An unusually large amount of people depend on trees for their living in this area, and among those I have met I have noticed a recurring theme: a radiant but non-smug contentment in their own work, often bordering on addiction. ‘I get paid for climbing trees,’ my tree surgeon friend Dave told me. ‘What could be better than that?’ As a boy Dave shinned up the oaks in Dartington’s North Wood near his childhood home, and now, in his early fifties, he does exactly the same. Sometimes, on my walks, I will look above me and see him dangling from a branch by a rope and feel the same sort of envy I felt at the flying men near my old house in Norfolk. Before he worked here, Dave lived in Australia and Long Island, New York, coppicing and removing trees in the gardens of Jack Nicholson and Billy Joel, among others. He’s never been within thirty yards of a gym but hasn’t got an ounce of fat on him and looks a decade younger than he is. Often he’s up there alone, wielding a chainsaw with one hand, hanging from a limb with the other, yet in the three decades since he received his arboreal qualification he has never come close to being seriously injured. That said, he did once almost render his boss two dimensional when felling a turkey oak that had sheared down the middle of its trunk. On the same occasion, with the force of its descent the turkey oak’s trunk managed to take out the hallowed 1930s art deco donkey sculpture in the gardens of Dartington Hall. Dave found the donkey removed from its perch but cradled gently in the fallen oak’s branches, almost as if the oak, selfless in its own demise, had wanted to protect it. Trees have not had the easiest run of it at Dartington in recent times. In late 2013 Dave watched from the estate’s tiltyard as a train of wind – a rigorously organised wind, a wind with a plan – tore up the river, sending ashes and oaks crashing into the water. Many of these can still be seen in the places they fell. Their sleeping half-submerged torsos look especially enchanting at dawn, smoked by mist, a classic example of the difference between nature making a mess and humans making a mess, which is that in the end nature will always make its mess look attractive. The following summer the two-century-old Monterey pine on the terraces above Dartington’s Great Lawn keeled over from old age, leaving a spectacular Jurassic-looking corpse that was subsequently rolled several hundred yards to the tiltyard, chopped up and used by local craftsfolk to make dining tables, lecterns, sculptures and musical instruments.
Two springs later I was encouraged to gaze mindfully at some of the other, intact trees at Dartington as part of a meditative evening walking class I’d enrolled on. It was an excellent time of year and day to appreciate Dartington’s gardens, which are full of surprises and retain the messy-neat aesthetic established by the Elmhirsts, the philanthropic millionaires who rescued the estate from near-dereliction in the early 1920s. Oddly, dusk seemed to bring out the reds and pinks and golds more than ever, and there was a soft quietness to the air, which along with the sensitive company gave the impression that the whole world was taking a gentle break from itself. The evening, however, did not pass without incident. At one point I made the error of shoving a holistic scientist into a flower bed. I hadn’t
