Introduction

Summary

When the Danish poet Poul Martin M0ller was sailing across the South China Sea on his way to China in 1820, he let his thoughts wander back to his homeland in a poem that he called “The Joys of Denmark”; in his mind's eye he saw cattle standing “in grass up to their knees,” and dreamed of “a clover-field for noonday peace.”

At about the same time, in the vicarage at Købelev on the island of Lolland, Møller's stepbrother, Christian Winther, wrote a poem about the blossoming, sweet-smelling hedges in the Danish countryside. And in the capital, Copenhagen, the grand old poet of the period, Adam Oehlenschlager, praised Denmark as the land of the beech tree:

There is a lovely land

With spreading, shady beeches

Beside the Baltic strand.

Old Denmark will prevail

As long as leafy beech trees

Are mirrored in the waves.

Luminous green beechwoods, sweet-smelling hedges, and fertile fields of clover were felt to sum up the character of the Danish landscape during the nineteenth century, not only for these poets and countless others but also for the Danish people as a whole. In 1936, when Denmark was invited to let herself be represented by her national plants in an international ‘garden of peace’ in La Plata, Argentina, the choice fell on red clover and the beech tree. In the Nature Conservation Act passed the following year, stone fences and hedgerows were mentioned in §1 as being particularly worth preserving.