Of all the trees you might imagine as a model for Harry Potter’s Whomping Willow (it lashed back when menaced), the sedate and conventionally elegant beech wouldn’t come first to mind. But it was a 400-year-old beech on the National Trust’s land round Berkhamsted in the Chilterns that was eventually cast as the prototype. The low-slung bottom branches, emerging from a tangled mass of stubs and cephalopodic burrs, were the clincher. With a bit of CGI tweaking, they were turned into the flagellating tentacles of a giant squid.
And they were pretty much like that in real life. I had known this tree since I was a child. It was a massive, mesmerising organism, whose serpentine structure I had assumed was entirely natural, until I learned about its human grace notes.
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