Flora and the Noble Fir Tree

One hundred and ten years ago, there was no Macrosty Park in the town of Crieff. Where the park is now, with its neat paths and children's playground and colourful flower beds, there were fields overlooked by a grim stone-built mill. Of course, there were also trees and bushes and flowers, but they were all wild ones, which grew where they liked. Most of those wild plants and trees were (of course) inhabited by spirits, although the human beings who sometimes crossed the fields never really noticed them. There were spindly green and brown thorn bush spirits and tufty thistle spirits with purple quiffs and tiny little nervous flower spirits who shivered whenever the wind blew. The only thing that didn't have lively little spirits hiding in it was the green grass, because that is simply the carpet that Nature spreads over the open spaces and tucks in at the edges. The other spirits chattered to each other, but the grass never said anything, though if you listened very carefully you might have heard it snoring.

In the middle of these fields, just about where the bandstand is now, there was a large and beautiful fir tree, and this tree also had a spirit living in it. People tend to think of spirits and fairies and elves as being beautiful things, but the fir spirit wasn't beautiful. He was old and spindly and very crinkly all over, like tree bark. He wasn't a particularly sweet-natured tree spirit either. He wasn't mean or cruel but he tended to put on airs and graces, and that sometimes made him a bit ruder than he needed to be. The reason for these airs and graces was that the tree he lived in was abies procera, the noble fir. The tree spirit knew it was a noble fir because he had heard two human beings talking about it in the field where it stood. One of them was an older man with tufty white whiskers and very fine clothes. This was James Macrosty, though the spirit didn't know that; he took no notice of human names. Mr. Macrosty had brought the other man to look at the land he was considering donating to the town of Crieff for a park. He pointed out the great fir tree where the spirit lived and said, "That noble fir was the one I meant." He had said that that tree would probably have to go if the land became a park, but the spirit didn't know that. He just heard the words noble fir and began to preen himself mightily.

James Macrosty wasn't the only person who visited the field where the tree stood. Although it wasn't public land, sometimes children of the poor workers living in the town used to sneak into it to play among the flowers and smell the sweet scent of the grass. One of these children was a little girl called Flora McEwan. Most of the other children used to play in big groups; they would play tag or hide and seek or football if anyone could be found who had a ball. But Flora was a very quiet, shy little girl, who preferred her own company most of the time. Her mother used to despair over how quiet she was, and say that she couldn't think how Flora would ever make her way in the world when she grew up if she didn't learn to speak up for herself. She was a very bright little girl who learnt her school lessons very quickly, but nobody ever noticed because she didn't speak up in class. And she was a very pretty little girl, with a huge mop of flaming red curly hair and big blue eyes, but nobody ever noticed those either, because she always had her head down looking at the floor.

Flora used to go and play on her own in the field quite often. It was peaceful in there, and because she was quite wee she could lie down in the long grass and be completely hidden. When she was alone like that, she didn't feel shy at all. She would chatter away to the grass (which didn't listen) and the flowers and trees (which did, if she had only known it). Occasionally she would even sing to herself very quietly too, a song about a tree (the tree in the song was a rowan tree, not a fir, but that didn't matter). Sometimes she did think she saw a little face peeping out at her from the heart of a flower or around the trunk of a tree, but when she told her mother about it, her mother said she had too much imagination.