The Jeweller's Window

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 5

The Jeweller's W indow

The Birch (Specially written for “The Press” by ARNOLD WALL.) IT IS, I think, a pity that so beautiful a tree, so universally admired, should have become a symbol of corporal punishment. The American author, J. R. Lowell, describes it as “the most shy and ladylike of trees.”

The anonymous Scottish author of the old ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well” writes: “But at the gates of paradise That birk grew fair enough." “Birk” is the north country and Scottish form of “birch.” Pliny says it is fond of a cold site, is a native of Gaul, of singular whiteness and slender shape, and rendered terrible as forming the fasces of the magistracy—in Gaul, too, they extract bitumen from it by boiling.

A footnote in my edition of Pliny observes that it was an object of terror not onlyin the hands of the Roman lictor but in those of the pedagogues also and was formerly nicknamed "The tree of wisdom." It also notes that in Russia they extract an oil from it which is used in preparing Russia leather and gives it its agreeable smell. That gives (or gave) the birch some economic in addition to its aesthetic and educational associations. The birch is one of the most widely distributed of trees, being plentiful throughout the colder parts of Europe, Asia and America. It gave me quite a thrill to see and to photograph it on the famous Zoji La pass on the way to Tibet through Kashmir, for there it is the last tree to be seen for many hundreds of miles. We have no birch in New Zealand but unfortunately the early settlers mistook the native beech for birch and called it so. a mistake which has never been quite corrected and probably never will be.

According to Kirk "Forest Flora of New Zealand,” 1889, “It is not too much to say that the blundering use of common names in connexion with the New Zealand beeches when employed in bridges and construction works has caused waste and loss to the value of many thousands of pounds.” Alone r THE two indispensable bed--1 rock words “all” and “one” were often associated in old times, as they are still, and eventually they went into partnership as one word “alone,” adverb. Then this was beheaded and became the adjective "lone." Later again, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it proliferated into “lonely.” adjective, “loneness," now obsolete, “lonesome,” “lonesomely.” “lonesomeness,” “lonelihood,” (now obsolete). These are all more or less orthodox developments but “10ne,,” especially in its Scottish form “lane” seems to have run right off the rails when it became a noun often preceded by a possessive pronoun—“my lone,” “her lane,” “mine alone” and other peculiar forms. So there are or have been quite a number of “lone” words. “All" and “one" are still associated in certain phrases. “It were all one that I should love a bright particular star”—Love’s Labour Lost 1-1-97, and we can say “It's all one to me;” in these phrases “one” means “the same” which we as it were emphasise in “one and the same.”

Now these offshoots of “all” and “one” have proved of very great value to our language, especially the language of poetry where some of them produce effects which would otherwise been unattainable. Wordsworth writes of Newton’s mind “voyaging through strange seas of thought alone;” and he “wandered lonely as a cloud” Tennyson sings of “all that bowery loneliness;" Keat’s knight is “alone and palely loitering:” “lone and alone she lies" writes Walter de la Mare; and Coleridge rather overdoes it, doesn't he? “Alone, alone, and all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea.” A final reflection on “alone” as defined to mean “by oneself.” How can you be yourself? Is it the same as being “beside yourself?” Of course not, but the two expressions are, as it were, essentially but not conventionally synonymous. A tricky affair our language, isn’t it?