The huge trees on either side of me appear to be on fire. As I drive down the great avenue I glimpse an orange radiance at the heart of them, like the glow of embers, which itself is surrounded by a myriad other hues, bright green, butter yellow, caramel, maroon, russet, bronze, even purple, which flow past me in an endless procession of colour. This is one of the great natural spectacles of Dorset, perhaps even of all of England—the Kingston Lacy beech avenue in autumn.
Beech is our supreme autumn tree. Its intensifying beauty in September, October and November takes you by surprise. It often starts with a single branch whose leaves will slide from green to yellow, but then the yellow turns to old gold, and then the fun starts—the old gold becomes burnt orange, which persists intensely, indeed like fire, while a host of other colours form all about it on the leaves’ journey to their ultimate dark brown, and their falling. You can spot ‘beeches on fire’ from half a mile away.
The season just ended was one of the most beautiful I can remember for autumn foliage. After the record sunshine and warmth of the spring and summer, some of the displays were unforgettable—birches with silver-gilt leaves tumbling down like long hair on a young woman, Norway maples (not native in Britain but widely planted, especially in suburban parks) blooming like giant bunches of golden flowers. The French author Albert Camus put it memorably: “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
But they are flowers in the process of dying. It is a curious phenomenon of the earth that this great annual mortality of the leaves should be a sequence of such beauty, and indeed, I find it triggers emotions—in me, at least—which are subtler than mere delight: feelings which sometimes seem to be just beyond the boundaries of consciousness, but include hints of sadness and regret and a sort of longing which I find difficult to define. How can beauty make you sad? Perhaps that is why autumn is different from the other seasons.
But certainly, its beauty is incontestable, and though we can find it in our oaks, our limes, our sweet chestnuts, our poplars, our hazels and many other trees, it is with the beech that it reaches its peak. You can see it best of all in the Chilterns, where it is dominant, and the beechwoods flow endlessly over the chalk hills. I was there at the end of October and driving through them sometimes felt like driving through a glowing orange world.
In Dorset, we are not overprovided with beechwoods. A very handsome one is the wood on the top of Lewesdon Hill west of Beaminster, the highest point in the county at 915 ft; but the Kingston Lacy avenue takes the prize. It runs for more than two miles along the main road from Blandford Forum to Wimborne, and was planted by William John Bankes, the most remarkable member of the family who occupied Kingston Lacy from 1693 to 1982, when the great house and its estate were given to the National Trust. A glamorous, eccentric scholar, politician and explorer, a close friend of Byron and a man who was eventually forced out of Britain for being gay, William John planted the avenue in 1835 as a birthday gift to his mother Frances—365 trees on one side, one for each day of the year, and 366 on the other (for a leap year).
The trees are enormous now, stooping and venerable in their old age, but in autumn, astonishingly vivid in the colours of their foliage. To drive or walk down that avenue as the year turns towards winter is to be astonished at the defiant loveliness of the earth, in the face of the coming cold and dark.
