With the latest lockdown restricting travel around the country, Dr Terry Mabbett reflects on what he was able to learn from the trees in his local graveyards in a year of being forced to stay close to home.
On 23 March, 2020, lockdown slammed the door shut on my schedule of visits for Forestry Journal and essentialARB. I religiously followed the science delivered daily during the UK government’s coronavirus briefing, which rapidly came to rival the original Hancock’s Half Hour. At my age I am ripe for the taking by a shadowy RNA figure in a protein coat called COVID-19.
“No more forestry and arb visits for you my lad,” said Mr Hancock. “Do not pass go, do not collect £200 and don’t drive to Durham for a walk in the bluebell woods. Stay indoors and only go out for a short walk once a day.”
So, what were my options? Two local parks, but the police were on patrol for anyone who stopped to photograph trees. What’s more, oak processionary moth (OPM) had finally arrived in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. I had been a bit miffed with OPM avoiding my manor, especially after affording the pest years of unrivalled publicity, but here it was at last and right on my doorstep. Steering clear of Parkfield Park was a good move. A shot of proteinaceous poison from a hairy caterpillar is the last thing you need when you are more likely to see a lesser-spotted woodpecker than a doctor.
HISTORY AND BIODIVERSITY
One obvious place to visit was the local cemetery – full of trees, with a rich history and no chance of catching COVID-19 from the residents. The entrance to the cemetery is guarded by an imposing gothic-style porch called a lychgate, and constructed from locally grown English oak donated several decades ago by Wrotham Park Estate to rebuild the dilapidated original in situ since 1909. A lychgate is a covered open structure found at a church gate, traditionally constructed with four or six oak posts embedded in the ground in a rectangular shape. On top are a number of oak beams holding a steeply-sloping straight-pitched roof covered in wood or clay peg tiles. Not surprisingly, Lych is one of the Old English or Saxon words meaning corpse.
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Wrotham Park, complete with its imposing mansion, was established in 1754 by Admiral John Byng across a huge swathe of undulating and once well-wooded countryside separating south Hertfordshire from the north London suburbs of Barnet and Enfield, much of which was part of the Enfield Chase. Kentish men and maids may wonder why there is an estate in south Hertfordshire called Wrotham Park. It was named after the Byng ancestral home at Wrotham near Sevenoaks in north-east Kent. If it’s any consolation, we neo-Londoners with distinctive Estuary English accents pronounce Wrotham how it is written, but apparently incorrectly and not as ‘Wrootham’, which they do in Kent. Students of military history may recognise the name Byng and specifically Admiral John Byng, who in true British style was scapegoated for the loss of the naval base at Minorca to the French in 1757, and unjustly executed by firing squad during the same year at the naval base in Portsmouth.
SPRING UNFOLDS IN THE CEMETERY
I started my visits in late March to see spring unfold in the cemetery at Mutton Lane, Potters Bar, with its exceptionally rich history given the earliest grave I could find was dug in 1904. And there are personal histories and memories for me because three generations of my paternal family are buried there. It was perhaps an obvious time to reflect as COVID-19 swept across North London and Hertsmere Borough, killing people like flies.
Spring was about two weeks early and the massed ranks of blackthorn blossom flanking the site were coming into flower during late March. Blackthorn bushes were dotted with peacock butterflies, having emerged from winter hibernation grateful for nectar offered by the tiny white, star-shaped flowers of Prunus spinosa on an otherwise lean late-March landscape. Other species seen on the wing were the comma, speckled wood and orange tip butterflies.
Hard on the heels of blackthorn was a burst of wild cherry and crab apple blossom coinciding with a spell of exceptionally hot sunny weather, providing near-perfect pollination conditions and the promise of a bumper harvest of fruit in late summer and autumn. Hawthorn blossom was full-out in April and well past sell-by date on May Day when it is traditionally used to crown Queen of the May.
The grassy bank near my great-grandparents’ grave was carpeted with primroses, unusual because Prima rosa, the ‘first rose of spring’, is uncommon in this corner of Hertfordshire. I guess someone scattered a wild flower seed mix on their loved one’s grave and nature did the rest. And sure enough, the flowers on some plants further out were tinged with carmine red, a sure sign of this primrose population’s origin and a sight for sore eyes.
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My great-grandfather was born in the 1840s and died in 1927. Clearly I never knew him, but I am reminded of his presence every time I stroll across the local fields and along the hedgerows, because Bob Mabbett was a hedge-layer. Too young for the Battle of Balaclava, too old for Lord Kitchener at Omdurman or for the Siege of Mafeking with Lord Robert Baden-Powell during the Boer War (and a great relief for me in the current climate, with no colonial connections).
I discovered my great-grandparents’ derelict cottage during the 1960s, before the M25 was built. The dwelling was one of an adjoining pair, fairy-tale in size and inside an elder wood on the edge of a dell, clearly a good place for badgers which like to clean their paws on the spongy bark of the elder tree. But that’s where the fairy tale ends, because outside the cottage was a murky pool of water called Nell Bowman’s Pond, after a sultry girl who tragically drowned herself in the dark waters. My Aunt Min (Mignonette) who knew the girl at school during the First World War said she always seemed a troubled child.
Some places see a succession of tragedies and so it was here, because just a stone’s throw away was another wooded dell called Betty Pierce’s Hollow after a lady who hanged herself from around the horizontal branch of a horse chestnut tree. As a child, I remember my father showing me the hollow and the horse chestnut tree. I recall looking up and seeing a rope-scored mark around the offending branch (unlikely, since the tragedy had occurred almost half a century before).
CONNECTIONS WITH TWO WORLD WARS
Nothing really changes, including the choice of trees for churchyards, cemeteries and burial grounds. English yew has been a common feature of burial grounds since pagan times and this cemetery was no exception, but with a much sadder and more poignant story behind the yew planting here.
It was confined to a self-contained circle and, in retrospect, was clearly designed to mark an important event, but something which only came to light when I took my older cousin Pamela to see our great-grandparents’ grave. I turned around to see Pam with her eyes fixed on the weather-beaten graves arranged radially around the circle under the sagging branches of the now mature yew trees.
“Look”, she said. “All my old neighbours are buried here.” Sure enough, there were graves of men, women and children carrying different dates of birth but all dying on same day, 25 January, 1945, when a German V2 rocket landed in Southgate Road.
Pam, then a child, and her mother, my Auntie Rose (Rose-May), had a lucky escape because they were visiting Alice, my paternal grandmother, less than 100 yards up the road when the rocket slammed into the English earth. They lost everything except the canary, which survived, blown out of the window in its cage. As a child in the early 1950s, I remember the bird in my grandmother’s house singing as it should – like a canary. Everything man-made, including a Catholic church, was flattened, though several oak trees survived the blast, living on until recently. They were almost certainly hedgerow oaks from when the houses were built on farmland in the late 1920s.
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However, that’s not the only important wartime association for this provincial and otherwise little-known cemetery with its trees and shrubs. There is an old but well-kept cherry laurel hedge along which were once laid the remains of some 20 German airmen from WWI, the crew of an airship shot down over Potters Bar in 1916. As a young child accompanying my father on our fortnightly summer visits to cut the grass around the family graves, I remember walking along the cherry laurel hedge trying to pronounce all the alien-sounding names on the gravestones.
On 1 October, 1916, Zeppelin L31 was shot down by pilot officer Wulstan Tempest in his biplane. Tempest Avenue in Potters Bar, named after the pilot, now occupies the field where the blazing airship came down. It crashed into an old English oak, the charred remains of which were called Zeppelin Oak before the area was developed in the 1930s.
Heinrich Mathy, the captain, jumped from his airship without a parachute rather than being burned alive. According to my grandmother, he survived long enough to ask for a drink of water, which he was given, before passing away. My Uncle Will, a boy at the time, made a good few bob selling bits of Zeppelin to curious Londoners.
But back to cherry laurel, which is not an obvious choice for British burial grounds. Why not English yew? Perhaps it was thought more appropriate to plant an exotic tree to mark the graves of aliens, indeed enemies at the time. However, English yew was historically unable to provide sufficient wood for England’s bow-making industry, thus requiring significant imports of yew timber from Germany. Some of the longbows which helped Henry V defeat the French at Agincourt may well have been hewn from German-grown yew.
But that’s not the end of the cemetery’s close connections with wartime. On its west side, the cemetery borders the East Coast Main Line Railway with entrance to the long Hadley Wood North railway tunnel less than 100 yards away. At least one explosive device fell on Mutton Lane cemetery during WWII, the German pilot clearly aiming for the tunnel rather than the cemetery. Fortunately, it fell on the periphery, but managed to cause ground disturbance still discernible today in an area which appears to have been a children’s section, at the time. I suspect the now mature beech trees straddling the boundary were planted shortly afterwards to help stabilise the ground which falls away sharply down the embankment.
GRANDPARENTS AND TREES
Grandparents more than parents traditionally taught children about the tree basics of life – planting trees, collecting, cutting and curing firewood and feeding kept animals like poultry and rabbits. So perhaps it was time to stop for a while at my grandparents’ grave and recall what I had learned from some 60 years before. I was still very young when my paternal grandfather Fred Mabbett died, but I remembered how he fed his rabbits with willow, apple, pear and plum, and taught my children the same when they kept pet rabbits years later.
He would cut branches from crab apple, wild pear and wild damson to supplement supplies from his own orchard planted in the first years of the 20th century. By the time I came along, the trees were half a century old and bearing varieties of fruit I have never seen since. This included an incredibly early maturing apple which allowed my grandmother to bake pies and crumbles as early as June from the tiny red fruit she called harvest apples. She was also a great maker of home-made wine, especially elderberry. There was a wizened elder tree behind the shed, clearly affecting its foundations. The tree was supposedly there for fruit to make wine, but having since read stories about Old Mother Elder inhabiting Sambucus nigra, I think Grandfather Fred was frightened to cut the tree down.
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My grandmother lived to a ripe old age, allowing winter afternoons by the fire with memories as far back as the late 1800s. By now (late 1950s), the early Victorian hob-grate fireplace was fuelled with coal, though traditionally fired with local wood. My gran described how she would go ‘wooding’ in winter, gathering wood from the ‘spinney’ (a small wood with spiny undergrowth) less than 100 yards from her cottage. It’s truly amazing that a lady standing under five feet tall could drag heavy branches and logs across the field for cutting up at home.
The field and spinney were built on in the 1930s, though, to their credit, the developers left many of the spinney’s mature oak trees which now grace suburban back gardens.
SPRING IS SPRUNG IN THE CEMETERY
I made my last visit towards the end of April, by which time the extra early spring of 2020 was well and truly sprung. Primroses were gone, replaced by swathes of blue bugle flowers, while bluebells, normally at their very best, were well past sell-by date. Even common ash dotted across the cemetery as well-established trees on older graves were breaking leaf, a good three weeks ahead of schedule. Still the most irrepressible native tree species, despite the arrival and spread of Chalara ash dieback disease, common ash should be dispatched with completely or left well alone. Ash saplings cut 50 years ago were now big coppice stools bearing stout poles, and completely consumed the affected graves.
I watched a goldcrest foraging for insects amongst the crowded May blossom on a hawthorn tree. Not an overly common sight in south Hertfordshire, but there thanks to a far-sighted arborist who 50 years before planted a line of Austrian pine along the boundary, in which the goldcrest and its mate were almost certainly raising a brood. Today, the same arborist would be incarcerated in the Tower of London for breaking the eleventh commandment: ‘Thou shall not plant conifers south of Skegness.’
As I left for the last time, the late afternoon sun cast spooky shadows of hand-like horse chestnut leaves across the weather-beaten gravestones. They were luxuriant and unblemished, but not for long as the mines of the horse chestnut leaf miner would soon start to scar them.
Outside, the normally busy A111 was as quiet as a country lane, the odd pedestrian looking nervously around for potential COVID-19 carriers. It was time to reflect on how far we had come (or not come) since my great grandfather was born in the 1840s. In the absence of a dedicated vaccine, smallpox was then killing thousands (10,316 in London in 1844), and cholera – with a vaccine 40 years away – killed 10,000 in London and Newcastle in 1854. Now nearly two centuries on and with state-of-the-art advances in medicine, including keyhole and robotic surgery, organ transplants and bionic limbs in the bag, we remain at the mercy of microbes. Trees typically outlive those who plant them.
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