Solving the puzzle of the monkey puzzle tree

The Sitka spruce at the gate is a lamentable specimen. Even on its leeward side, the branches sport only a ragged stubble of needles. To windward, many of them are snapped or sawn off and bleached to a driftwood silver. But the tree survives, after three-quarters of a century of storms off the ocean. Whom are we to surrender on its behalf?

I remind myself of our gaunt and crippled old gatekeeper when I find myself disapproving of other people's trees. As the new bungalows multiply along the Connacht coast, their gardens flaunt their independence of the rough countryside around. Purple petunias, floppy mutant poplars in cream and pink - and now, just over the hill, the first monkey puzzle tree.

My formative images of the Araucaria, framed in the upstairs windows of city buses, were of the tree's jagged, overpowering ascent above pocket front-lawns, its dark and twisted domination of little baywindows and suburban red bricks. A dreadful stillness seemed to hang over every monkey-puzzle house, as of the death of an argument that had everyone exhausted.

Now that the tree has arrived beyond the hill as a nursery sapling, flourishing in salt Atlantic winds, I have been forced to look again at Araucaria araucana, both for its own sake, as it were, and its role in human affairs. This has inspired an entirely new regard for what is clearly a remarkable tree.

Araucaria is a very ancient genus of conifers, belonging only to land that formed part of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland more than 160 million years ago. The foliage of A. araucana is called "primitive" (largely, it seems, because it doesn't know when to stop branching), but the whorls of leathery, sharp, scaly leaves that spiral around its twigs, right to the growing tips, were a defence against dinosaurs and other big South American herbivores, most of them long extinct.

Today, the "Chile pine" survives in substantial (but often heavily logged) forests at the southern end of the Andes, in the cold and snowy uplands both of Chile and Argentina, a zone without monkeys. The popular name we have for the tree dates from the indelible waggery of some Big House wit who pricked his fingers after the tree reached England in 1795: "Twould puzzle a monkey to climb that tree, by George!". It was first grown from seed brought by Archibald Menzies, who pocketed the "nuts" served at dinner by the governor of Chile.

A fine corrective to such frivolity is the "Ode to the Araucaria araucana" composed by the late Pablo Neruda, the left-wing Chilean poet awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1971. The first lines, in translation, set the tone: "They lift you high above the earth - tough, beautiful Araucaria of the southern heights. Tower of Chile; crown of the green domain; pavilion of winter; ship of fragrance . . ." The ode takes off into a passionate celebration of what the tree has meant to the Araucani Indians, who gave the species its name. When Spanish horsemen came rampaging along the Andes, the forests of tangled pines gave an impenetrable, razoredged refuge to Chile's native people. The tree also fed them with the seeds in their huge cones, big as pineapples (and unfolding, in Neruda's images, sometimes like a fist, sometimes "a wooden rose").

It's a heady and heroic flow, with echoes of Lorca, and sweeps away all one's condescensions to the "monkey puzzle" as an effete misfit of suburbia. What forests those must be, in which the great, domed pines reach 30 metres and the lowest branches sweep the ground! Unfortunately, while not yet threatening extinction, logging is progressively eroding the genetic variation of the species.

This has brought a new importance to the specimen trees of Ireland and Scotland, where - given proper space - the Chile pine grows extremely well.

On a good, free-draining loam, it will comfortably reach 25 metres and one metre in diameter (which ought to be the warning accompanying every tree-nursery sale).

There are fine Araucarias in a dozen of Ireland's great heritage gardens. Powerscourt, for example, has them lined up along an imposing formal walk - but without the savage curlicues of their lower branches. There are more in groups and plantations at Avondale in Co Wicklow and at the Raven in Co Wexford.

The pines could, indeed, make a worthwhile timber tree for Ireland. A close relative, whose warm wood we already admire, is the Parana pine, Araucaria angustifolia, from the forests of Brazil and Argentina. The heartwood of the Chile pine is equally fine and even-grained, and Irish woodturners make good use of its large and decorative knots.

Dr Rory Harrington of Duchas, a tree enthusiast, would like to see it used more often in farm-forest situations, "particularly in exposed coastal sites". But, as he stresses, it must be given visual dignity and coherence by planting it in groups, or together with other pines.

It's a view that puts quite a new perspective on my misgivings at the tree's arrival on the coast of Mayo. Across the road, after all, is a magnificent flowering hedge of escallonia, hardy seaside shrub of the west, named for Senor Escallon, the Spaniard who travelled the Andes to find it. And all along the coast are fine hedges of Fuchsia magellanica, a shrub brought originally from Chile. Both are so thoroughly part of the local scene that we should be at a loss without their vigour, shelter and colour, all proof against salt and wind.

So, hail to the wooden rose, I suppose: Arriba Araucaria! But it's still worth remembering that while three may be noble company, one can be a crowd . . .