Tree fellas…

CHRIS BENNETT was lost in admiration as a dead milkwood of huge proportions was removed from in front of his home.

IN the village in which I live, surrounded by the most noble and glorious milkwood trees, which daily remind me of the first time I heard the actor Richard Burton reading the prologue to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood*, winter means the already laborious task of keeping the village clean of woodland (and human) detritis is an even greater task. And it is well done.

One of the most dangerous of these tasks is the felling of the dead milkwoods.

It was engrossing to watch from the elevated view of my terrace, and look down on the workers and their foreman as the skilfully used ladders and ropes, thick as a man’s wrist, to secure and delicately counterbalance, like the counterpoint in a Bach fugue, the distribution of the weight of the sawn branches.

First the finer and smaller branches are cut off by a worker using a machete. This is relatively quick; then starts the more serious business. Someone has perilously to sit on a major branch while chopping it off. The trick, it seems, is to sit on the trunk side of the cut, otherwise…

It is now that the geometric ballet of the ropes comes into play, giving the whole operation the air of a spectacular trapeze display in a circus: as the branch, probably weighing as much as two or three men, falls from the tree it is immediately suspended by the ropes, seemingly weightless. Finally it is lowered safely to the ground, under the watchful, nervous, narrowed eyes of the workers. There is a lot of relieved tension.

Then there is the demolition of the colossal trunk to be dealt with. This involves a chain saw, whose screaming bite gnaws the affrighted air. The brave soul wielding this appalling machine needs nerves of steel, the eye of a hawk and, preferably a third arm. Another leg might be useful too, as he straddles the saddle like-forks of the now limbless trunk.

I imagine that a similar undertaking in the last century would be a cause for great celebration. A few of us managed to secure stumps big enough to grow peaty plants in and soften the all too evident concrete around our cottages.

All this cleansing and maintenance of the village is a pleasant reminder of how conscious of our surroundings we have become. Of course there is nothing new in this. Here’s a quote from Plato (428 BC to 348 BC): “…don’t put too many people in one place, don’t impose more on the physical environment than it can bear, make the maximum use of resources like water and replant trees if you cut them down.”

The other milkwood I mentioned, Under Milk Wood, was a play written for radio (of course some prat made a movie of it) written in 1954 by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. It was written for his friend, the outstanding actor of his day, Richard Burton, whose meliflous, slightly gravelly voice, swaying gently on occasion into a Welsh lilt, was the perfect medium for this near-perfect poetry.

I’ll leave you with the opening sentence, spoken by the narrator, Burton:

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack*, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.

* The sloe berry, the flavouring of gin, is coal black.

* Dylan Thomas, 'Under Milk Wood', The Definitive Edition (Dent: 1995.)