ONE of London’s charms is the proliferation of trees (often plane trees) in city streets and vacant spaces (not to mention the wealth of woodlands in its parks). No doubt the trees benefit from much cleaner, fog-and-soot-free, city air than that Thomas Hardy encountered almost a century ago, when he wrote this deft little poem.

TO A TREE IN LONDON (Clement’s Inn)

Here you stay

Night and day,

Never, never going away!

Do you ache

When we take

Holiday for our health’s sake?

Wish for feet

When the heat

Scalds you in the brick-built street,

That you might

Climb the height

Where your ancestry saw light,

Find a brook

In some nook

There to purge your swarthy look?

No. You read

Trees to need

Smoke like earth whereon to feed. . .

Have no sense

That far hence

Air is sweet in a blue immense,

Thus, black, blind,

You have opined

Nothing of your brightest kind;

Never seen

Miles of green,

Smelt the landscape’s sweet serene.