The Library of Obscure Wonders

I was in a very grizzly mood last Tuesday. The cat woke me at six in the morning with vomit and diarrhea. Then the phone company rang to tell me I owe them lots of money, even though I’ve paid all my bills and my phone hasn’t been working for the last month. I was in such a bad mood that I decided I had to go to Kew Royal Botanical Gardens to cheer myself up. A friend had bought me a year’s membership to Kew as a birthday present, which is great because it is so expensive otherwise. 

I didn’t get there until 4 pm. I was in a foul mood when I arrived; it seemed crowded, there were aeroplanes flying overhead and, somewhere in the gardens, there were builders banging away. I decided to have a cup of tea and calm down. It was then that I noticed the ash tree, a big, beautiful weeping ash. It was just what I wanted to see, so I spent the next three hours sitting and sketching it. I studied its leaves, trying to draw all the details, and then the textures of its crumpled bark. A great way to spend a Tuesday afternoon, and I felt so much better!

I’m very aware that I describe most trees as beautiful (because they are), but the ash is particularly so at this time of year; beautiful in a delicate and regal fashion. My friend Louise calls the ash the dignitary of the woods. This is because the tree loses its dainty leaves earlier than any of the other trees, and is the last to grow new ones come spring, preferring to sort its seeds out first.

The narrow, finely toothed leaves of the ash face each other along the stem, so it doesn’t shade as much as the sycamore, but produces intricate, web-like shadows. The purple headed flowers, which have no petals, only stamen, cluster tightly together. Although it is often either a male or a female tree, there is a great deal of variation. One might change it’s sex over the course of a year, for example, or have a single branch that is a different sex to the rest of the tree, or, indeed, have flowers that are of both sexes. This has led to the ash being occasionally referred to as a hermaphrodite tree. 

To read more about the ash visit https://jofisherroberts.substack.com/p/the-ash-tree-and-yggdrasil

Lime trees can be seen lining many of London’s Victorian streets, often heavily pollarded to keep them smaller than they would naturally grow. For years I wondered why I never saw limes on these lime trees; it seemed I was missing something. Then I found out that lime trees never have any citrus fruit because they are completely unrelated to the citrus family. The reason they’re called ‘lime’ in the UK is simply a corruption of ‘linden tree’, which is what these trees are called in Europe. In America, it is also known as ‘basswood’. In the wild they can live for three hundred years (although some have been estimated at around two thousand), can grow very tall and have a girth of up to six metres. 

I foolishly promised my drawing students I’d make them some linden flower tea for their last class this term. Linden trees don’t flower for long, just a couple of weeks in June, and you need to get the flower while it’s still young. I was too late. The flowers I collected were just too old and battered to turn into a decent tea, so I cheated, finding some linden flower tea in my local grocery store. I took it to work and brewed the tea in an old cafetière that I found in a cupboard there. It was okay, my students said they liked it. I didn’t say that it was collected by me, but then I didn’t say that it wasn’t, either.

To continue reading visit Under the Linden Tree

https://jofisherroberts.substack.com/p/under-the-linden-tree