The Stray at Castle Howard, I’m told, is an overtly sexual landscape. On a map, the road appears to run ruler straight, accented by monuments and follies. In reality, it’s not straight at all, but energetically undulating, and when approached in a bouncy open carriage, the manner in which the 100ft obelisk rises in the archway of the castellated gatehouse was once considered arousing, amusing or appalling, depending on one’s sensibilities. The architectural pornography is, I suspect, less apparent to a 21st-century mindset than an 18th-century one, especially at an air-conditioned 40 miles an hour, but the road still has the “Oooh!” factor, thanks to its stupendous trees.
At peak autumn, the limes are zingy gold, and the beeches, which stand in clusters that give the impression of vast individuals, are furnaces of colour. They were probably planted to be viewed from the road rather than walked among, but doing so is like passing through a series of halls more ornate even than those at the big house, gilded and draped in tawny, scarlet, emerald, gold, deepest umber and too many more hues too name. It’s way too lavish a display to be accidental, surely. It’s as if, having shed their factory uniform chlorophyll, these trees want to show who they imagine they really are. Most of the mast has dropped but some cases are still attached to branch ends and, pardon me, but there is something lascivious in the way they gape, some still offering a lolling glossy kernel.
It’s not only the beeches letting themselves go. The nearby arboretum is a festival of tree fire and music – a plunky-plonk of falling acorns, measured but mesmerising, and the cheekier percussion of sweet chestnuts: tsik, crash, plish, as springy spines bounce, seams split and reciprocally curved triplets and quads tumble apart from the siblings that shaped them.
Bending to collect a few, I’m struck painfully on the neck by a spiky bomb and sense an arboreal smirk. Touché, old friend. I raise my hood for protection as more bounty falls, faster than I can pick it up.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion