H ow quickly something that defines a landscape for centuries becomes the absence that redefines it – so it is with ancient trees. The trunk snapped like a carrot at the roots and crashed, its bony branches splintered. Now it lies like a shipwreck stranded in an open field, its hulk of twigs an animal pelt stilled. A day before, looking at its 300-year-old architecture of mostly dead wood yet so vividly alive, admiring its form and persistence through years and trouble, standing alone with spring coursing through the land and its timbers, I wondered how long, in tree time, it had left. Storm Dave answered quickly: “None.” This fallen tree is a common lime, Tilia x europaea , a hybrid of our native small-leaved lime, T. cordata , and large-leafed lime, T. platyphyllos ; probably of natural origins, probably introduced, but certainly common since 17th- and 18th-century plantings.…