In our time we have rescued a variety of plants and today I will add L's hornbeams to the list. L is dead and the vicarage she lived in during her husband penultimate incumbency sold off, demolished and turned into residential accommodation. The hornbeam tree by the front gate did not survive the developers' bulldozers, but before she departed for the South L planted up three small saplings from it. She may not have known or cared about what would happen to the house - rambling, cold, draughty - but I think she would be glad about the trees.
They came to us in a roundabout way and we planted them up in the wildlife area in the park behind the back garden. I had the idea that they would blend in with the hazels there as they are a native tree. They survived but did not thrive. (It was probably too dark and dry.) So when J gave us her surplus forsythia and my husband heroically uprooted the privet hedge from the front garden clay to make room for these, there was a space for the hornbeams. Again, I had the idea that they would bush out in the fashion of our next door neighbour's copper beech hedge. But it requires more than three to create that effect.
I have trimmed them slightly each year and now they look like young trees recently purchased from a nursery. I have a dilemma - I do not want them to mature into fully grown trees but I do not want to cut them right back. I have postponed any decision. I am waiting until they attain the height of the holly and camellia.
When I look out of the front window at L's rescued hornbeams I think of the penultimate pages of Tolkien's epic when a sapling of the most ancient of trees is found growing among the mountain snows, uprooted gently and carried back to be replanted in the city. L's hornbeams have a home, not a royal palace but a suburban semi. This is how the next era starts.
