Country diary: A tree can define a landscape – even when it has fallen | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: Recently I had wondered how long this great lime would stay standing. The next day, I had my answer

How quickly something that defines a landscape for centuries becomes the absence that redefines it – so it is with ancient trees. The trunk snapped like a carrot at the roots and crashed, its bony branches splintered. Now it lies like a shipwreck stranded in an open field, its hulk of twigs an animal pelt stilled.

A day before, looking at its 300-year-old architecture of mostly dead wood yet so vividly alive, admiring its form and persistence through years and trouble, standing alone with spring coursing through the land and its timbers, I wondered how long, in tree time, it had left.

Storm Dave answered quickly: “None.” This fallen tree is a common lime, Tilia x europaea, a hybrid of our native small-leaved lime, T. cordata, and large-leafed lime, T. platyphyllos; probably of natural origins, probably introduced, but certainly common since 17th- and 18th-century plantings. Back then it was called the Dutch lime because so many were planted from Dutch nurseries in parks, avenues, gardens and streets in the baroque style throughout Europe. This common lime may be the variety ‘Pallida’, a major component of parkland estates such as this one at Llanforda and others around Oswestry.

Given its condition, girth, height, browny-red leaf buds and thatch of epicormic twigs (an ecosystem of its own that covers a third of its bulk), this individual could have been planted in the 18th or early 19th century – a Georgian survivor of a countryside idyll defined by an ecology of sweeping vistas and great trees. I fashion a digging stick and poke about in the duff of decayed wood and soil exposed when the trunk broke. Here’s a shard of stone, here’s a hollow finger of wood, here’s a fragment of green glass – the corner of a flat‑sided bottle.

Holding it up to the sun, there are tiny bubbles of air, trapped from when the glass was made, which have not seen the light of day since the tree was planted. Was this a bottle of gin or laudanum you took the last swig of before chucking it into the hole you planted the lime tree in? A libation, Dave?

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