Queenswood

More tree stories. This is a very wooded part of the world, with giant or ancient trees everywhere here. This morning we went to Queenswood Arboretum, a large area of hilltop woodland about six miles north of Hereford, and a favourite place of mine. There always seems to be something new to discover, new walks, new trees. A place of memory and dedication, wilderness and research, picnics and children. There are long walks of oaks, hundreds of different species of trees, grasslands, heavy wooden benches, distant views of south Herefordshire. The Autumn Garden has trees which look their best in the autumn, maples and acers and beeches, and on a sunny day in late October it is very beautiful. Driving past later in the autumn two years ago it felt as if the season had spilled out from the Garden and was flowing down the hill as trees outside the park began to turn.

Today the handkerchief trees were in leaf, and sure enough each conventional green leaf seemed to have a foppy white handkerchief-leaf hanging beneath it; a delicate, restrained, somehow eighteenth-century sight. We wandered through a grove of giant redwoods, wellingtonia and sequoia, which towered sixty or eight feet into the sky. And these of course are only half-a-century old. Their trunks are like thick red fur, like Chewbacca the Wookie, and with the fairly low morning light seemed to have faces in them. I wondered if this is where the idea for totem poles came from, the idea that the sculptors were just carving what was already in the wood. A glorious, muddy, rainy-spring-light morning, and a good way to spend the rain.