From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay: The Great Elm of Howth

Howth Castle and Environs c1735, with the elm by the two horses

In 1933, the Royal Dublin Society published The Trees of Ireland - Native and Introduced. This was a comprehensive list of every tree species in Ireland, compiled by a 31-year-old Dubliner called Maurice Fitzpatrick. His 1994 obituary from the Society of Irish Foresters (which he helped found in 1942) describes his great project:

'To complete Trees of Ireland, Native and Introduced, he visited 85 estates and arboreta, North and South, mostly on a pushbike, identifying and measuring each tree recorded – a phenomenal achievement of skill and physique.'

Fitzpatrick had to visit private estates because all of Ireland's ancient forests had been cut down by the late 19th century, as the drinkers discuss in Ulysses:

—As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of lord Castletown’s...

—Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

One of the estates Fitzpatrick must have known well was Howth Castle, where he found a remarkable elm tree as well as the painting above, from the castle collection. This is from the opening page of his study:

'Little is known regarding the early introduction of exotic species. According to Loudon the oldest introduced tree in Ireland is an English Elm still standing at Howth Castle, which, he states, was planted about 1585. A painting of the castle and grounds, said by Mr Gaisford St. Lawrence to have been done in the reign of Queen Anne, certainly shows this elm as a large tree, with the formal beech hedges, which were so fashionable in gardens at the commencement of the eighteenth century, scarcely six feet high beside it.'

H.M.Fitzpatrick, 'The trees of Ireland – native and introduced', Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, 1933, 597

James Joyce knew The Trees of Ireland, and was so interested in the Howth elm that he wrote about it to his patroness Harriet Shaw Weaver:

'Léon began to read to me from a scientific publication about Irish trees. The first sentence was to the effect that the oldest tree in the island is an elm tree in the demesne of Howth Castle and Environs.'

Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver 10 July 1934 (Letters III 308)

In fact, the Howth elm was the oldest introduced tree in Ireland, but there were much older native trees. Yews can live for thousands of years. Like the hero of Finnegans Wake, the Howth elm was a foreign invader.

This 'scientific publication' was identified as Fitzpatrick's by Danis Rose. His The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (1995) has a brilliant chapter 'How Joyce planted The trees of Ireland in Finnegans Wake'. Rose identified 67 uses of Fitzpatrick's trees, which you can see listed here in fweet.

I've found another picture of the Howth elm, from 1820, in Francis Erlington's A History of County Dublin (1903). You can see how much the tree had grown in 85 years. It now towers over the castle.

This tree was famous enough to appear in a 1911 book by the US folklorist, Charles M Fitzpatrick:

'There are not infrequent instances in folk tales of the dependence of human lives on those of plants and trees and one such instance has been noted in the superstition relative to the great elm of Castle Howth, near Dublin. For years this tree received care, its limbs being propped or tied when threatened with decay, in the belief that whenever a branch was broken the head of the Howths would die, and that when the tree itself should have lived out its life the family would become extinct.'

Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits and Plants, Washington Square Press, 1911

The great elm tree survived the earldom. The last earl of Howth died in a Bournemouth hotel in 1909. The tree was still standing 24 years later when Fitzpatrick recorded it in his study. I can't find any later reference to it.

In Dublin in 2022 for Bloomsday I visited Howth Castle and found the place where the tree once stood.

Does anybody know when the great elm finally died?

Howth Castle passed into the female family line, the Gaisford-St Lawrences, who sold the estate in 2019 to Tetrarch Capital, who are now turning it into a 'retail food and tourist destination'.

THE ELM OF CHAPELIZOD

Joyce had already given an elm tree a big role in his book, at the end of the 1924 Anna Livia episode, where one of the two washerwomen is transformed into one. In 1959, in The Books at the Wake, J.S.Atherton identified the source of this tree as Sheridan LeFanu's novel, The House by the Churchyard:

'One glance, however, before you go, you will vouchsafe at the village tree—that stalworth elm. It has not grown an inch these hundred years. It does not look a day older than it did fifty years ago, I can tell you. There he stands the same; and yet a stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless, busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and affections far away among bygone times and a buried race. Thou hast a story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the moaning reeds.'

Sheridan LeFanu, prologue, The House by the Churchyard, 1863

This is the Wake's 'loftleaved elm Lefanunian' (264.04) which is always paired with a stone, the tree standing for time and the stone for space. Like LeFanu's elm, Joyce's tree has a story to tell.

'The elm that whimpers at the top told the stone that moans when stricken' 94.04

'Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone.' 216.23

'Talkingtree and sinningstone stay on either hand.' 564.30

THE TREE OF MORPHEUS

Charles M Fitzpatrick's folklore study has another possible reason why the tree is so important in Joyce's night book. The elm was the tree of Morpheus, god of sleep:

'In classic legend the elm was a creation of Orpheus, or a gift of the gods to him, for when he had returned from the vain attempt to release his wife from Hades and betaken himself to his harp for consolation, the listening earth took new life, and crowding over it came a grove of elms, marching to his song, and forming a green temple in whose shade he often pondered, and uttered melody while he remained on earth. Thus it should be the tree of Orpheus, but by some strange perversion it became the tree of Morpheus, god of sleep, and dreams hovered and roosted in its branches, ready, it would seem, to pounce on the unwary who stole a nap beneath it.'

Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits and Plants, Washington Square Press, 1911

Looking for the source of this idea, I've found it comes from Virgil's Aeneid, Bk 6, here in John Dryden's translation:

'Full in the midst of this infernal road,
An elm displays her dusky arms abroad:
The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head,
And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread.'

My home town, Brighton, has the greatest collection of elm trees in the world. I've been out photographing a few. This weeping wych elm in Queens Park reminds me of the washerwoman who turns into one in the Wake.

'I feel as old as yonder elm' 215.34

Here's an ancient elm, planted in 1776, in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion. It's so old it's hollow, and people leave padlocks there as an offering.