, its crown half-wild where stock and scion struggle for dominance; the blue atlas cedar in my neighbour's garden that I can see from a mile away as I come down the hill towards home.