French Roses and Oak Trees
Some Rose News
It’s been a while since I wrote my blog, the reason being that I’ve been in my house in central France over the summer. It’s the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-and-a-half years! Although others have been staying there, and keeping an eye on the garden, several of the roses I planted just before I left the last time (in February 2020) didn’t make it, alas. And July-August isn’t the best time to enjoy the rose-garden. But several roses were in bloom. Here’s one: Reine des Violettes , a wonderfully fragrant magenta coloured Hybrid Perpetual, cultivated in France and in commerce since 1860.
In my book By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose I write that Hybrid Perpetuals “were crosses with Portland, Chinas, and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about six feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose.“
Concerning my book about roses, I’m pleased to say that it is now available in Italian. Here’s the back and front cover:
A New Project?
I’ve been thinking about the oak tree because just down the road from my house in France straddles the immense Forest of Tronçais, which at 26,000 acres is one of the largest stands of sessile oak (Quercus petraea) in western Europe. Amongst other things, the Forest is celebrated for supplying oak wood for wine and brandy barrels; almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais. In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris.
It is not too much to say that human civilization is both literally and metaphorically built on oak trees like those in the Forest of Tronçais. For millennia, oak lumber was the premier building material for houses, boats, and furniture. The oldest surviving Viking longboat is made of oak. Oak wood also served as fuel in the form of logs, and later, as charcoal. The acorn was an abundant and nutritious food. The bark was used in the production of leather. It was also valued medicinally as an antiseptic and hemostatic, a pacifying agent in inflammation, a healing agent for burns, and a cure toothache and gastropathies. Many important manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells and the American Declaration of Independence, were written in ink made of oak gall, produced by wasp larvae who live on the oak tree. The oak is central to many myths and religions, especially of Europe. The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and Teutonic tribes all venerated the oak tree above all other trees. The ‘Golden Bough’ that serves as the title to James Frazer’s celebrated foundational text on world mythologies was sheltered within a sanctuary of sacred oak trees. In Celtic mythology, the oak symbolized the virtues of strength, courage, and wisdom, and the word ‘Druid’ may derive from the Celtic meaning “knower of the oak tree.” Contemporary witches suggest hanging a sprig of oak in the house to ward off negativity, strengthen family unity, afford protection, and promote prosperity.
At the western edge of the forest stands a very old oak named La Sentinelle. Born around 1580, during the Wars of Religion then raging in the region (and that led to the sacking of my village, and the destruction of its walled château) La Sentinelle means ‘The Sentry’ or ‘The Watchman’ . It’s my favorite of the ancient oaks in the forest, and I always make a point of visiting it and giving it a hug. Here it is as of early July, 2022:
As you can see, La Sentinelle certainly looks its age. Deeply fissured, gnarled, and cracked, and not very elegant looking, it would take four people with arms outstretched to gird its stocky, nobly, trunk. It puts me in mind of a story of the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, or Zhuangzi, (369—298 B.C.E). Here it is as translated by Solala Towler in Chuang Tzu – The Inner Chapters, the Classic Taoist Text (2010):
Once a master carpenter named Shih was travelling with his apprentice on his way to the state of Chi. When they arrived in Chu Yuan village they passed a huge old oak tree sheltering the village shrine. It was huge, large enough to fit several thousand oxen under its branches. It was 100 spans and towered over everything else in the village with its lowest branches a full 80 feet in the air. These branches were so large they could have been made into a dozen boats. Many people were standing under it, their necks craned as they tried to see the top. But the master carpenter did not even turn his head as they passed it; but walked on without stopping for a moment.
His apprentice took one look at the immense tree and ran after his master saying: “Since I first took up the axe to train with you Master, I have never seen a tree as magnificent. Yet you do not even look at it, much less stop. Why is this?”
The carpenter said, “Enough! Not another word about this tree! Its wood is useless. A boat made from its timber would sink; a coffin would rot before you could put it into the ground; any tool you made from it would snap. It has too much sap in it to make a door, and a beam made from its wood would be full of termites. Altogether it is a completely useless tree and that is why it has lived so long.”
One night, after he returned home, the ancient tree came to the carpenter in a dream and spoke to him. “What are you comparing me too,” it asked, “useful trees like cherry, apple, pear, orange, citron and all the other useful trees? Yet for these trees, as soon as the fruit is ripe they are stripped; their branches are broken and torn off. It is their usefulness that causes them so much abuse. Instead of living out the years heaven has given them they are cut off halfway through. So it is for living things. This is why I have worked so long to cultivate the spirit of uselessness. I was almost cut down several times but I have been able to attain a great level of uselessness and this has been very useful to me. If I had been more useful I would never have attained the great age that I have, and grown so large.
“The two of us are similar. We are both just beings in the world. How is it that we go about judging other beings? You, an old and worthless man, about to die, how can you judge me and call me worthless?”
Shih the carpenter awoke then and spent a long time lying in his bed trying to understand this strange dream. Later, when he shared his dream with his apprentice the young man said, “If this ancient tree is so interested in being useless why has it allowed itself to become part of the village shrine?”
His master said, “It is only pretending to be a shrine. It is its way of protecting itself. Even though its timber is useless, if it were not a shrine it would have been cut down long ago. It is totally different from other trees. You cannot hope to understand it!”
La Sentinelle is on last legs, its death accelerated by climate change. Since I last visited, it had lost several of its huge branches..
I realize my life has been intertwined with the oak from almost the beginning. The house I grew up in had a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) – the most common kind of oak in England - growing in the garden. It was much taller and much older than the house and completely dominated the garden. In the summertime, all I could see out my bedroom window were its leaves and branches, which almost but not quite reached close enough for me to leap out the window into its canopy, like the young aristocrat in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), who rebels against his dull family by climbing into an oak tree in the garden and then refuses to come down - ever. Today, in South Korea, the hills around my house are mostly covered in young oak trees. The majority are Quercus dentata, which is smaller in size than the typical European oaks, but has the largest leaves of any – some are bigger than my open hand.
in the not to distant future my burgeoning interest in the oak tree will bear fruit as a new book. And in my next post I’ll be over my jet lag and ruminating once again on things Korean…..Well, Probably.