Jenny Smedley
At
the beginning of this book there is a quotation from Hermann Hesse: ‘Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak
to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning in precepts, they
preach and undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.’ Jenny Smedley elaborates on these thoughts in this remarkably
gripping story about 300 year life of an oak tree. Many people will have had
the thought that a certain tree was alive long before they were born, and will
continue long after their death. Here,
the life of the tree is described from both the outside and inside. The book begins in 506 AD in a sacred grove
among people who are saying farewell to Gildas, an
elder of the tribe. His spirit becomes
one with the spirit of the tree as he dies, and the young priestess Oriana appoints his successor. There is a palpable reverence in the
ceremony, and the sacred grove stands for many centuries until it is destroyed
by a group of men in the early 15th century. It is a moment of
forgetfulness, of desacralisation as the reader is
jolted into the modern mechanistic mindset that regards nothing is sacred.
The narrative begins in October 1687
when a crow drops an acorn into a jagged rock, a place where it will never
germinate. Then, in the early spring of
1688, a young girl about the same age as Oriana is
murdered because she witnessed some smugglers who are afraid that she might
report them. Already the reader realises the degree of spiritual understanding
permeating the book as the young girl leaves her body and looks down on the
scene and even through it to another time and space in a previous existence. even as the man is burying the girl in a shallow grave, the
acorn is dislodged and buried with her. From death, from her sacrifice, new
life is born and the acorn begins to germinate. The girls
soul is in a sense joined to the spirit of the tree, giving her a different
kind of life and the tree a greater awareness of the world around it. The next
major incident involves a highwayman whose holdup
results in a carriage wheel being driven over the tree, twisting the trunk,
and, eventually, saving it from being chopped down and made into a ship at a
much later date (1764). Next, a wise
woman comes to use its bark for healing purposes; her relationship with the
tree is conscious, and she asks for its forgiveness.
Over the years, the tree witnesses
many critical moments in people’s lives.
A lover who is let down by a soldier when he discovers she is pregnant
and who subsequently brings her daughter to the tree and severs a branch to
make a cradle for her, according to an ancient superstition. Two men discuss
Trafalgar in 1805, and the tree suffers storm damage in 1810. It continues to grow,
housing a veritable ecosystem in its branches. The first car is invented and
drives past, a zeppelin looms overhead during the
First World War. In a 1950s a large part
of the forest is cleared for new housing, leaving the tree more isolated and
exposed. A hippy begins to understand the tree and its sacred site and tries to
prevent it being damaged by workers widening the road. The work, however, weakens the root
system. Then a therapist called Sally
befriends the tree and finds herself working with
another girl called Sam who has recurrent nightmares about being murdered.
Finally, the tree is one of 15 million blown over in a great storm of 1987. The
roots reveal the bones of the murdered girl….the story comes
full circle as Sally researches the 17th century background and the sappling of a yew appears in the empty space. In the wood
of the tree is made into a bridge, so in a sense its spirit lives on as a
conduit between the worlds..
In the epilogue we learn about the
symbolic significance of different types of tree, as well as a number of
significant facts about trees and their special qualities. She also observes
that ‘trees take very little and give a lot; man gives very little and takes as
much as he can.’ She reminds us that we used to know that every living thing
has a spirit, and asks how differently we might treat a tree if we accepted
this again. So the book propounds a new
and ancient philosophy of nature and a deeper understanding of the cycles of life,
death and rebirth.