The Impossible Tree

I’ll pause awhile under the impossible tree to cool off. Do you know – my feet are quite damp. Amazing that the grass could be dewy in this heat.

I call this tree – the ancient flowering cherry near the back door – the impossible tree, because of the way it has grown.

It is a very old Prunus (possibly P. subhirtella ‘Pendula Rubra’). An ornamental cherry that someone planted years, decades ago. Planted far too near the house, which is easily done. At some stage a previous resident must have decided it was far too big to negotiate round to the back door. Rather than chopping it down, all the weeping branches were trimmed up to head height. Now it still has the pendulous form, but the branches stop in mid air like an umbrella, or a ballet dress.
Very pleasing, very elegant, very Japanese.
So there it is.

It is heaven to sit under its informal branches on a hot day. In the summer its long, oval, mid-green leaves provide soft shade. Their shape, their form, as they point down towards the ground, is restful. Some very thin twigs just have sparse clusters of leaves at the very tips, giving the impression they are floating in space – impossible!

As the sun shines through there are countless greens and shady patterns created on the gravel beneath.

The aged trunk, with great gashes in the bark, is 2 feet in diameter at the base. It goes straight up from the ground, forms a chunky overgrown pollard and then the impossible stuff begins. This is more clearly apparent in the winter. The branches make no sense and I have never seen the like in any other tree.

On a normal tree the trunk grows up, divides into branches, divides again into smaller branches and then into twigs. All very logical. Here, the trunk goes up like a gnarly cylinder then weird things begin to happen. Large branches merge into each other so you can’t make out where they begin or end. Some boughs go straight up skywards with great deliberation. Some grow sideways, some horizontally and some determinedly downwards at 45 degrees. All confusingly unnatural. To add to the puzzle, some branches appear to grow from one place deliberately to join another one, above, below or beside them. Other branches suddenly stop abruptly in a big fist-sized knob of wood with a few spindly twigs growing out of it, as if it’s saving its resources before bursting out again at some vague point in the distant future.

It’s a maze. It’s bird heaven.

In the spring the whole tree is smothered in a mass of tiny pink bells which are breathtaking in their simplicity. They start as deep pink buds. Then they burst into a luscious candy floss, a marshmallow topping.

In the autumn the leaves are rich yellow-gold, which catch the low sun and decorate the gravel as they fall.

By day, we sit in its shade and the birds, mice and squirrels feed. By night, the fox with the gammy leg and her pals clear up any bird food and drink from the bowl of water underneath.

The winter shows the true impossibility of the tree, when the dark boughs are a haphazard, random skeleton.

There is a beautiful bright dragonfly sweeping around me as I sit here. Why go out when you have all this?