In 1978, shortly after the death of her father – artist Duncan Grant – Angelica Garnett moved back into her birthplace and childhood home, Charleston farmhouse, near Lewes (East Sussex). The house had been Grant’s home and studio since 1916, shared with fellow artist, brief lover and life-long companion, Vanessa Bell – mother of Angelica and sister of author Virginia Woolf. For over half a century, Charleston had been the country refuge for the celebrated Bloomsbury group of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes (both Duncan’s lovers) and, from 1939, Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell.
Angelica – who was 18 when she first learned that Duncan Grant and not Clive Bell, was her father – did not return to Charleston for long. She found the house too emotionally charged and moved to a smaller house in nearby Ringmer, after she’d helped set up the Charleston Trust in 1980 to preserve the house and its contents. During this brief window in 1979, the same year that Jane Bown photographed Angelica (now in the National Portrait Gallery), I had the rare privilege to photograph the house, from top to bottom, while Angelica was still living there, along with her large cat.
Sadly, the hundred or more colour photos I took, along with those by Paul Bamborough (who went on to found the groundbreaking video editing suite Lightworks) have all been lost. All that survive are a couple of dozen black and white negatives, shot with a 2 ¼” square format camera, which I have finally scanned and present here. They have never been shared before and may contain details that are of interest to researchers, despite the meticulous restoration of Charleston and the huge archives.
How I came to photograph Charleston
In July 1979, American filmmaker, Dee Dee Glass (1948- 2004) was making a TV documentary on art historian, Quentin Bell (broadcast as Who’s Afraid of Quentin Bell, Southern TV, 1979). Son of artist Vanessa Bell and art critic Clive Bell, and nephew of novelist Virginia Woolf, Quentin grew up with his brother Julian and half-sister Angelica at Charleston, which became one of the locations for Dee Dee’s film.
At that time (1979), I was working as a researcher in the psychology department at Oxford University alongside Dee Dee’s husband, Paul Bamborough. Dee Dee and Angelica thought it would be a wonderful idea if Paul and I could make a photographic record of Charleston, from top to bottom, to help fundraise to preserve the house as a memorial. Which is what we did.
Paul used his Nikkormat 35mm camera and a borrowed Widelux medium-format panoramic camera, while I used an Olympus OM and either a Yashicamat or a Bronica S2a. If it was the Yashicamat, it had belonged to a great photographer, the late Paddy Summerfield, who was working as darkroom technician in the same Oxford psychology department as Paul and I. The Bronica belonged to another friend, Alun Anderson, who was a postdoc at Oxford and later became editor of New Scientist.
In a dilapidated state
We arrived at the front door for the first day’s shoot, ringing a large school bell that stood by the step. Angelica soon appeared, holding the cat and welcomed us in for tea in the downstairs room she used most.
The house was in a dilapidated state, with rising damp, peeling paint and wisteria creeping in through an upstairs bedroom window. In Duncan’s downstairs studio, ephemera of daily life, like bus timetables and shopping lists, rubbed shoulders with iconic artworks, murals and sculptures by the Bloomsbury group. The upstairs rooms each had the signature of its illustrious former occupant and were just as they’d left them.
Angelica was unhappy living there, amid the stifling presence of Duncan, Vanessa and the Bloomsbury collective – all strong personalities. Her aim was to raise funds for an endowment so that the National Trust or another organisation might take it over and preserve it for posterity, while she could move out.
Lost and found
Once I’d handed the films over to Paul and Dee Dee, which I understood would be used to make prints for fundraising and as cutaways for her film, I forgot about them for the next 45 years, until I met another photographer, Sue Snell, who’d photographed the gardens at Charleston after their restoration, which she published as a book in 2010.
I tried in vain to locate the colour negatives or prints through Sue’s many Charleston contacts, finally reconciling myself to their loss when Paul recently admitted he had no idea where they might be. I knew where my black and white negatives were, though, and duly scanned them.
These may therefore be some of the few surviving images of that brief interlude between Duncan Grant’s death and Angelica Garnet’s departure, when Charleston was still inhabited, unarchived and unrestored. There is, of course, Dee Dee Glass’s film Who’s Afraid of Quentin Bell, which used some of our images, but I have been unable to trace a copy.
This is a polyembryonic beech in Wrongs Covert (Norfolk), next to a Saxon stretch of the pilgrim’s way from Norwich to Walsingham. The two trunks are identical twins, growing from a single seed that split into two embryos. The twin on the right has grown a branch, high up in the canopy, like an arm, which is preventing the twin on the left from leaning any further and falling.
Wrongs Covert, about 10 miles outside Norwich is a heritage and education centre teaching natural heritage and woodland crafts, nestled in a fragment of ancient woodland traversed by a former glacial stream.
Further along the Walsingham Way – still in the Wensum valley, just north of Ringland – the tree on the left, possibly also a split-seed tree, appears to be supporting it weaker neighbour with a pair of maternal arms around it.
In her book Finding the Mother Tree Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has famously researched what she calls the ‘Mother Tree’ in forests in Canada. A lifetime’s study eventually spawned the idea of the Wood Wide Web of fungal (mycorrhizal) connections between trees, along which pass information, nutrients and signals.
Mother of leaves and sweetness
In her bittersweet poem Winter Trees, written in the last year of her life and published posthumously by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath also sees the tree as mother. Although many species are hermaphrodite or ‘monoecious‘, several, including the ash, holly, poplar, willow, and yew, are dioecious– they have separate male and female trees.
Here, Plath portrays trees as keepers of stories and history – memories growing ring on ring – and also as blessed with the gift of giving birth to them effortlessly: mother of leaves and sweetness. This is in contrast with Plath’s own ambivalence about birth and motherhood:
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings.
Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history.
Full of wings, otherworldliness. In this, they are Ledas. O mother of leaves and sweetness Who are these pietas? The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but chasing nothing.
This is another reflection triggered by a charity bookshop find – this time of a first edition (1987) collection of poems by Seamus Heaney. In the poem that gave the collection its title – The Haw Lantern[1] – Heaney likens the red berry of the Hawthorn, (Haw – Cretaegus monogyna) drooping on its stalk, to the lantern held by Diogenes, the ascetic philosopher of ancient Greece,[2] who wandered the streets – in daylight – seeking ‘a [wise] man’[3]
It is a minutely observed poem, with at least one tightly packed aside that could almost be overlooked: ‘Its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you.’ As I enter my senior years and have to keep blood sugar levels under control, that haw-like blood-prick is a daily encounter. And those increasingly frequent visits to the phlebotomist to be bled for this or that test leave me, too, waiting for the all-clear. I wonder whom Heaney had in mind, and for which test, as he was still a youthful 48-year-old at the time. But I digress…
Enter the tarot
Reading Heaney’s poem, the tarot card, L’Hermite, numbered VIIII in the series of 22 (or should I write XXII) major arcana, came to mind. Here, too, is a cloaked, bearded elder, holding a lantern in one hand and a walking stick in the other. Is he seeking truth, like Diogenes? Or is he already enlightened, a beacon showing others the way?
Soon after I moved to Paris in 1986, where I lived for the next 20 years, I stumbled across a weekly improvised lecture-cum-performance by the Chilean cinematographer-mystic tarot-maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky at the Maison des Mines, on the southern fringe of the Latin Quarter. An odd venue, but one that was large enough to hold the 200+ people who would regularly turn up – and cheap enough, as the conférences were free. Someone with a bucket would collect donations, “to pay for a meal”, as the audience filed out.
‘Jodo’ as he was known, would take centre stage, often dressed in purple, flanked by human-scale tarot cards, and would free-associate on a theme, usually linked to the family tree – l‘arbre généalogique. He was (is – he turned 97 in February) convinced that most psychological issues are transgenerational and often linked to what he has called a ‘misreading of sacred texts’.
One or two people from the audience would join him on stage and provide live material for a spontaneous bout of public psycho-magical analysis. Subjects regularly included sibling rivalry, couple problems, financial struggles, stymied creativity…
I became a regular attendee for a while and even spent a few weekends at his extraordinary ‘psycho-magical’ self-inquiry group sessions at a private house in Fontenay-sous-Bois in the eastern suburbs.
Now, while Jodorowsky spent countless hours interpreting the tarot and holding free consultations in cafés, I don’t believe he dwelt on the links between L’Hermite and Diogenes. He is more concerned with the internal logic of Grimaud’s Tarot de Marseille, its imagery, symbolism and, not least, its coherence as a series, with time passing left-to-right, 1 to 22.
So, for Jodorowsky, L’Hermite (VIIII) might be contrasted with the very first major arcanum (is that the right term?), Le Mat, which has no number. LeMat shows a bearded young man, just starting out in his adult life, with everything before him. In contrast, L’Hermite is looking back, with furrowed brow and a stick crooked with age.
The next arcanum, number X, is La Roue de Fortune, revolving anti-clockwise – a new cycle of trials eventually culminating in XX Le Jugement and the final card, Le Monde, a kind of epiphany or triumph, with the symbols of the evangelists – angel (Matthew), lion (Mark), ox (Luke), and eagle (John) – in the four corners.
Back to Heaney
Heaney, unlike W B Yeats, did not delve much into mysticism or the occult, being more rooted in the imagery of the Irish countryside, Celtic mythology and, of course, the Classics. So, for Heaney it was eyeballing – or rather being eyeballed by – the common haw that evoked Diogenes and the search for truth. However, the haw lantern is a ‘small light for small people’, not there ‘to blind them with illumination’, but simply to remind them ‘to keep the wick of self-respect from dying out’.
When I found The Haw Lantern back in April, it was the paradoxically white blossom of the blackthorn that lit the paths on the daily moonlit walks I made on a silent retreat near Bath, looking inwards for a glimpse of truth. Seeking it neither in the ‘used to be’ of the past, nor the ‘could be’ of the future. So, where is the present moment in the tarot cycle(s)? I think Italo Calvino had a go at answering that in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, but that’s another story
Epilogue
It is now the month of May, another common name for the haw, whose rather fetid-smelling flowers and edible ‘bread-and-cheese’ leaves were so much a part of the hedgerows around my childhood home in the Chilterns.
A few weeks ago, in a bookstall in Hampstead market, I found seven of the nine volumes (or ‘series’) of F Edward Hulme’s wonderful Familiar Wild Flowers, published around 1904. After a search, I tracked down (separately) the two missing volumes, paying for each almost what I’d paid for the seven I’d originally purchased (which had been a bargain). Reading through Series 1, I came across this lovely illustration and entry on the Scarlet Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) – which Hulme says is one of only two common British wild flowers that are red, the other being the Scarlet Pimpernel.
From the same pile of books by my armchair, bought recently from secondhand bookshops, I’ve also been reading a selection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I first discovered as a 20-year-old student in Manchester. In the second stanza of The Woodlark is a stunning description of … a Scarlet Poppy in a wheat field. I thought the two would make a perfect pair.
From The Woodlark
To-day the sky is two and two With white strokes and strains of the blue. The blue wheat-acre is underneath And the braided ear breaks out of the sheath, The ear in milk, lush the sash, And crush-silk poppies aflash, The blood-gush blade-gash Flame-rash rudred Bud shelling or broad-shed Tatter-tassel-tangled and dingle-a-dangled Dandy-hung dainty head. And down … the furrow dry Sunspurge and oxeye And lace-leaved lovely Foam-tuft fumitory.
Hopkins (1844-89), an ordained Jesuit priest, never saw any of his highly unorthodox and innovative poems appear in print.
This unfurled ‘page’ of lettering on a Beech tree literally means a book…
The German word for “letter” – Buchstabe – literally means “Beech stick” and refers to a time when an old form of lettering called runes was carved or punched into staves or sticks (Staben) made of beech wood (Buche) [Fagus sylvatica]. Our word stab comes from this pointed stick, too.
Runes were used for divination and when making important decisions. The German / Old Teutonic was itself derived from Old Norsk bók meaning beech. So, the beech tree is the origin of the English word book. In Old English it was bóc.
Codex Runicus, a vellum manuscript from approximately 1300 AD containing one of the oldest and best-preserved texts of the Scanian Law, is written entirely in runes.
Buchstaben, then, literally means beech graffiti. And, lots of letters put together … a book / Buch / and back to beech. Love it!
The smooth bark is an ideal surface for carving – although not to be encouraged as it could affect the health of the tree. As the tree grows in height and girth, the letters rise up the trunk and expand, giving clues to the tree’s age.
Extracts from the Oxford English dictionary (2nd edition 1989)
Book
A com. Teut. Word OE. bóc These forms indicate an OTeut. *bôk The original meaning was evidently ‘writing-tablet, leaf, or sheet’ OE. bóc charter: in pl. tablets, written sheets, hence ‘book,’ a sense subseq. extended to the singular.
Gothic does not show *bôks, but an apparently derivative form bôka strong fem., in sense of ‘letter’ of the alphabet, pl. bôkôs litteræ, γράµµατα, writing, document, book.
The OED adds a note to dampen this lovely eponymous circularity of meaning:
[Generally thought to be etymologically connected with the name of the beech-tree, OE. bóc, béce, ON. bók:—(see beech), the suggestion being that inscriptions were first made on beechen tablets, or cut in the bark of beech trees; but there are great difficulties in reconciling the early forms of the two words, seeing that bôk-s ‘writing-tablet’ is the most primitive of all.]
Never let truth get in the way of a good story, though.
Leaning black mulberries in Fountain Court planted for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897
From the end of June through July I’ll be leading weekly walks, using London’s mulberry trees as waypoints to discover the capital’s hidden past. From Roman bathhouses and Thameside wharves to King James I’s silk project; from Chelsea’s fascinating veteran mulberry heritage to the City’s Monasteries and Inns of Temple …
The Victorian nature writer, Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887) is up there with Gilbert White (1720 – 1793) and the poet John Clare (1793 – 1864) as a leading influence on contemporary nature writers, such as Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane. And for good reason.
Some of the writing in Wild Life in a Southern County (1879), for example, is minutely observed and evocative, albeit both romantic and anthropomorphic:
“Up the blade of grass here a tiny white-shelled snail has crawled, feeling in its dull, dim way that evening is approaching. The coils of the little shell are exquisitely turned – the workmanship is perfect; the creature within, there can be no question, is equally perfect in its way and finds a joy in the plants on which it feeds. On the ground below, hidden among the fibres near the roots of the grass, lies another tiny shell; but it is empty, the life that once animated it has fled – whither? Presently the falling dew will condense upon it, and at the opening one round drop will stand…”
I can remember, as a young child, perhaps 7 years old, lying on the chalk slopes by the woods near to our house and looking at the little snails, the ants, the blades of grass, the butterflies, and entering their world, with the same kind of close-up vision. Jefferies has not only preserved this faculty, which most children share but leave behind as they become adults, but he is also able to put it into words.
Yet Jefferies also dispassionately describes shooting almost any creature that he is curious about, especially birds – jackdaws, rooks, even a heron. And this trigger-happy form of natural science he shares with Gilbert White. I don’t remember contemporary writers inspired by Jefferies and White, like Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane, dwelling on this, yet it is something that separates the generations, and, presumably, makes it impossible for those more likely to be armed with a magnifying glass and binoculars, to get “into the head” of these bygone naturalists. Perhaps that’s where Clare has the edge.
Some 40 or more years ago, when I first read Venture to the Interior by Laurens van der Post, I was struck by his vivid description of a dense forest of unique cedar trees, high on the Mulanje Plateau in southern Nyasaland, (now Malawi). Having spent much of my childhood on the edge of a soft and bright ancient beech wood in the Chilterns, the dark, ominous forest that van der Post describes evoked a very different experience of trees and woodland to my own. I’ve wanted to write about this ever since. But I hadn’t bargained for what I would discover (Spoiler alert: scroll down to the end of this blog article).
Venture to the Interior is a narrative account of Van der Post’s mission to Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1949 to explore two relatively unknown parts of the country for the British government.
The book is, despite its intrinsic colonial tone, beautifully written. Van der Post was something of an evangelist for the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, so it is little surprise that Venture to the Interior treats Africa, the continent in which he was born, as a metaphor for the unconscious – and more specifically his own unconscious – which he contrasts with ‘rational’ Europe, his adopted home as an adult. There is, he says in the Preface to the book, “…an unresolved conflict between two fundamental elements in my make-up; conscious and unconscious, male and female, masculine and feminine; the constitution of my father and the presence of my mother in me. On one side, under the heading “AFRICA”, I would group unconscious, female, feminine, mother; and under “EUROPE”: conscious, male masculine, father.” (pp.12-13). Comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, written 60 years earlier, are obvious.
Here are extracts from the pages dealing with van der Post’s first encounter with the cedars of Mulanje, in his ascent with Peter Quillan, the Chief Forestry Officer of the province and their meeting with forester, “Dicky” Vance, whom they arrange to meet near his forestry hut:
It seemed that Mlanje, from the forestry point of view, was unique. There was no other place like it in Africa or the world. It was indeed a world of its own, a very ancient, lost world of trees that grew nowhere else. These trees, he [Quillan] said had been given the name of cedars, Mlanje cedars, because they looked to the uninitiated eyes like cedar. But they were not cedars at all. They were a conifer of a unique and very ancient sort, had their roots in the most antique of antique Africa botanical worlds.[1] I would see them for myself soon, in fact I would smell them even before I saw them. Their scent, night and day, filled the air on the mountain; filled it with a heavy, all-pervasive but delicious scent of a lost world; of a time and a place that existed nowhere else.
Their colour, like their scent, was unique. It was green, of course, but like no other green; there was a sheen of the olive green of cypress, and the substance of the green of the ilexes of Greece and the Caucasus; the texture of the conifers of Columbia and the vital electric sparkle of African juniper. In the bark, in the veins and arteries of those trees, the sap, a thick, yellow, resinous sap of a specific gravity and density most unusual in conifers, ran strongly. If you laid your ear to a trunk, it was almost as if you could hear this vital, this dark, secret traffic drumming upwards, skywards, from the deep, ancient soil, the original earth perhaps of Africa, to the outermost, the smallest spike of a leaf, sparkling in the sun a hundred, even a hundred and twenty feet above. So full were the trees of this vital sap that it preserved them even in death; no insect, no worm, no ant would touch even the driest morsel of .it. It was the only ant-resisting wood in the whole of Africa.
But when one threw it on the fire as I would soon see, it was so full of life, of stored-up energy from another world, that it literally exploded into flame. It consumed itself joyfully and gaily, crackling explosively in flame with none of that lugubrious reluctance to burn of some other woods that Quillan could mention. And fire, unfortunately had nearly been the cedars’ undoing. Some centuries ago when human beings first appeared in the plains round Mlanje, great fires swept up the mountain and burnt havoc through the responsive cedar woods. They, the Forestry Services, had come just in time to save the remnants of it.
There was still a good deal of forest left–enough for them to exploit in order to get the money to rejuvinate [sic] the species, but what I would see was a world of cedars in retreat, a world of unique and irreplaceable living trees, fighting a desperate rearguard action against fire and rapacious human beings, standing-to gallantly, night and day, without cease in the deepest, dampest and remotest recesses of the mountain. Surely I could understand why they were so jealous, so suspicious on the trees’ behalf! [..]
[Quillan] explained that they were so short of good wood in Nyasaland that they were cutting cedar at Chambe, sawing it up by hand and carrying it down the mountain, each length separately on the head of black porters.
“It is hell for them” said Quillan “but they don’t mind and we have got to do it. We make it up to them by feeding them and paying them as well as we can, but we don t like it.[…]
I became aware of a strange, thick, resinous, spiced, oily scent, and Quillan said: “Do you mind getting off the track, please?”
There seemed to be a deep, sheer drop on our right, so, using saplings, we pulled ourselves up on to a steep slope to the left of the track. I heard the pad-pad of heavily burdened feet coming out of the mist above, then someone breathing and puffing with every cell of his lungs, followed by a smell of human sweat mingling with the scent of resin and a native balancing a heavy, thirty-foot beam of cedar on his head, came out of the mist towards us.
I thought it wrong, somehow, that laden and breathing as he was, he should feel compelled to raise his hand and say, “Morning, Bwana !” Besides, he was just on the edge of a precipice.
“He gets ninepence a day and some food for doing that,” said Quillan. “I’d be damned if I’d do it.”
From now on we passed dozens of carriers coming down the mountain at regular intervals. Quillan always took the same punctilious care to make way for them. We began to talk less. The track became steeper and we had to use our hands as well as our feet in places. One bit of it passed a tremendous drop of smooth sheet rock, cyanite I think Quillan called it. The rock had a seventy-degree slope above us, but below it dropped sheer into the mist. We clambered across it from one precarious foothold of moss and aloe root to another.[…]
At twelve exactly, three hours after our start, as we were going up a particularly steep part of the mountain using our hands as well as our feet in places, I heard dogs barking in the mist above us.
“Those are Vance’s dogs. I expect he is coming to meet you,” Quillan said, paused, and sniffing at the mist, added: “Do you notice something?”
It was that heavy scent. Every time the timber carriers went by I had smelt it, a scent that I had not come across anywhere else. But now it was much more confident and pronounced. I nodded.
“Cedars,” he said, breathing the scent in with deep satisfaction. “Cedars, as I told you. We are near the top now.” […]
The peaks were still covered but the valley, the so-called Chambe plateau up which we had walked, became more and more open to view. I could see what Arbuthnot meant by saying it was like a glen in Scotland. It was utterly unlike the Africa we had left down below.
It was covered in lovely long rye, oat and barley grasses, gold-green and purple in their early winter colours. Through the valley on all sides, from behind folds, hills, and many slow, gradual rises in its contours, flowed crystal-clear streams, presumably the rainbow trout streams of which I had heard so much.
At first I thought there were palm trees growing on the banks of the streams, but I soon realized that they were huge tree ferns, the last remnants of the great cedar forests that once had covered this valley too. The scent of the cedars themselves now was most marked. Soon I began to see them, as Quillan had so vividly described them to me: at first, in small clusters driven back into odd, remote nooks of the valley, but then, as we went deeper into the valley, there appeared in the central gash of it a real, dank, brooding, resentful forest of them. It was rather an awe-inspiring sight. They looked, in an odd way, prehistoric; lovely, but long before human time. I would not have been surprised to see a pterodactyl fly out of them. All round the edges their branches were festooned and heavily hung with garlands and veils of lichen and moss.
“Aren’t they wonderful!” Vance said to me in his clear, firm voice, proudly as if he had invented them. […]
[Vance’s forestry hut] stood on a high grass-gold mound in the central gash of the valley. There was a wide clear stream and a darker fringe of immense cedars round the bottom of the mound. As we made our way slowly towards it the afternoon light turned it purple and it looked rather like some kind of unadorned velvet set in a crown of be-metalled cedars. On either side of the stream there were long slopes of golden grass, speeding away and up to where three miles farther on perpendiculars of solid grey cliffs, smooth and shining like the bark of a blue-gum tree., rose two to three thousand feet above the floor of the valley. All around the cliff-tops the mist continued to sag heavily.
The hut itself was built of crossed-cedar beams, lath and plaster. It had a roof of cedar shingles, a little cedar veranda at the back, cedar floor-boards and, I was to find, a few pieces of crude cedar furniture as well. It burned cedar logs whose flame and. smoke added to the cold air their own variants of the generic all-pervasive scent. The smoke rose straight up for some hundreds of feet, wavered, and then curved slowly back on its course, until it looked like a feathery question mark stuck into the roof of the hut. […]
“I hope you won’t mind, but look, you are not going to take all this away from us are you?” [said Vance].
“How could I? And why should I?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I don’t know, but the feeling seems to be that you might want to use Mlanje for something other than forestry?”
I reassured him as best I could. I said I had not seen Mlanje, had no preconceived notions about it, but judging only from what I had seen that day, it seemed obvious that whatever happened very special provisions would have to be made for the cedars and their rejuvenation. But it seemed to be a tremendous mountain and there might be room for other things besides cedars.
“It is big enough,” he said sadly. “It’s big enough! That’s the trouble. Butyou know, anything else, particularly sheep or cows, wold spoil it. They wouldn’t belong, It should all be recovered with cedars from end to end, as it once was.” […]
“I am sure it will be all right,” [I said]. “We’ll see that your cedars are all right anyway.”
Extracts from Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior. Chatto and Windus, London, 1952. (Queen’s Classics edition 1962). 116-127.
It seemed that Mlanje, from the forestry point o view, was unique. There was no other place like it in Africa or the world. It was indeed a world of its own, a very ancient, lost world of trees that grew nowhere else. These trees, he [Quillan] said had been given the name of cedars, Mlanje cedars, because they looked to the uninitiated eyes like cedar. But they were not cedars at all. They were a conifer of a unique and very ancient sort, had their roots in the most antique of antique Africa botanical worlds.[1 I would see them for myself soon, in fact I would smell them even before I saw them. Their scent, night and day, filled the air on the mountain; filled it with a heavy, all-pervasive but delicious scent of a lost world; of a time and a place that existed
[1] The Mulanje cedar is Widdringtonia whytei, an evergreen conifer, native to Malawi (former Nyasaland) and found only on the Mulanje Massif altitudes of 1,830-2,550 metres. It has been renamed the “Mulanje cypress” to better reflect the taxonomic group it belongs to. It is a fast-growing, pioneer species and will usually grow back quickly after fire. However, its durability and resistance to insects and fungi made it in great demand for most of the 20th century for construction, driving it to the point of extinction.
For an update and photos, see also this Guardian article by Morgan Trimble (Tue 22 Sep 2015 12.08 BST)
and this piece by Wiliam Atkinson from Sun 15 Jan 2012 00.04 GMT
Few trees have had a greater global impact than the mulberry. As the sole food of the Bombyx silkworm, the leaves of the mulberry have brought prosperity to all those who learned the art of silk production over the past 5000 years. In this beautifully illustrated new book, Mulberry, I also chart the many other contributions the tree has made to civilization, from the first paper, to exquisite furniture and even modern medicine. And the blood-red fruit of the black mulberry has graced royal tables and inspired poets for centuries. Mulberry is published by Reaktion Books on 11 November 2019.
Peter Coles 