It being the season, Grey Granite went to Tyrie Kirkyard to look at the cherry tree, planted by Rev. Charles Birnie many years ago in a far corner of the manse garden, his 'Little Eden 'twixt the Tyrie and the Dour'. Fortuitously the cherry is close to the memorial stone erected to him by members of his congregation and the Buchan Heritage Society. Grey Granite remembers Charlie quoting this much loved Housman poem from the pulpit at Rosehearty.
'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my threescore years and ten,
twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.'
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