Passion, greed and indefatigable obsession all appear at their most commendable in Thomas Pakenham’s lively account of a year in his life as a proven lover of trees.
There is nothing cloying about his devotion; he has protected the legacy left by previous generations of his family, also committed plants men, and he has monitored, renewed, re-planted, accepted the inevitable by removing the dying and dead, and introduced the new through painstakingly collecting specimens and, most impressive of all, taking tiny seeds, which resemble so many specks of dust, and placing them in trays, prepared to wait in hope.
It is hope as well as the energy of an enthusiast which drives this book. Reading his breathless, anecdotal and informed narrative will lift the spirits. If ever an author set out to write a feelgood book, this is it. Pakenham, master of Tullynally estate in Co Westmeath, has quite brilliantly, with his conversational style and fondness for historical references, not only presented an engaging text describing his many wonderful expeditions to remote locations ranging from the Patagonia to Sikkim and the borders of Tibet, but he makes serious points about the threats facing trees: storms, diseases such as bleeding canker and the inevitable deals struck with developers.
Sensibly he avoids polemic by admitting to the felling of trees in his earlier years. Pakenham was raised in England and inherited the estate in 1961 on the death of his uncle. Throughout the book he laments the trees that he failed to save. But on a wider level he raises the subject of ancient and “protected” woodlands such as Coolattin, in Co Wicklow: “the last beleaguered outpost of Ireland’s once celebrated oak woods. . . the struggle to save the ancient oaks at Coolattin had begun in the 1980s when there was still about 10,000 trees in the wood.” He places the trees in context by adding: “. . . they were the heirs of the great forest of Shillelagh, whose roots stretched far back into history and mythology. Shillelagh was once the Irish equivalent of Sherwood.”
Victorian plant hunters
Author of
The Year of Liberty
(1969) and
The Scramble for Africa
(1990) Pakenham is a respected historian if more widely known for two beautiful coffee table books:
Meetings with Remarkable Trees
(1996) and
Remarkable Trees of the World
(2002). His fascination with plants has brought him all over the world.
He is by inclination a disciple of the Victorian plant hunters he so admirers, pioneers such as Joseph Hooker, the son of botanist Sir William Hooker, the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Joseph Hooker was a bit of a tearaway, and in 1848, in the company of a friend, Archibald Campbell, was the first European plant hunter to explore the Sikkim Himalaya. Describing Hooker as his hero, Pakenham went to Sikkim in late 2012 in search of Hooker's discovery Magnolia campbellii alba, which Hooker had named after his friend.
As expected of a Pakenham tree book, the photographs are superb – though not the same spectacular full-page scale as in the previous books. The informal style may cause purists to wince at times. Still, the information is there, as is the wonder of it all and mention of the great Irish collector Dr Augustine Henry (1857-1930) who gathered more than 15,000 dried specimens, the largest collection ever made of Chinese plants. Of course gardeners will envy Pakenham for having seen so many exotic species in their native environment as well as succeeding in cultivating them in a small island in Northern Europe. His various planting projects such as the arboretum at Tullynally testify to his artistry as well as his tenacity. From Tibet and the Andes he has brought home exotic botanical treasures, yet he also remains sensitive to the simple beauties.
At the close of the book he refers to Odysseus's return to Ithaca at the end of Homer's Odyssey. The hero's aged father, Laertes, does not recognise his son. Odysseus reminds the old man of the trees he had once given him when Odysseus was a little boy: "thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees" which Pakenham, aware that his life's passion has involved an odyssey comprised of many shorter journeys, decided to plant along the stone wall of his arboretum.
