by Miki Marks // Main Photo: Aerial view of Cranleigh, on a sunny May morning with rows of maples
On the top of the fountain in Fountain Square you can see two of the historic symbols of Cranleigh: a crane and a basket. Basket weaving was a major cottage industry in this area and a small part of the osier bed which furnished the willows for the weavers is still to be found in a corner of Knowle Park. As for the cranes, which gave Cranleigh its name, sadly they are long gone through loss of habitat and gun-happy gentlemen blasting them from the sky in the name of sport.
So if one was to think of some iconic image to represent our town it would probably be the maples which grow round the edge of the Common and towards the High Street. They were planted in by Mr Rowcliffe of Hall Place in 1889. The trees are Norway maples and the variety is Schwendlerii. They look magnificent in the spring and spectacular in the autumn. Unfortunately the trees are reaching the end of their lives due to age and various environmental stresses. Mark Matthews’ photo shows clearly what the trees have to contend with: hard surfacing limiting root grown, pollution mainly from traffic and the incursion of works by utility companies. Recently many people have noticed that some of the older trees are being felled and the anxiety is that the trees will go the way of the cranes and the baskets. Joy Horn’s photo of a felled maple reduced to a little heap of sawdust is poignant.
I was therefore very pleased to hear from two Tree officers from Waverley that there are funds available to undertake a re-planting programme .They are well aware of the special feeling Cranleigh people have for their Common and the trees. The trees are inspected regularly, and this last inspection showed that there were a number of trees which have suffered considerable decline and could be a public safety problem. After a good deal of research the Tree Team are very pleased to have found a worthy substitute to replant in the gaps. They have chosen Acer plataniodes ‘Deborah’ for its sturdiness, resistance to pollution, reflected heat and drought. In addition, according to Hilliers, its wonderful autumn display of colour. It is very heartening that the value of the trees round the Common is recognised and that pro-active work to replace the dying trees is already in hand.
We are now in the midst of winter and nature has developed many strategies for survival. Only three mammals in the UK, bats, dormice and hedgehogs truly hibernate. Amphibians such as frogs and toads will fall into a deep sleep – whilst reptiles enter a lighter process called brumation. Many creatures such as badgers and voles forget their territorial instincts and huddle together underground for warmth and enter a state of torpor. Most remarkably, the shrew does not hibernate but shrinks in size – including the liver, brain and skull, which helps it to conserve energy. The honey bee overwinters as a colony of up to 10,000 bees. They feed on the honey made from the nectar they have collected and stored during the warm months. Kenneth Grahame the author of Wind in the Willows writes “no animal according to the rules of animal etiquette is ever expected to do anything strenuous or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter”. Humans, of course, keep going despite sometimes having a strong instinct to hunker down and sleep out the cold, dark months.
Gilbert White (1720-1793) was a clergyman and lived in Selborne, Hampshire for most of his life. He was curious and inquisitive about the natural world around him. Until his time, Natural History was a quaint study derived not from observation but from Ancient Greek and Latin Scholars – notably the work of Pliny and Aristotle. Nature was generally not studied in the field but as an academic discipline. Gilbert White was a pioneering English naturalist, ecologist and ornithologist. He transformed the way we look at the natural world by moving from the view of human dominance to the notion of nature as worthy of celebration, respect and admiration. He kept diaries and wrote the masterly The Natural History of Selborne. Many were influenced by his writings, including Darwin. One question continued to puzzle White to the end of his days and that was where the martins – which were his favourite birds – disappeared to in the winter. It seemed inconceivable at the time that martins, and other migrating birds could travel huge distances and then return when the weather became more favourable, every year. A popular theory was that martins lived underground or under water throughout the cold winter months, and then popped up good as new in the spring. Despite lengthy investigations, White found no proof of this and concluded that indeed his miraculous martins flew huge distances and unerringly returned every year.
Best wishes for a healthy, happy New Year.
