Elms ~

My earliest memory of life on the farm is when I was three years old. I was toddling along a cow track in the rough pasture behind the cowsheds with our much loved collie dog called Tuscan. On our way to fetch the cows for milking we passed a pair of giant old elm trees. I knew these two elms in particular because they were twins, towering straight up to the open sky like cathedral pillars. Their branches were as waving tracery, causing the sunlight to sparkle and jig like diamonds of light on rippling sunlit water.
What I loved about them, at such an early age, was that they were joined just above ground level by a massive root. It linked them forever. So they stood only inches apart, their trunks side by side like barrels on a double-barrelled shotgun. Their crowns and canopies, swaying in the breeze high overhead, were home to a noisy colony of cawing rooks. The rooks returned to this, their rookery, every year to patch, repair and rebuild nests lost or damaged in equinox gales.
They often fought each other. Sometimes, unable to fly and fight at the same time, they would crash down through the branches, still scrapping as they hit the ground. Feathers and dust would fly in all directions until, as suddenly as it had started, the ruckus was all over. Stalking off in opposite directions, the two ruffled rooks would give themselves a hurried preen, straighten out ruffled feathers, do a quick check of personal damage and dignity, then flap up rejoin their kith and kin high overhead.
While the protagonists were fighting, neighbours would rob their nests of choice materials to enhance their own domestic structures. Robbing each other was common practice, erupting into full fights only when caught red-handed.
Rooks are truly lords of their manors, and should a buzzard or other opportunist bird of prey stray too near, a flight of rooks will immediately scramble and attack, just as in aerial dogfights. They continue until they have seen the intruders off, usually minus a few tail feathers.
For we ground anchored creatures the rookery was fascinating to watch, a way of timing the year, and very entertaining.
Seventy years later they still are. Time has long ago taken away the rookeries of my childhood, but new generations in different landscapes keep my memories alive and give me great joy.
Elms were beautiful trees. They lent grace, stature and spectacle to most of the British landscape and way beyond years ago. As a small boy I became very aware of the beautiful sound they made. I could see several elms from my bedroom window, and on windy nights I loved to lay in bed with the window open wide to the darkness, listening to the soothing rushing whooshing flow of air's ocean playing through the branches, lulling me to sleep.
Later, in another life in the iconic sixties, disaster struck.
The mighty elms were destroyed, in the space of just a few years, by a tiny beetle which spread what was known as Dutch Elm Disease. To our horror these mighty trees crumpled, one by one, brought down by this small insect, and we watched our treasured English landscape being totally changed, just as villages would be today if all church towers and spires were knocked down, as once happened to a large extent.
There are glimmers of hope that elms may once again grace and dominate our countryside, but sadly not in the lifetimes of most of us.