“The clown passeth by thee and heedeth thee not, / But thou’rt a warm source of reflection for me” wrote John Clare in To a Dead Tree. This clown has passeth an old dead tree in Attingham Park – at Atcham, near Shrewsbury – many times without much heedeth, but today, warmed by bright sunlight after weeks of cold weather, it is certainly a source of reflection.
Clare saw his own mortality in a dead tree, but this one speaks of a beyond-death experience. A tall, leafless, largely branchless, barkless, wraith-pale pole stands near ancient oaks, some of which also have bare “dead” trunks and boughs and are beautiful in their starkness. This vision of a ruin may be a Scots pine, perhaps more than 300 years old, and it’s been dead for many of them. A standing dead tree such as this is called a kelo tree, using a Finnish word for dead standing timber that has come into common usage.
