The willows and walnuts he loved when I was a child say something about who he was. On my first trip back, my sons can meet him, too
My dad was a tree man. He loved trees; he planted them; he was good with them. I remember a couple of his trees from our garden in north London – a walnut and a catalpa. Also known as an Indian bean tree (though it is neither Indian, nor produces beans), the Catalpa bignonioides‘Aurea’ has lovely, big, floppy, heart-shaped, yellowy-green leaves.
It is still here, and the walnut tree, too. I have come back to the house of my early childhood, still occupied by the family who bought it from mine in 1975. Everything seems smaller than before, apart from the trees. The catalpa bears the scars of some surgery, and leans a little; my dad leaned a little in later life. Bloody hell, I think: if the catalpa I’ve planted in my own small London garden gets to this size, it will fill it.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UfRm3A
