Tree day (tomorrow) is in autumn - logically enough. Colette was only twelve when she showed her originality by writing in her exercise book that she did not agree with "those who called autumn a decline." The teacher commented in red ink in the margin "This shows imagination, but one senses a deliberate attempt to appear original." (This from a columnist in Country Life, Carla Carlisle.) Colette was right. Fallen acorns are sprouting in the lovely warm autumn days. In most cases they will not survive, out where there is moss in the grass they well could.
One lawn, some twenty years ago, not cropped too tight, holding a fair content of moss, surprised the owners in a wet and warm August, by sending up from the previous year a hundred and more tiny oaks. Anyway, the sprouting acorns may not survive, but they hold forth a promise. And, in autumn you can transplant young trees, and move your favourite nursery stock - everyone should always have a few things in pots - into bigger pots. Your Mediterranean-collected kermes oak, for example, or your pinus pinea. You can buy small saplings from the garden centres, but a tree you mark as having started its life when you picked up a seed at the roadside or wherever, is one you will cherish.
You may say that you live in digs or a flat with only a window-box as garden. You can still bring on a couple of acorns or other seeds in a small pot and, when it is a year old, give it as a present to someone with a garden. My tree! A special tree. And the thought and care you have given to it may see it on its way to a life of two hundred years and more. You appreciate the beauty and grace of trees all the more when you remember their origins, an oval or a three-cornered nut, or a winged device, lying in the palm of your hand. And then, only a few years after, a thing of beauty and strength.
One friend makes a point of going slightly out of his way to marvel at trees in the garden of a house which he formerly occupied - "my trees". Age isn't everything - a birch of only a few years is a thing of beauty. Every tree has its own quality of strength, grace, or utility. Then there is the tree of the long haul. As Dryden puts it:
The monarch oak,
the patriarch of trees,
Shoots, rising up, and
spreads by slow degrees;
Three centuries he grows,
and three he stays,
Supreme in state, and
in three more decays.