Carol’s Column

Cutting down trees isn't the only way to calm down

Stress is a potential killer. Everyone knows that, so I found it fascinating to read about a particularly novel anti-stress cure offered by the charming little village of Schonwald in the picturesque Black Forest area of Germany.

For the very reasonable amount of R1 250, you book into a local hotel for a week. And then begins the cure, described as wielding an axe and saw and cutting down trees. Apparently the action of chopping something really hard – in this case a piece of wood – immediately relieves anxiety, while the rhythmic sawing action calms the soul. Now it is a fact that women are particularly prone to stress as they have so much on their plates, what with careers, wifing, mothering, and so on. I phoned the hotel in Schonwald and found myself speaking to Miss Gretchen Schnibbelfussen.

"Do you have more women than men coming to your wood chopping cure?" I asked.

"Ag, nein," she retorted. "We hef men und wimmen in equval amounts. Vud is a vunderful cure for schtress und ven you chop ze vud, you vill vunder vere ze anxiety has gone." I was most impressed. But why go so far, I thought to myself. Why not chop a tree down in my garden. It's convenient, it's handy and it's right on the spot.

Mrs Schnibbelfussen did say that it had to be a hardy stout tree so that you would really be able to act out your frustrations and relieve your stress suitably.

"A schmall tree is no goot," she said convincingly, "it must be a vide vun."

There are other ways of relieving stress. Some people push coloured balls around a pool table. Others take 10 deep breaths, while more jog or go to gym in their natty designer outfits and bond with other stressed individuals.

In our garden in Parkwood, there are many trees. Three massive oaks, two huge jacarandas, a tall syringa. In fact, we only bought our house so many years ago because we could see the oaks through the crack in the bedroom wall.

Today, you can barely see the house through the cracks in the trees. Probably a little intelligent culling would be beneficial, I thought to myself. That's what they say in the Kruger Park and elsewhere when they selectively decimate elephant herds.

But how does one select a suitable victim? The three oaks, Arthur, Martha and Fred, are over 150 years old, each has its own distinctive personality and each is home to a myriad of birds from crested barbets to masked weavers. It would be unthinkable to axe such magnificent creatures.

Don't be sentimental about a tree, my intellect told me. Whatever Prince Charles says, trees don't feel. Just think of all those stressed out people in Schonwald (which, incidentally, translated means "beautiful forest") curing themselves by lustily chopping and hacking away.

There is, in the corner of our garden, an ancient apricot tree with gnarled and arthritic branches. It is quite deformed and misshapen, its apricot crop is negligible and because of its age, its trunk is wide and solid. This tree was the perfect stress antidote. Its time had come.

I approached it, axe in hand, and found my chest tightening and the blood rushing to my eardrums. For over 100 years this tree had grown, each year producing apricots by the thousands. Each curved branch was a memory, each bud an affirmation of life. To put one small mark on it would have been sinful. I could feel my personal stress barometer rising to somewhere in the 80s. I felt like an executioner.

On reflection, there was the Schonwald stress solution and the South African option. I chose the latter and poured myself a long, iced beer, sat myself under a tree and watched the barbets, doves, bulbuls, weavers and mossies depositing their droppings all over the show.

There's nothing like a cold beer and a little bit of birdshit to place things in perspective.

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