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Slow Life

Alex James

Wednesday, 20th August 2008

Putting down roots

The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet: a tree. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They’re indigenous to North West America but, far from uncommon in this country, great avenues of them are lining drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything; odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. I reckon I’ve got the tallest one in Oxfordshire. Mr Taplin said it was the tallest tree in Oxford when he sold me the farm, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford — Oxford is 20 miles away — but it is definitely tall, visible for miles around, straight and narrow as an arrow but leaning gently to one side, setting the tone for the place where I choose to spend my days: one can’t be precious living in the shadow of a vast, beautiful but lopsided tree.

My father took great delight in measuring it with his sextant for a Christmas Day sweepstake three years ago and it was 137 feet tall then, as tall as a cathedral. It’s a mere sapling, too. They can live for up to two and a half millennia. I reckon this one was probably planted in the Twenties. Some people came round a few months ago. They said they wanted to tell me that the man who planted the tree had died. I wanted to say, ‘Did you ask him why he planted something that will be as large as the Eiffel tower one day quite so close to my house or will I never know now?’

But it wasn’t really appropriate. It does baffle me. Still, so many of the problems faced by farmers are due to the short sightedness of previous generations. This colossal thing is on our very doorstep and there were so many other places it could have gone. That was the perfect spot for a magnolia, not for the tree-rex.

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