October | Things to Appreciate

The leaves are turning and falling, so why not find a weekend afternoon to visit an arboretum and see how many of the things on our back cover nature table you can spot in the wild?

The leaves are turning but there are still plenty of good weather days to be had. One way to make the most of the last warmish weekends, and embrace autumn, too, is to pack up your camera and a picnic and head to an arboretum. With the trees turning orange, red and gold, you should be able to capture lots of amazing pictures of the autumn colour on display. Many of the big arboreta have trails you can follow to make sure you don’t miss any of the more unusual or special specimens growing there. An outing to an arboretum is also a chance to connect with nature and improve your wellbeing. You don’t have to go in for a full tree hug (though we would encourage it!) but some light forest bathing, just sitting at the foot of a tree, looking up at the canopy, can help to reduce stress and boost your mood. And if not, a flask of soup on a blanket alongside a spot of leaf identification is sure to leave you in mood for the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

This idea for a day out was featured on our Almanac Pages, where each month we collate a few seasonal things to note and notice, plan and do. The nature table image above was taken by Alice Tatham of The Wildwood Moth who takes a photograph for our back cover each month, featuring things to appreciate in nature. She also runs workshops on seasonal photography and publishes seasonal journal stories from her home in Dorset.

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Try Out | Cloud Pruning

If you’ve ever sprawled on the grass, looking up at the sky and marvelled at the undulating shapes of the clouds, this gardening trend might be for you. The Japanese art of Niwaki or ‘Cloud Pruning’ is all about pruning trees and shrubs into the shapes of clouds. 

Niwaki literally translates to ‘garden tree’ and Cloud Pruning is all about showing off the ‘true essence’ of the tree. Cloud Pruned trees look a bit like bonsai; the only difference is not size, but the fact that bonsai trees are grown in pots and Niwaki trees directly in the ground. 

How to start Cloud Pruning

1. Select your plant. Evergreens are best; perhaps a box, pine or Japanese privet. 

2. Plan your secateur attack. With privet, box and other hedges, prune into curved, fluffy cloud shapes from their usual ‘box’ shape. With trees, you might like to ‘clear’ some branches of leaves and twigs close to the trunk so that the ‘leafed’ parts appear to float like clouds. 

3. Use secateurs to trim the outside of a bush or shrub, and a pruning saw for thicker branches on a tree. Try to take out branches close to each other to allow the silhouette of the branches you leave to shine out a bit. 

4. You can use weights and stakes to encourage the branches to grow in a particular direction.

5. Prune once or twice a year to slowly form the shape you want. 

For more on Cloud Pruning, you could read Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way by Jake Hobson. 

If you’d like to know more about general topiary, turn to page 84 of our July issue, in which Julian Owen meets some practitioners of the art, in our Modern Eccentrics series. Buy this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

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Nature | Tree tunnels

Walk through a tree tunnel near you and feel like you’re entering fairyland

Those moments when you walk (or sometimes drive) through a tunnel of trees are a bit special, giving you at once a feeling of being hidden from the world and also transported somewhere magical. Of course you know that at the end of the tunnel the world will be much as it was on the side you entered it, but the strangeness of being cocooned by trees brings, just for a moment, that feeling that anything is possible and at the end of the tunnel might lie an entirely different world. 

Some tree tunnels are partially ‘man’made’, with trees planted in avenues to offer a shady walk in summer and a canopy of silhouetted branches in winter. Others are formed naturally, when a path is formed through trees by either footfall or vehicles and the branches meet in the middle overhead, never able to grow lower than the tallest person who regularly passes through. 

We think a good tree tunnel is a very fine focus for a good autumn walk, so we’ve listed a few of our favourites around Britain and Ireland. We hope you can find one near you. Send us a postcard from Fairyland!

Halnaker, West Sussex

Halnaker (pronounced ‘Ha’nacker’) is just north of Chichester and this tree tunnel walk (pictured above) follows the ancient Roman road, Stane Street. The woodland path has worn down over the years, giving the whole tunnel a circular effect and the look of a Tolkien novel. 

Kilham, East Yorkshire

Immortalised by David Hockney, who painted this tree tunnel in various seasons (they were exhibited at the Royal Academy for some time), this tunnel is between the villages of Langtoft and Kilham. Hockney painted them outside, rather than in his studio, and it’s worth familiarising yourself with the pieces before you visit; you get the feeling of stepping around Hockney himself seated at his easel as you approach.

The Dark Hedges, County Antrim

Created by more than 150 beech trees planted along the Bregagh Road between Armoy and Stanocum by the Stuart family as an entrance to Gracehill Manor, this tunnel is so spooky it’s been featured in films and TV series including Game of Thrones. It’s seriously spooky, with branches that look terrifyingly like they might just reach down and pluck you off the road. 

Laburnum tunnel, Bodnant Garden, Conwy

This 55m-long laburnum arch was planted in 1880 at Bodnant Garden, now owned by the National Trust. It’s believed to be the longest and oldest in Britain and is best visited when the flowers are in full bloom and hanging down into the tunnel at the end of May and the beginning of June. 

Yew Tree Tunnel in Aberglasney Gardens, Camarthenshire

It’s difficult to date yews. Experts originally thought this tunnel to be a thousand years old but in the 1990s dendochronologists (tree-daters to you and I) decided it was probably only a quarter of that age and guess it was planted in the 1700s. It proved enormously popular in the Victorian era. Victorians went mad for yews, apparently. 

Gormanston College Fairytale Tree Tunnel, County Meath

The cathedral-esque curves of this tree tunnel in the grounds of Gormanston College near Dublin makes for a spooky walk with a quiet reverence about it. 

Untamed tree tunnel, Kilsyth, North Lanarkshire

Some of the best tree tunnels are the slightly wild ones you just happen across. Kilsyth has one in the Burnside area, close to the sportsground. As haunted-looking as some of the most famous tree tunnels but a bit rougher round the edges and more ‘real’, this is a joy to find as you turn into it. 

Rhododendron tunnels, Sheringham Park, Norfolk

Paths and tunnels weave through the rhododendrons at Sheringham Park. They’re at their colourful best in Spring and perfect for a game of hide-and-seek, no matter your age. 

Hollow Way, Monksilver, Somerset

Hollow Way is the perfect moniker for this sunken Lane which creates a perfectly round tunnel through the trees. We recommend a stop off at the Notley Arms Inn on the way back to rest weary legs. https://www.notleyarmsinn.co.uk/en-GB

Yew tunnel, Easton Walled Garden, Grantham

Another yew tunnel, but they really do make for the best tunnels. And if it gives you a taste for the labyrinthine, the gardens also have a turf maze to enjoy. Visit in late winter or early spring to enjoy the woodland snowdrops, too. 

Do share your favourite tree tunnels with us in the comments, and turn to page 17 of the October issue to read more about understanding your walks from outdoor guru Tristan Gooley.

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Know a thing or two... Trees and druid traditions

Druids revere the natural world above all else. Trees, particularly oaks (‘Druid’ is thought to have meant ‘knowledge of the oak’), are considered sacred, and meetings are held in forest groves.

Druids believe in the interconnectedness of all life and in an afterlife. Some of their traditional beliefs and rituals are still around in altered forms:

The Yule Log

Druids believed that the sun stood still for 12 days at midwinter, and so they burnt a log throughout this period to banish the darkness and to keep evil spirits at bay.

Mistletoe

The cream berries of the mistletoe in the depths of winter were seen as a symbol of life. Pliny the Elder records a moonlit ceremony in which a priest would cut the bough of mistletoe with a golden sickle, and catch it in a white cloak.

Wassailing

This Twelfth Night tradition has Celtic roots and is upheld in druidry, offering a gift of cider and baked apples to fruit trees to ensure the coming year’s bountiful harvest (see issue 67).

Turn to page 85 of October's The Simple Things for more of our arboreal lore and legend feature including secrets of our autumn woodlands and nine native British trees.

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The British Oak tree

WE'VE CLIMBED THEM, felled them and even given them names. The stately oak tree has a history rich in anecdote and folklore. In issue 15 of The Simple Things we have a preview from Archie Miles' latest book, The British Oak. Plus we have two copies of the book to give away.

SOME OAKS HAVE consistently attracted more notice than the rest. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest has to be the most photographed individual oak in the whole of Britain. Victorian tourists were lured by the romantic tales of Robin Hood and his Merry Men and began to flock to Sherwood Forest. As it became a tourist honeypot, local photographers began setting up studios in the field. Here they could offer portraits taken with the tree; photographed, developed, printed, and mounted for tourists to carry home for all to marvel at. By 1900 the postcard boom was churning out thousands of Major Oaks.

Old tree books reveal many examples of anomalous oaks that captivated tree enthusiasts a century or two ago. As a result, a rich legacy of anecdote now accompanies such trees – one can even say that sometimes it’s the stories that shade the trees. Take for example the ancient oak tree in Melbury Park, in Dorset. The tree has acquired the unusual name of Billy Wilkins. Nobody is exactly sure why, although it was very likely someone who lived and worked on the estate.

One story, which is unsubstantiated, was that Wilkins was a bailiff on the estate, and was sent to warn his master, Sir John Strangeways (the owner, and a Royalist sympathiser) that Parliamentarian forces were approaching. Sadly, he was overtaken and killed by the Roundhead soldiers, and therefore never delivered his message. Whether the coup de grâce was delivered near the oak, or the tree was simply named as a tribute to this loyal servant, is uncertain. JC Loudon mentions that the tree had a girth of 30 feet at the smallest part of the bole, and that it was 50 feet high, with a spread of 60 feet in 1838. In his Dendrologia (1827), James Mitchell describes it as “as curly, surly, knotty an old monster as can be conceived”.

It also receives a mention in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, as “Great Willy, the largest oak in the wood”. Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry paid a visit to the old oak for their Trees of Great Britain and Ireland and included a beautiful photogravure plate of the tree. Elwes measured the girth, and by 1906 it had grown to 35 feet at chest height. It survives in good health to this day on the private estate.

ONE OF THE most recent oak stories involves part of the 2012 London Olympic legacy. In 1890, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, visited Much Wenlock in Shropshire to observe the Olympian Games (as they were then known) devised by Dr William Penny Brookes, who believed (quite rightly) that health and spiritual wellbeing were promoted through exercise. After this, de Coubertin was inspired to hold the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. In celebration of his visit to Much Wenlock, an English oak cultivar ‘Concordia’ was planted on Linden Field, in the town. In 2004, acorns were collected from the original tree by local school children, grown on at Kew Gardens, and then 40 saplings were planted out at various sites, in a ribbon between Much Wenlock and the Olympic Park in London. If the Olympic Games comes round to London in another 64 years, it will be interesting to see how our commemorative oaks are getting along.

READ MORE ABOUT the facinating story of the British Oak tree in issue 15 of The Simple Things.

Thanks to publishers Constable & Robinson we have two copies of The British Oak to give away. Click here to enter.