Obit For A Tree

I took this on the way back from the shops. I had seen the roped-off site earlier while walking in the nearby park, but didn't have the camera.

My poor son was tired and suffered my digression in non-silence (so we both suffered). The tree (a lime I think) is ancient, bearing god knows how many years of natural history.I had actually photographed it before, about two years ago. It must have had a weakness, perhaps an old wound from lightning, because it had simply fallen down the previous night, as if of its own accord (there was some wind but nothing spectacular).

The man I spoke to earlier, part of the crew who had dismembered the tree for carting off, said he reckoned the new Spring growth of leaves might have tipped the balance. He also said that, weirdly, none of the neighbours he'd talked to had heard it fall, though their houses are only yards away. Yet the tree was HUGE, one of the most impressive in that stretch of woodland, so how did it manage to swoon silently, "with a dying fall"? It was as impressive in death, all those shining, chainsawed limbs like the columns of a collapsed temple.

In his marvellous short poem 'The Trees' Philip Larkin refered to them as "unresting castles", noting that "their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain." It is startling, almost shocking, to see those rings freshly sawed, all that sappy white light the tree had locked in its rough, dark, dependable skin.