“Trees vanish very quickly, and a clump that has taken years to grow is gone in a day.” These words, written 127 years ago this month by Lady Augusta Gregory, acquired renewed resonance after January’s Storm Éowyn fatally uprooted tens of thousands of trees across Ireland.
“If woods, like friendships, are not kept in constant repair, the day will come when they will be but a memory,” she wrote in the Irish co-operative movement’s journal Irish Homestead in February 1898.
As chatelaine of Coole Park, near Gort, Co Galway, for decades, Lady Gregory nursed and nourished the demesne’s extensive woodlands that dated from the mid-18th century and that William Butler Yeats memorialised in his 1902 poem In the Seven Woods and his 1904 collection of the same name.
She also denounced her father, Dudley Persse, for cutting down trees to feed a sawmill on his 12,000-acre Roxborough estate, close to Coole Park, and she admonished her schoolboy son Robert, her only child, when he cut down a tree at Coole. “I told him that he must never cut one down without planting two in its place,” she recalled.
‘Ireland, more than other countries, ought to be a country of trees’
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Her two Irish Homestead articles, promptly reprinted in full in the Kilkenny Moderator and the Tuam Herald and in the journal Irish Forestry in 1976, display a deep knowledge of tree-planting and husbandry. “We are not likely to have more lasting monuments put over us,” she wrote, “and we cannot have more gracious ones than the living, rustling trees that we had planted and that we had loved.”
She wrote that “Ireland, more than other countries, ought to be a country of trees” since the letters in the modern Irish alphabet are derived from Ogham letters named after trees. (The first entry under each letter in Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary gives the tree it is named after: A from aim for the palm or elm tree; B from beit - birch; D from dair - oak; E from eabad - aspen; F from fearn – alder- etc).
Lady Gregory noted that many tenants who had recently bought their holdings under the Land Acts were “beginning to find a pleasure in planting on their own land”. She urged readers to plant more trees, promising that “a healthy one can never be anything but beautiful in its strength and vigour”. She described the strengths and attractions of a large variety of trees. “No one need be without even a few trees about his farm, to screen his house from storm, or to give shade and shelter to his sheep and cattle.”
She advised which soil and which season were best for planting, and how best to protect young ash, oak, beech, horse chestnut, lime, elm, sycamore, plane, larch, mountain ash, rowan, willow, sallow, laburnum, crab, birch, spruce, yew, Scotch fir, silver fir and apple trees.
“We must...plant orchards for our sons,” she wrote, so that instead of looking at the earth to see potatoes – “earth apples” – as their only fruit, “they will then be able to look upwards as well for their crops, and to see them not only taking strength from the earth beneath, but sweetness, and savour, and colour from the sun in heaven”.
She planted thousands of trees at Coole. “Have planted about 1,400 trees in nut wood and clump in ‘45 acres’ – larch, spruce, silver, scotch and some evergreen oaks and new lilacs,” she wrote in her diary on January 31st, 1896. Two weeks later she wrote: “Have planted 1,000 birch in nut wood,” adding later that day: “Farrell of Lissatunna wants larch for rafters so I went with Mike and marked two – though it goes to my heart cutting a tree.”
Her diaries and journals, covering from the early-1890s to 1932, contain numerous entries on trees and tree husbandry. The third last entry in her journals, written on April 24th, 1932, less than a month before her death, said: “A mild day – and more colour in the beech leaves in Shanwalla.”
Shanwalla (from “sean-bhalla”: old wall, or “sean-bealach”: old way) is one of Coole Park’s seven woods, each of which is named in Yeats’s 1906 work The Shadowy Waters, addressed to Lady Gregory.
In her last book, Coole, published by the Yeats sisters’ Cuala Press in 1931, Lady Gregory wrote: “These woods have been well loved, well tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace.”
