In all the recent winds and gales, could you detect the individual sounds it drew from various trees and bushes? Thomas Hardy, the great novelist and poet, who had more acute hearing than most of us, always listened to this music and wrote of it. Thus, of the wind on a hill: "Tonight these trees sheltered the southern slopes from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moaning ... the instinctive act of humankind was to listen and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chanted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir, how hedges and other shapes leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then ploughed into the south, to be heard no more." That's in Far From the Madding Crowd.
Elsewhere he writes of gusts of wind resolving into three: treble tenor and bass notes were to be found therein. "The general richochet of the whole over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. ... Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain in the throat of fourscore and ten.
It was a worn whisper, dry and papery and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realised as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit blades, prickles, lichen nor moss." That's getting a bit beyond us. It's from The Return of the Native.)
Some may recall a scene from Hardy's The Woodlanders where Giles Winterborne is planting, with the help of the girl Marty, young pines. She held the plants upright while he shovelled the earth in. "How they sigh directly we put them upright" she said "though while they are lying down they don't sigh at all." He hadn't noticed.
She set one of the young trees upright in its hole and held up her finger: the soft musical breathing instantly set in which was not to cease night or day until the grown tree should be felled - probably long after the two planters had been felled themselves. "It seems to me", the girl continued, "as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest - just as we be."
Neighbours would remember him, Hardy wrote of himself: `He was a man who noticed such things', of many aspects of nature and life. Indeed. Y