Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

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FLORA & FAUNA

exactly what you would go out and buy now. The rake seems to have been top tool and is unchanged, though it has a sort of half-brother that boasts a spike. Perhaps it came from Italy, for Christ seems to be carrying one at the Resurrection in Titian’s Noli me tangere, where Mary takes him for the gardener. The Riverside Gardens is perhaps the sadder book. Wonderful prime-site, status-symbol gardens drifting to the river from either bank are all now devoured by concrete. At the Bridge House on London Bridge, which seems to have housed a sort of London County Council, there was a kitchen garden that fed a multitude and an annual festival with green branches and green candles that continued for over two hundred years. All gone. Across the river was Winchester Palace with vast ecclesiastical wealth and land. All sold. A breath of Fulham Palace does still just survive in bewildered paths and a forlorn gateway. As for Whitehall Palace, we all know what happened to that. Like what remains of the gardens of the Tower of London, it is no longer a place of gillyflowers. Lambeth Palace still has a walled garden to one side, but the traffic screeches by and it is invisible. As for More’s own creation, his gardens at Chelsea, there are only a few patches of rose-red wall left, a queerlooking stone slab in the Moravian Burial Ground, and a decrepit-looking mulberry tree said to have been planted

A ha-ha

by More himself, which if he saw it now he would order to be removed. More went to Chelsea for seclusion (despite 100 servants and a large family) and to meditate in the garden, where he had built a private library for reading and prayer. Christianson believes that it was in Chelsea that More’s religious strength deepened, enabling him to defy the king. There is a statue to More standing on the Chelsea Embankment, newly decked with gold. More made jokes about contemporaries who flaunted

themselves in scarlet and gold, but there. Way to the north along the King’s Road is the awkward dog’s leg at the World’s End which has been annoying town planners for years. I was once told by an old man who used to shoot snipe on the Chelsea marshes that this corner marked the boundary of More’s cornfields. Between the dog’s leg and the statue now there’s solid masonry: prime-site streets, but of little beauty. The maps in this book fetch a sigh too: woodlands, orchards, vines, fountains, meadows in the heart of central London. Behind the Tower rise green hills. Only the Abbey stands immoveable, and the earth is presumably still beneath the pavements. Anybody who cares for gardens or English history will want both these books for Christmas. To order these books, see order form on page 78

LETTERS

LAST POST

Dear Sir, Nigel Jones’s disparaging and pretentious review of Max Arthur’s Last Post (LR, November) does him no credit, not least because it is riddled with errors. He writes that, ‘the only common qualifying factor for inclusion in The(sic) Last Postis the random one of having survived to be a centenarian.’ Not so. The common factor is that those included were the last remaining British survivors of WW1. He writes that, ‘there is nothing distinctive about Arthur’s nine.’ As 21 survivors contributed to the book, which nine does Jones have in mind? His puerile sneer that the book, ‘is not of high literary distinction’ is a gratuitous insult to the veterans who are not, they would be the first to admit, literary men, and completely misses the point which is that theirs are the authentic voices of that time. He refers to ‘a distasteful element’ of the book showing ‘signs of haste’. I suggest that tracking down and interviewing the 21 survivors could hardly have been a rushed job, as the final publication proves (during the period from the first interview to publication twelve of them died). At the book launch at the Army Museum, Major

General Sebastian Roberts said, ‘The remarkable thing about Max Arthur is that in a country which keeps covenant with its war dead in a quite exceptional way, he uniquely and personally, but on all our behalf, has kept covenant with the living veterans.’ Nigel Jones should be ashamed of himself. Yours faithfully, Group Captain Don McClen, CBE, AFC, RAF (ret’d) Sherborne

LEG-PULL

Dear Sir, In his review of J M Coetzee’s Slow Man (LR, September), Anthony Gardner explains: ‘Paul Rayment … has no family, so when he returns from hospital with an amputated leg he requires a nurse-cum-housekeeper to look after him.’ Even with two legs, I can’t follow. Whose leg did Rayment bring home? Yours faithfully, Graham Landon Newcastle

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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FLORA & FAUNA

S TEPHEN A NDERTON A FOREST OF DELIGHTS

T HE S ECRET L IFEOF T REES : H OW T HEY L IVEAND W HY T HEY M ATTER

★By Colin Tudge (Allen Lane 451pp £20)

O AK : T HE F RAMEOF C IVILIZATION

★

By William Bryant Logan (W W Norton and Co 336pp £16.99)

A TTHETIME I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time I understood his explanations of astrophysics, but was quite unable to repeat them afterwards. Others have said the same. But physics is not easy – some minds can do it and others not; and however good the writer, the substance will not necessarily stick. Colin Tudge’s explanation of evolutionary botany, The Secret Life of Trees, definitely sticks. Botany and biology, you might say, are more tangible than physics, more immediate to the senses, and therefore easier to assimilate than physics. True enough, but still they have great complexities, and Tudge can make them not just understood but compelling reading too. Tudge sets out his stall as ‘science in the service of appreciation, and appreciation in the service of reverence which, in the face of wonders that are not of our making, is our only proper response’. When writing about the wonders of nature it is hard to avoid lapsing into the ‘Fancy that!’ style of narrative, as one fascinating fact succeeds another. Tudge avoids it no better than anyone else, although he manages not to make pile-ups of them. Fascinating they certainly are: sandalwood, for instance, is a parasite of the strychnine plant which in turn is related to our common buddleia; a diesel tractor can run perfectly well on oil pressed from the jatropha; hollow baobab trees are not uncommonly used as the final resting place for corpses, which mummify there in the dry heat. But there is much more to the book than tit-bits. It is in a sense four books. The first – ‘What is a Tree?’ – deals with the evolution of trees from the primal swamp, the value of sexual reproduction, and why trees find it useful simply to be so big. The second – ‘All the Trees of the World’ – is a heavyweight catalogue of the taxon

Balanophage at rest

omy of trees according to modern science and the links suggested by DNA. Tudge marches through the various families pointing out species of commercial or pharmaceutical significance. It is the third book – ‘The Life of Trees’ – that most people will find gripping. Tudge explains in detail how each of the 750 species of fig has its own dedicated wasp to aid fertilisation, how in Canada the jack pine is adapted to reproduce in response to forest fires, and how the great coastal redwoods of California cope with being smothered every few hundred years by deposits of silt. He answers questions which you never think to ask: why do conifers in high latitudes have downswept branches while those in tropical latitudes have flatter, tiered branches, for instance? The answer is, because the trees must take optimum advantage of the angle of sunlight. In the fourth book – ‘The Future with Trees’ – Tudge gets down to the nitty-gritty of climate change and how thoughtlessly man is treating the planet. He comes to the conclusion that ‘What matters in the end is politics’. It’s not comfortable reading, and Tudge’s occasional touches of jolly humour evaporate. This is what he has been dying to say for the past 350 pages; it’s his ‘proper response’ again. Curious, however, that someone who has written with such even-handed joy about evolution should suddenly be quite so angry at the possibility of further extinctions because of climate change. Where is the book on the morality of extinctions? In an atheistic age which gives man no God-given supremacy on earth, why should he last for ever? There is a book worth writing. There is no talk of hugging trees in the extraordinary little book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, but I feel sure that Logan is a tree-hugger. He offers the exact opposite of Tudge’s book: a hymn of conversational praise of oak trees (almost any species, it seems, will do). Logan, an American who is confessedly neither botanist nor historian, touches on many scientific issues (evolution, the migration of species, reproduction), but his aim is to persuade the world to love oaks. Logan is convinced that the acorn was the springboard for all human civilisation and has proudly coined his own word for acorn-eaters: balanophages. There is even a suggestion that Adam and Eve were officially permitted to eat acorns and that only the apple tree was banned. Some chunks of the book are written as dialogue: for instance Logan with his oak-felling Jewish neighbour Mrs Kornbluth, or Logan trying to find acorn flour in a Korean supermarket without knowing the Korean word for acorn: ‘Unwilling to go away empty-handed, I rum

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