The poplar prophecy came true – 15 years later – Joe Bennett

Poplars are planted to stabilise ground, to hold hills up, to suck bogs dry. Photo / 123rf

Poplar. It’s not much of a name for a tree. It sounds cheap and insubstantial – poplar music, poplar taste.

And no one had anything nice to say about its wood. “Matchwood,” they sneered as I stacked it. “Good for kindling. Not much else.”

Ha, I thought, but didn’t say.

Poplars are planted to stabilise ground, to hold hills up, to suck bogs dry. They’re not fussy, poplars. I didn’t plant this one. But I’d been warned about it.

“That poplar,” said an arborist, years ago, pointing at the beast as he went down my drive, “that poplar will kill all those,” and he swept an arm to indicate the trees and shrubs nearby – a rhododendron, a snowball tree, a kōwhai, none of which I’d planted either. “You just watch.”

I just watched for 15 years. How fast the poplar grew, how lustily. Every year it stretched itself up and out, grabbed more of the sun, greedy for all of it, to starve the others out. Pitiless in its dominion.

But every spring the new unfurling leaves were copper-lemon lovely, and when the breeze blew through them the whole tree shimmered and twinkled.

By summer it was lime green, by autumn bronze-and-yellow dappled and tumbling in drifts to block the drains and gutters, leaving bare for the winter the silver-barked branches, a metre taller than the winter before.

As it towered, its neighbours sickened.

I was watching them die. And then two months ago, I drove round the bend in the drive and stamped on the brakes. A bough had sheared off the poplar in the night, smacked down across the drive. I went at it with the chainsaw. It took me half a day to turn it into firewood.

I rang the arborist. “Yes,” he said, “poplars do that.”

“Fell it,” I said. That scream you heard came from Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest and poet and tortured soul. He knew and loved a grove of poplars. He described them as “airy cages”. Then he came by one day in 1879 to find “all felled, felled, are all felled”. You can hear the shock in the repetition.

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew.

But I knew what I was doing. I was having my poplar felled. It took the arborists a couple of days. The beast came down in huge and thunderous sections. Light flooded back in. And ever since I’ve been at work on the corpse, like the old-timers flensing a whale.

For if I wanted the wood, the arborist said, if I thought it worth burning, I needed to get it in fast. Leave poplar out in the open to season and it will suck in the winter like a sponge and be rotten by spring. So I have raced against the tilt of the Earth. Whole afternoons I’ve spent at it.

I’ve sawn it, split it, barrowed it up the drive – oh, the burn in the thighs, the strain in the calves, the heave and heft of it – and stacked it against the house where the wind and sun can get at it, but the rain not much. I’ve built three huge stacks, and I go out often at odd times to stand and admire and slap them.

For it is a primordial pleasure to have wood hard against the house, within reach of the hearth, the oldest form of insurance against hard times. Let the firewood snobs sneer at my poplar. I don’t care. It is wood. It is free. It is mine. It will dry and it will burn.

And let them know too that some time in the early sixteenth century in the city of Florence a man selected a panel of wood, all clear-grained and creamy white like the stuff now drying against my wall, and sat down to paint a picture of a woman on it. The woman was Lisa del Giocondo. The man was Leonardo da Vinci. The wood was poplar. “Good for kindling,” they said. “Not much else.”