Funny what appeals. With little fanfare, indistinct in the midst of other trees, in Batsford Arboretum I found a cypress. It doesn't feature on Batsford's website, yet it gave me a greater thrill than even the most scenic corners of the arboretum.
The notice nearby read:
Cupressus Sempervivens
On 1st November 1852 The Duke of Wellington's funeral took place in London. A cypress wreath from the funeral carriage fell in Piccadilly. An Eton boy aged 15, Lord Redesdale, secured a cone from the wreath and planted the seed at his home in Exbury in Hampshire. A cutting from one of these Exbury trees was sent to Brayfield in Buckinghamshire. This tree, planted in 1959-60, is a cutting from the Brayfield cypress and so a great-grandchild of the Duke of Wellington's wreath.*
A third generation tree - not very exciting? Well, that securing of the cone was not straight-forward. In a letter to The Spectator in 1942, George Farrer, grandson of the aforementioned Lord Redesdale, revealed:
As the gun-carriage went by where he stood a cypress wreath fell from it and desperately he tried to get this, but an old woman in the crowd was before him and would not part with it for anything. However, at last he persuaded her to let him have a cone off it for a shilling, which was all he had in the world.
The crowd was surely a dense crush. Certainly around St Paul's, it was so thick that the lamplighters couldn't reach the gas lamps to turn them out. Onlookers near the carriage would have been dwarfed as the enormous vehicle, made from melted-down French cannon captured at Waterloo, slowly rolled down the centre of the street.**
So, for decades after, mementoes of that day and the Iron Duke grew at Exbury. I'm not the only one who finds the story moving. New owners of the estate in 1919 (a date when the funeral was still within living memory), Lady Rothschild and her husband grabbed billhooks and "literally hacked our way through a glade dense with scrub and sycamore saplings," in their eagerness to find the trees, which bore very old labels recounting the funeral story.
Today, the trees have gone, blown down in the storm of 1987. So it's only thanks to a happy seating arrangement at a dinner table in the 1930s, when a member of the Mitford family (which includes Lord Redesdale) recounted the funeral tale to a neighbouring Rothschild, and the latter promised a cutting from the Exbury tree, that the essence of the original tree can be found at Batsford.***
For me, standing by the tree, history telescoped. Touching the trunk, I touched a memory of one of the greatest funeral processions ever seen in London.****
Sentimental? OK. But don't you think more should be made of these living relics? Around Britain there are descendants of trees that link us with all sorts of events, people and places (the myrtle from Queen Victoria's wedding bouquet seems to have been spread far and wide). It's the fact that these huge organisms were living and breathing at a time long gone that makes them so evocative. I'd love to hear if there are trees with historical connections that send a shiver down your spine.
Batsford is currently holding a raffle (with some rather luscious pampering prizes) to raise £40,000 to build a new schoolroom. Tickets are on sale at the arboretum or you can donate direct to the Leaves for Learning Project.
PR and Marketing Manager, Susie Hunt, says, "We already offer around 700 local primary schoolchildren the chance to learn more about how plants and trees grow and the importance of natural spaces and conservation. But a new schoolroom will give us the opportunity to extend our education programmes and give us flexibility to hold adult courses and events too."
All good aims. But I do hope the Duke's cypress gets a well-deserved mention.
*The date should read 18th November.
**With such an enormous carriage, they really should have practised more, as I discovered when I researched an article on St Paul's.
"When his coffin arrived [at the cathedral] on its monstrous carriage, proceedings were held up for an hour as the bearers tried to figure out how to move it, fifteen feet above them, on to the waiting bier. Thousands of mourners, seated in specially built stands in the nave, suffered as the freezing wind swept through the open West door."
***It seems possible that the Rothschilds were quite generous with the cypress; Sir Stephen Tallents, also in the Spectator, admits to one with a very similar provenance.
****The fact that it's a cypress makes perfect sense, as it has long been the tree of mourning. (At the time, cypress hatbands were offered for sale, no doubt bought by many of the million onlookers.)
...Landscape Juice Network
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