History uprooted

History uprooted

The Pagoda tree at Kew Gardens • Photo by deror_avi (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Originally published 16 November 1987

Among the more engag­ing char­ac­ters with which J. R. R. Tolkien pop­u­lat­ed Mid­dle-earth were the ents, the old­est of all liv­ing races, a tree­like peo­ple only ten­ta­tive­ly removed from their arbo­re­al roots, awak­ened by elves from a long, silent aware­ness of them­selves into mobil­i­ty and speech.

The hob­bit Pip­pin described his first impres­sion of the ents this way: “One felt as if there was an enor­mous well behind them, filled up with ages of mem­o­ry and long, slow, steady think­ing; but their sur­face was sparkling with the present, like sun shim­mer­ing on the out­er leaves of a vast tree, or on the rip­ples of a very deep lake.”

A few weeks ago [in Octo­ber 1987], when a great storm dev­as­tat­ed Eng­lish forests, I thought of the ents: tall and stur­dy, clad in grey-green bark, with grey, bushy beards and deep, brown eyes shot full of green light.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of trees were felled by the rogue wind, trees hoary with his­to­ry, gnarled with the expe­ri­ence of ages, almost ent­like in their long, silent asso­ci­a­tion with the affairs of men.

Royal gardens hit hard

At no place was the loss of trees more keen­ly felt than at the Roy­al Botan­ic Gar­dens at Kew, about 10 miles west of Lon­don on the banks of the Riv­er Thames. Kew har­bors one of the world’s finest sci­en­tif­ic col­lec­tions of plants, includ­ing more than 10,000 trees spread out over near­ly 300 acres of splen­did park­land and his­toric glass houses.

Five hun­dred trees at Kew were top­pled by the storm, includ­ing oaks that stood 150 years ago when Queen Vic­to­ria came to the throne. More than a thou­sand oth­er trees were dam­aged, and many of those may need to be felled. The dimen­sions of the calami­ty are only now being ful­ly ascertained.

Kew is syn­ony­mous with botany. It was about the year 1759 that Princess Augus­ta, Dowa­ger Princess of Wales, estab­lished on the roy­al prop­er­ties at Kew a gar­den with an express­ly sci­en­tif­ic pur­pose. The place has been a cen­ter for plant preser­va­tion and botan­i­cal research ever since.

The col­lec­tions at Kew were extend­ed by Augus­ta’s son, George III, the king who lost the Amer­i­can colonies but gath­ered to the roy­al gar­dens plants from the fur­thest cor­ners of the realm. Dur­ing the ear­ly years, the the growth of gar­dens was guid­ed by the famed British nat­u­ral­ist Sir Joseph Banks. Banks dis­patched agents world­wide to gath­er plants. Col­lec­tors from Kew sailed out with Cap­tain James Cook on the sec­ond and third of his great cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tions of the globe. There were trees intend­ed for Kew on Cap­tain Bligh’s ship Boun­ty at the time of the famous mutiny.

By 1786 the gar­dens at Kew had acquired suf­fi­cient renown to attract the atten­tion of gar­den­er-states­man Thomas Jef­fer­son on his vis­it to Eng­land. In 1841, the gar­dens and col­lec­tions of plants were trans­ferred from the Crown to the British nation. The first direc­tor of the new­ly orga­nized estab­lish­ment was William Hook­er, per­haps the most dis­tin­guished botanist of his time.

Sir William was suc­ceed­ed by his son, Joseph Dal­ton Hook­er, the friend and bene­fac­tor of Charles Dar­win, and an ear­ly sup­port­er of Dar­win’s the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion. The younger Hook­er sup­plied Dar­win with seeds and sta­tis­tics from Kew to test the­o­ries about how plants and ani­mals came to inhab­it remote ocean­ic islands.

Valuable research

For more than two cen­turies the Kew Gar­dens have been a mec­ca for the sci­en­tif­ic and eco­nom­ic study of plants. The botan­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries at Kew once con­tributed through plant research to the pros­per­i­ty of empire; they are now con­cerned with con­ser­va­tion of species, preser­va­tion of the bios­phere, and the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment of Third World nations.

Some years ago I resided for a year in Lon­don and spent many hap­py hours in the gar­dens at Kew. I was study­ing the his­to­ry of sci­ence at the time, and as I walked among the ancient trees I keen­ly felt the spir­its of the great men — Joseph Banks, Thomas Jef­fer­son, William and Joseph Hook­er, Charles Dar­win, Charles Sprague Sar­gent (the first direc­tor of Boston’s Arnold Arbore­tum), and count­less oth­ers — who had walked there before me. If, out of their silent asso­ci­a­tion with so much his­to­ry, the trees of Kew had sud­den­ly, like ents, stirred them­selves to mobil­i­ty and speech, I would not have been surprised.

Whether J. R. R. Tolkien was ever at Kew I do not know, but it is hard to imag­ine that he was not a famil­iar vis­i­tor. He often enjoyed the botan­ic gar­dens at Oxford, and main­tained deeply-felt rela­tion­ships with favorite trees. Trees loomed large in Tolkien’s imag­i­na­tion, even­tu­al­ly awak­en­ing into entish creaturedom.

Ents, like elves, live for­ev­er unless killed by injuries inflict­ed from out­side. The great wind that swept south­east­ern Eng­land in mid-Octo­ber inflict­ed trag­ic vio­lence upon forests as ancient as the ents — and at Kew upon trees of his­toric sig­nif­i­cance to botan­i­cal science.

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