Change is coming to the land I’ve come to love in 15 years living on the edge of the Castle Howard estate. Across almost 9,000 acres of mixed agriculture, forestry and parkland, the clear felling is over, as is the estate pheasant shoot – empty pens stand ready for dismantlement. The least agriculturally productive acreages are to be unyoked from cultivation – large herbivores will manage what springs from the boggy soils and there are hopes, soon, of beavers. Elsewhere, farming is switching to regenerative methods and tree cover is set to increase through a mixture of natural regeneration and planting with stock grown from seed gathered by hand – a huge effort boosted by volunteers.
When I call into the estate’s tree nursery, Guy Thallon, the head of natural environment, is chatting to nurserymen Josh and Henry. They’ve been grading saplings for sale, but something is awry. “The rowans are all growing bent again,” says Josh. “They did it last year too.”
He holds out a few examples. They are emphatically wonky – some executing 90-degree turns just a few inches above ground level. It’s odd, Josh muses, as other species growing alongside are reaching – conventionally – skywards. Then he says that the deviants are bound for disposal. They won’t fit in tree guards and no one wants bent trees anyway.
Rowans have a strong appeal, aesthetically, ecologically and culturally. They are pioneers and bird magnets, at home on exposed crags in minimal soil, and thus ideally suited as urban “amenity trees”, because a city street has much in common with a rocky mountainside. Their associated mythology and folklore is almost boundless, encompassing associations with life, fertility, fire, blood, death, transition and magic of the quickening, protective kind. I discover that the Castle Howard rowans are all bending the same way, to the south. Reaching for the light. I hard relate.
When Guy offers to gift me a few trees of my choice as thanks for some small favours last year, I go back to the determinedly bent rowans, and pick four of the wonkiest I can find. They’ll grow potted for now while I work out what they might have to tell me. And I persuade Josh and Henry to keep some in stock in case anyone else fancies embracing their queer and quizzical wisdom. For inquiries email treenursery@castlehoward.co.uk.
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