TOLKIEN PINE ON SALE AT THE BOTANIC GARDEN

Saturday 6 December is the start of Oxford’s Botanic Garden Christmas Fair, and this year there is an extra frisson of acquisitive excitement owing to the release for sale of a small number of artisan-crafted products made from Tolkien’s much loved black pine tree (Pinus nigra).

It’s been a long wait. The tree, believed to have been planted around 1830, partly fell down in 2014 and had to be removed. It was then planked and seasoned in the correct manner, nothing a rush. A small sample was used in 2021, but really now is the first time that Tolkien’s mighty pine tree has broken cover in a coordinated fashion.

The garden’s Christmas Fair, this year held on 6–7 December, has become a highlight in Oxford’s Christmas calendar, enjoyed by many for the original artisan products on sale, the unique food and drink available, and the lively entertainment staged in beautiful surroundings.

The ‘Black Pine Collection’ will be unveiled at the Christmas Fair and is exclusively available on site at the Botanic Garden Boutique. 

The full range includes cufflinks, writers’ boxes, paperweights, letter racks, pen pots, pen trays, coasters, bookmarks, and fern and acorn decorations.

Prices range from £20 to £145 and all products come with a limited-edition letterpress authentication booklet created in collaboration with the Oxford-based printer Richard Lawrence. Numbers are quite limited, typically to a few dozen of each.

We caught up with Professor Simon Hiscock, Director of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum. He says that this is a bigger occasion than it might at first sight appear. For one thing, the sale of the items will materially benefit the Botanic Garden and Arboretum, always a pressing need. But perhaps more centrally, the work and craft that has gone into these iconic items is immense. Behind the scenes the work was distributed to numerous producers rather than one.

One of them is Oxfordshire’s Sylva Foundation Wood School, responsible for a writers’ box from the black pine wood. Based in Long Wittenham, Sylva was formed to support the revival of wood culture using home-grown timber, stimulate innovation in design, and encourage the next generation of designers and makers.

‘I also encourage anyone visiting the garden, and the Christmas Fair, to stroll down to the bottom and take a look at the replacement black pine that was grown from seed from the original. It is doing very, very well and is now a small tree.’ (pictured, above right)

On 8 June 2021, HM King Charles III (then HRH Prince of Wales) planted a new black pine raised from a seed of the original tree, the occasion commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Botanic Garden in 1621.

There is a mistaken general notion that the original tree suffered damage in a storm but Professor Hiscock says: ‘Actually it was a calm sunny day. The tree had grown out more than one stem from the base, really trees in their own right, and one of the stems appears to have been too heavy and broke away from the base.’

The original has been captured by Stanley Donwood, the artist associated with local band Radiohead and singer Thom Yorke, recently celebrated in a landmark exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum.

Donwood’s rendering of the tree is captured in the new collection of items as a motif, clearly showing the tree as a prodigious, multi-stemmed affair.

The literary association with Tolkien (1892–1973) is that he sat and wrote beneath its branches, creating his ‘Ents’ (giant talking trees), partly inspired by its patterned bark.

The tradition was then embellished by local writer and literary legend Philip Pullman who includes the black pine in his iconic scene at the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy – yet another testament to its enduring place in Oxford’s literary imagination.

The Patron of the garden is His Majesty the King, Charles III.