Ashes to Ashes – Stumps to Stumperies
I’m writing this feeling very sorry for myself after an excruciating encounter at the dentist yesterday. Not that the dentist was in any way at fault (in fact he’s an artist with his tools of torture!) but having someone play tug of war for 10 minutes with a well rooted molar did nothing to brighten up my afternoon. Lying there in a state of panic wondering which was going to give in first, my skull or the recalcitrant tooth, I tried to deflect my ever increasing levels of angst by concentrating on anything other than meeting a grisly end, courtesy of the NHS. Unfortunately all I could conjure up was recurring images of tree stumps being either heaved up out of the earth in a flurry of soil and creaking roots or being ground down to a subterranean grave!
Unfortunately, my poor old tooth which had served me well over the past half a century, finally met with an inglorious end in the surgery’s medical waste bin – I doubt even a Chinese ivory craftsman could have made much from its many and various amalgam filled cavities. Thankfully, we don’t have to be quite so cavalier with tree stumps; if you think about it, they are simply the bottom part of the plant without the leaves. In their own right they can easily be described as natural works of art with fantastically extrovert roots sprouting all over the place – just like an arboreal Johnny Rotten. Over the years I have salvaged many stumps – some dug out slowly and painfully by hand but normally effortlessly extracted using the bucket of a JCB. Years later I still find them tucked away in borders, gently rotting down to mulch and providing the perfect home for countless insects, amphibians and small mammals. My cat seems to think I’ve deliberately provided him with his very own mouse production line – nature can be very cruel!
The Victorians were the first to spot the potential in tree stumps and, along with their magical grottoes, they mastered the construction of ‘Stumperies’which in their purest sense were simply a pile of upended tree stumps, filled in with soil and planted with ferns and other shade loving plants. Prince Charles has a rather splendid Stumpery at Highgrove which fits in nicely with his organic recycling ethos, although his father clearly doesn’t share his son’s enthusiasm; he once famously asked him, “When are you going to set fire to this lot?” You’d better go and see it before Prince Phillip sneaks out one night with a can of paraffin and a box of Vestas!
The recent arrival in this country of the dreadful Ash Die Back Disease (which has clearly not read the rules regarding our island nation standing in splendid isolation from European nasties) is likely to mean we will lose virtually all our native Ash trees in the next year or two. The only protection for unaffected trees is for the wholesale slaughter of those showing any signs of infection – normally in the form of communal pyres. I’m sure in reality it will mean a glut of firewood for our wood burners and (if you know a friendly forester) some perfect ammunition to build your very own stumpery. Whilst we would all rather have the living trees in our landscape, let’s not destroy their legacy altogether. We’ve all got dark and un-gardenable spaces in our gardens – why not build yourself (and all the garden critters) your very own Victorian folly?!
Happy New Year to you all – and especially to my Dentist!
Jonathan Wild
Garden Consultant – Stumped!
Comments