The Memory of Trees

“The Druids held the trees as very sacred.”
Enya
There’s a palpable sense of timeless history on the long driveway approach to Homme House, over a kilometre through the parkland landscape dotted with its magnificent ancient trees. Some things would have been different when my father was a butler here, over eighty years ago, one of several ‘situations’ he noted in his very brief notes that passed for his diary.
I’ve long been impressed with the scientific revelation (to me) that trees communicate through mycorrhizal networks, and even store memories. What stories they could tell, silent observers of the human dramas unfolding around them over the centuries – no exaggeration as the nearby Ancient Yew at St Bartholomew’s is estimated to be well over a thousand years old!
This sentinel at the gateway to the walled garden would have been no less impressive for being a mere youngster in comparison, even when my father visited here all those years ago – so long ago to me, but less than the blink of an eye in human history. To hear the stories the trees would tell takes patience, like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings; which raises the question for me that Tolkien anticipated ‘communication’ between trees long before I was born and ‘science’ confirmed as such.