h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When we arrived at our old house in France, the sky was cloudless. There was a hint of mist at the horizon, but pure blue at the zenith. Everything was parched. Leaves hung shrivelled and one of the old fruit trees in the orchard seemed to have died. The grass, which is usually rampant when we arrive, had bleached to the colour of straw, leaving patches of bare earth and yellow thistles.

If we had hoped for a plentiful harvest, we were unlucky. In our garden, most of the plums were over, with only a few mirabelles on the tree. The grapes had shrivelled on the vines. The only trees with a significant amount of fruit were the cooking apple and the quince. The persistence of the quince tree impressed me, as two big branches broke off a few years ago.

I watched as a couple of men on tractors finished the plum harvest in the commercial orchards at the end of our garden. Both tractors were equipped with trailers and attachments that looked like upside down umbrellas. These close round the tree trunks, shaking them and producing a rain of plums. Plums are an important crop here, as they are dried and sold as prunes, called ‘Pruneaux d’Agen’.

If the drooping leaves were sad, the saddest sight in the garden was the wreck of the willow tree. It used to grow on the boundary between our house and that of the neighbours. It was a big tree, draped with ivy and Virginia Creeper, which gave shade on the hottest days. One day, our neighbour rang us up in a panic, saying the tree had fallen in a storm, and was threatening her property. We spent some time on the internet and the phone, trying to find tree surgeons who could cut it down. And communicate with them in French. When we arrived at the house, all that was left of the tree was a stump, a pile of branches and big slices of trunk. We will have enough firewood for years and we went home with bags of apples and quinces.

A swamp maple tree on our border was blown down in one of last winter's windstorms. Your willow probably met the same fate, owing to roots close to the surface and a lot of wet weather that made the ground soggy. Oaks and many evergreens have big, deep taproots that anchor them well against storms.

Enjoy your apples and quinces.

I enjoy prunes for breakfast every day. I have a potted plum tree in my backyard.

I'm glad you enjoy your prunes!

I don't think the whole of the tree came down. From photos we've seen it looks as if it broke where the two main branches met. Willows have a bad reputation for falling, or breaking, I think.

We have a lot of weeping willows hanging over the banks of the river here. Sometimes they break off and float in the water.