What we were fighting for... (a tree-hugger’s postscript)
What do we know? You walk past a tattered old tree. If you see it at all, you think, “there’s a tattered old tree.” Transpires you’re walking past 1500 years of birdsong, war, poetry, tobacco-smoke, exile, failure and hope. Could be any old tree, near any of us. Demolishable in less than hour to save a few quid for David Cuckoo-Clock and Nick Clogg. High above London grows a solitary fir tree – this one – the last of a stand that was planted in 1745 by William Turner, a retired tobacconist whose business was (where else?) in Fleet Street. Already, Turner’s pines were more than half a century old when John Keats saw them while rambling on Hampstead Heath as a medical student, looking for medicinal herbs with his tutor, William Salisbury. William Blake must have walked past them on his way to Sunday lunch with John Linnell (maybe the firs are visible in the background of this picture by Linnell of the ageing visionary, poet and painter on the Heath?). Byron and Shelley and Coleridge woul...