I STOLE A TREE!
Not really, technically it was always ours I just took it back. It was at the bottom of the garden but over the years a succession of neighbours who lived in the council bungalow that backs onto ours let their garden hedge get out of hand. Over the decades, rather than tackle the encroaching row of ivy covered trees that served as a boundary between the gardens, the fence had been re-positioned; the garden became slightly smaller and the tree was lost in the undergrowth.
It’s a lilac tree. It was always there when I was a kid and was even there before my parents moved into the house in the 1960’s. The house was new then but before the current house was built the plot of land was occupied by one of the many prefabs built just after the war that originally made up the estate. Lilac trees aren’t native to England so someone long dead who lived in a prefab in the 1950’s must have planted it there.
In the late 1960’s my mum said Mrs Smith next door told my dad how pretty the tree was and that it might be a good idea NOT to build his garden shed in front of it - Advice my dad sadly ignored. Consequently throughout my lifetime it was always poking up behind my dad’s creation. At one point in the early eighties it even towered above it before it was swamped in the 1990’s by even bigger native trees that had rooted just over the fence in the adjoining garden.
About six years ago my mum paid a handy man to put up a new garden fence. Still unwilling to tackle the neighbour’s hedgerow this new fence was re-positioned to make our garden smaller still. In the process he also cut down any vegetation on our side which included any remnants of my lilac tree.
The tree was made up of lots of thin trunks clumped together but growing separately out of the ground. I was sad it had gone but noticed one solitary stalk had survived the onslaught. This however was now marooned in the overgrown no man’s land between the gardens on the other side of the new fence. The people living in the adjoining property would regularly slice it in half as they tried to cut down their hedgerow to a manageable height. How ignorant! I thought. - They obviously don’t deserve such a nice tree.
I looked out of the bedroom window the other morning and noticed these people in the council bungalow at the bottom had moved out. I thought this was an ideal opportunity to move the fence back to where it was supposed to be and put the tree on our side of the border once again.
I confess it’s a bit odd to be sentimental about this tree now as when I was growing up a part of me kind of resented this overgrown shrub. What I really wanted was a classic boy’s tree that you could build a tree house in but you just didn’t get those kinds of solid old trees in a relatively new housing estate garden. This didn’t stop me trying to climb it though and I could get about five feet off the ground. There weren’t many horizontal footholds and the spindly branches frequently gave way to my weight if I tried to get any higher.
Having ‘read up’ on the lilac tree (or the ‘Syringa tree’) I’ve discovered that the blossom apparently has a nice scent. Something we never really appreciated as it was way too high. In fact you’re supposed to keep a lilac tree pruned to ‘head height’ so you can enjoy its fragrance.
I feel as if my tree has taken me on a journey of self discovery. I’ve discovered that as well as the neighbours at the bottom of the garden, both me and my family were a bit ignorant too and we probably didn’t deserve such a nice tree either.
Chris Dobrowolski is performing Toy Stories at this years Edinburgh Festival you can book tickets here:
https://www.menagerie.uk.com/
Instagram: @chrisdobrowolski
All images: Chris Dobrowolski