Tag Archives: unreliable quotes

Tree Gibraltar Point, Lincolnshire - dramatic setting

More Thoughts on Planting Trees

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Derbyshire Trees

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”

It’s supposed to be an ancient Greek proverb, but it isn’t. I’m fascinated by the way these things twist and turn and a 1950s sentence in a book becomes both “ancient Greek” and a proverb. However, I’m just as bad – I often say that my grandmother told me something when she didn’t. She did tell me that the weather was bad due to Russian satellites, not to trust American servicemen offering nylons and not to buy rabbits without the skins. The last is the only really useful advice of the three. Despite “the spirit of the blitz” it was known that skinned cats were sold as rabbits, and butchers were prosecuted for it. I never really enjoyed rabbit meat as I always find it too sweet, so I haven’t eaten rabbit since 1982, when I was on an economy drive.

Backlit Sumac Tree in the MENCAP garden

I have planted a few trees over the years, but I’ve also had a few problems with one of the neighbours, who thought I could control where the leaves fall. I can’t, and the law, sensibly, doesn’t expect me to.  Over the years we have lost two birches, a hawthorn, a crab apple and a laburnum from the neighboring gardens. Suburban gardens really aren’t made for tree planting. I may write to the government and suggest they start community arboretums. Or arboreta.  That’s the trouble with Latin plurals – you add an “s” and it looks wrong, you change it to the correct ending and it looks pretentious. I have to be careful of my tendency to pomposity now that I have a conservatory.

You could plant, or have a tree planted for you, in a field on the edge of town where it had room to grow free and contribute to the view and the environment. More trees would grow, nature would benefit, and neighbours would not complain.

Meanwhile, they sky is grey, the back garden is moving in a stiffish breeze and it feels like November.

Trees on a hill near Slaidbirn

 

Changes

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The recent arrival of my pension documents through the post were a bit of a shock. Retirement, is becoming real. It was, in my thirties, a far off myth, a bit like Avalon or Narnia. In middle age it became the subject of daydreams, where we would wander off, hand in hand, into some fuzzy place where we would do things we had been putting off. Later, it became a place of dread, as my delinquency in failing to make proper pension arrangements came home to roost. Finally, the time has arrived.

We now have to start putting plans into action, and make some decisions. At one time I would have had no problem with this – I would simply have set a date and done it. Theoretically it’s easier than when i was younger, as there will be no employment to work round when retirement comes.

In practice, there’s a lot of physical and mental clutter to work round. It’s time to declutter on an epic scale, and face the fear about what I will do when i have no job to add form to my life. I also have to face the fact that a lot of my plans aren’t going to happen. I won’t be walking miles across salt marsh looking for Bitterns, and I won’t be writing any best-sellers in a late-blooming writing career, because I’ll be watching Countdown. I may be old, but I’m not senile, and can see the writing on the wall (which is what Countdown is all about). . No matter what I may wish, the habit is set (as discussed in my last post) and despite all my good intention I am likely to go to the grave with the song still in me.

Unfortunately for the construction of this post, Thoreau actually said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. The good bit, the bit about going to the grave with the song still in them, is a misquote. Isn’t that always the case?

Quotes are never as good as you remember them being, which is a quality they share with much of my life.