Explore "The Gnarled Pine-Tree" by Grant Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MORE than once in these papers I have mentioned, as I passed, the wind-swept and weather-beaten Scotch fir on which the night-jar perches, and which forms such a conspicuous object in the wide moorland view from our drawing-room windows. I love that Scotch fir, for its very irregularity and rude wildness of growth; a Carlyle among trees, it seems to me to breathe forth the essential spirit of these bold free uplands. Not that any one would call it beautiful who has framed his ideas of beauty on the neatness and trimness of park-like English scenery; it has nothing in common with the well-grown and low-feathering Douglas pines which the nursery gardener plants out as "specimen trees" on the smooth velvety sward of some lawn in the lowlands.
No, no; my Scotch fir is gnarled and broken-boughed, a great gaunt soldier, scarred from many an encounter with fierce wintry winds, and holding its own even now, every January that passes, by dint of hard struggling against enormous odds with obstinate endurance. Life, for it, is a battle. And I love it for its scars, its toughness, its audacity. It has chosen for its post the highest summit of the ridge, where north-east and south-west alternately assault it; and it meets their assaults with undiminished courage, begotten of long familiarity with fire and flood, with lightning and tempest.