Jared Farmer (Picador)
WHEN the Hardy Tree in the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church finally , London lost a unique and much-loved landmark. This ash tree was surrounded by upstanding headstones that had been moved there in the 1860s to accommodate a new railway line. Legend has it that the arrangement was created by a young Thomas Hardy while he was working as an architect on the construction of St Pancras station.
The Hardy Tree came to my mind as I read Elderflora, which is ostensibly a book about ancient and (sometimes) venerated trees, but is so much more 鈥� and often less 鈥� than that. It is a great idea for a book and the parts of it that stick to the script are an excellent read. But it is also a frustrating and confusing book that often doesn鈥檛 seem to know what it is trying to achieve.
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Jared Farmer, a professor of environmental history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, begins his book with a tantalising premise. He wants to visit the remains of the longest-lived organism in the world, the stump of a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva), which lived and died on Wheeler Peak in Nevada. When it was cut down in 1964, it was estimated to be at least 4862 years old, meaning it germinated around the time of the collapse of the 1st dynasty of Ancient Egypt.
Unfortunately, this excellent opening gambit soon gets lost in the forest of a meandering introduction, 26 pages of dense and overwrought prose that quickly goes off topic and stays there. The tone is exemplified by this utterly baffling and pretentious sentence: 鈥淏y sharing stories of human relationships with alien organisms 鈥� for ultraterrestrials experience time and place (time in place, place in time) in ways so earthly they seem otherworldly 鈥� I hope to say something hopeful, or at least anti-hopeless, about linear time including the future.鈥� Nope, me neither.
But I soldiered on and was rewarded. When he stays on message, Farmer is an entertaining and erudite guide to the world鈥檚 oldest trees and what they mean to us. We meet the cedars of Lebanon, ancient olives, ginkgos (my favourite tree), the bizarre-looking baobabs and the venerable yews of English churchyards.
At its best, the book is a masterful blend of natural and human history 鈥� with an emphasis on the human. Farmer鈥檚 elderflora aren鈥檛 just amazing old organisms, but a backdrop against which human drama, hubris and decency play out.
At its worst, however, the book is a trudge through miscellaneous facts and brief encounters with long-forgotten people that fail to hang together. I was reminded of Arnold Toynbee鈥檚 criticism of his fellow historians that too many of them treated history as just 鈥渙ne damned thing after another鈥�.
Despite the ups and downs, a strong theme runs throughout: the wanton destruction of old trees, especially during the rapacious colonial period of the 19th century. We read of European settlers in New Zealand, dreaming of commandeering the endemic conifer forests, logging them and converting them into pasture and eucalyptus plantations, then doing exactly that.
Similar grief-inducing stories of ruthless exploitation and self-appointed superiority litter the book. Farmer skilfully draws this line into the present day in the guise of climate change, which is both a modern form of colonialism and an imminent threat to many of the world鈥檚 oldest and biggest trees, as well as the vital functions they perform within their ecosystems.
Farmer wraps up with the story of the ancient bristlecone pine cut down in 1964 under controversial circumstances. I was awaiting a moving account of his own visit to the stump of the tree, technically called WPN-114, but widely known as Prometheus. Spoiler alert: it disappointed me in its brevity when it could have made a magnificent end to a book about magnificent things.
