The Music and Murder of Trees

As Israelis celebrate Tu B’Shevat - the biblical ‘birthday for trees’ - residents of the leafier suburbs of Sheffield, Yorkshire, England are fighting to stop the destruction of their neighbourhood elms.

So fierce is the war against the municipal tree felling programme that a couple accused of plying the officially appointed tree surgeons with tainted tea have been interviewed voluntarily by police.

I’m fascinated by this, not only because I once lived in Ecclesall, barely miles from the focus of the row; nor yet because of the childish link I harbour for trees and my surname or even because my own secular birthday often coincides with the Jewish festival.

What really engages me is the contrast in British and Israeli attitudes:

In Israel, the religious pray for rain while in Britain most folk yearn for sunshine.

In the U.K., clay-footed jobsworths kill off trees on a bureaucratic whim while in Israel for the past decade mature trees have been legally protected and anyone considering felling or relocating an adult tree, must gain approval from –– a very long list of officials!

But none of this was on my mind during Friday morning last week when amidst a ceaseless, black, freezing, torrential downpour all too reminiscent of a British winter, I nonetheless enjoyed a tour and tree planting expedition to the Jewish National Fund’s Lavi Forest deep in the north Lower Galilee.

The outing became a classic ‘only in Israel’ affair, when accompanied by Tzippy Oppenheimer, regional coordinator for the Go North Nefesh B’Nefesh Israel immigration organisation, the four of us remaining from a pre-registered crowd of 40 began, not with nasty tea but a  nourishing red fruit beverage that we sipped in the forest shelter before squelching our  way to the nursery.

There we glimpsed tiny embryo seedlings being incubated like hundreds of premature human babies before we were invited to choose pot plants from the greenhouse and then to plant Aleppo Pine saplings in the newest part of the forest. We also received a further gift of dried fruits and nuts.

But most appealing was to note how the professional foresters’ skill and knowledge is but part of a sincerely held love for their craft.

Indeed, our main guide, who on telling us of his mother’s constant struggle to keep him indoors as a child, endeared himself to us further by reading Trees, the celebrated lyric poem by early 20^th century Catholic US poet Joyce Kilmer that has also been set many times to music.

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I’ve chosen this version by Paul Robeson as my late mother told me it was cherished by my grandfather, whom I never met.

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Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

© Natalie Wood (30 January 2018)