The demise of the landed gentry - Parade's End

The one single element that the BBC miniseries uses from book 4 of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End is the great cedar tree on the family estate, Groby; in the series, screenwriter Stoppard makes a big deal about the symbolism of the tree - it seems to stand for all the grandeur and tradition of the country baronial estates, ridings, I think they call them in the north country, and it's kind of a surprise that this tree makes no appearance until the final volume of the series - but at last it does, as a group comes up to the immobile and mute Mark Tietjens, who's living in his rustic hut on the estate, and it takes a while before we learn that the visitors are the new tenant for Groby, an American woman, accompanied by Christopher Tietjens's son, also Mark I think - so we realize that some time has passed as the son is now at Oxford, and he talks about all his friends'  being communist. Well that's kind of odd, as the kid himself has no sense about giving up any of his landholdings or class privileges. What's going on in this section of the novel is not just a challenge to the moral values of the landed gentry but an invasion of the American, commercial spirit - the new tenant who's made to seem like an idiot and a boor - she trudges across the meadow, not realizing that her doing so will damage the hay harvest, but how is she to know that? There's a sense, always, among the landed gentry, that their ways are the only right ways, the best ways, and that anyone from another class is only to be barely, condescendingly tolerated. Worst of all, she wants to chop down the ancestral cedar - a pretty heavy-handed symbol. Also, Christopher T. is now making his living as an antiques dealer, buying up all this British scrap and selling it at outrageous prices to American collectors. So - America came out as the only winner of the war, the dollar is mighty, and the ways of the landed gentry will never be the same. And what makes the landed gentry so great? Why do they feel entitled to own all that land and live off the labor of others? They are no better, no smarter, than anyone else - and if the Americans, we Americans, can earn enough $ to buy stuff we want from the British, so be it. It's particularly odd that Mark Tietjens wills himself never to speak - never to move his body, in fact. Another bit of symbolism, old England, paralyzed and mute, while the world around changes and grows.