Unto the woods

As the bitterly divisive Tasmanian forests issue rolls on with no sign of any solution, a pause for reflection – a reflection, that is, on what trees mean to us, particularly if they are age-old.

For this I offer some words from Robert Louis Stevenson, he of such immortal works as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae. The offering is from the pages of his first book, An Inland Voyage, of 1878. It was his recounting of a journey by canoe with a companion, Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, along the waterways of Belgium and France (the trees were not the same as in our forests, but the message gets across).

They had endured bad weather, but he wrote there were “some calm intervals, and one notably, when we were skirting the forest of Mormal, a sinister name to the era, but a place most gratifying to sight and smell”.

“It looked solemn along the river side, drooping its boughs into the water, and piling them up aloft into a wall of leaves. What is a forest but a city of nature’s own, fully of hardy and innocuous living things, where there is nothing dead and nothing made with the hands, but the citizens themselves are the houses and public monuments? There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet, as a woodland; and a pair of people, swinging past in canoes, feel very small and bustling by comparison.

“And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the sweetest and most fortifying. The sea has a rude, pistolling sort of odour, that takes you in the nostrils like snuff, and carries with it a fine sentiment of open water and tall ships; but the smell of a forest, which comes nearest to this in tonic quality, surpasses it by many degrees in the quality of softness.

“Again, the smell of the sea has little variety, but the smell of a forest is infinitely changeful; it varies with the hour of the day, not in strength merely, but in character; and the different sorts of trees, as you go from one zone of the wood to another, seem to live among different kinds of atmosphere. Usually the resin of the fir predominates. But some woods are more coquettish in their habits; and the breath of the forest of Mormal, as it came aboard upon us that showery afternoon, was perfumed with nothing less delicate that sweetbriar.

“I wish our way had always lain among woods. Trees are the most civil society. An old oak that has been growing where he stands since before the Reformation, taller than many spires, more stately than the greater part of mountains, and yet a living thing, liable to sicknesses and death, like you and me: is not that in itself a speaking lesson in history? But acres on acres full of such patriarchs contiguously rooted, their green tops billowing in the wind, their stalwart younglings pushing up about their knees: a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but the most imposing piece of nature’s repertory?”

Note from the editors: Perhaps readers would like to provide some other great literary quotes involving forests or trees via comments to this article… Such as “beautiful book, smallest forest, leaf after leaf” (Pablo Neruda)

First published: 2012-06-11 04:32 AM