Through a Gap in a Wall

Through a gap in the wall, the horizontal lines of the Firth, flat islands looking half-submerged, and the frown of long lines of reedbeds across the water, are drawn like smears of dirt below a layered sky.

Pass through to the other side and the world has shifted, as though the rift faults that made this landscape just happened. The air is clamorous, the sky immense. In a town that arose among the orchards of an ancient abbey, the wild fruits of native Rowan are planted on the waterside of the wall.

By the slipway, the silver and gold of pungent Mugwort and Tansy give way to outsized rushes the size of small trees. Among them hide bobbing boats, lapped by the high tide. Listen to the clicking and fretting of small wind-waves on the stone wall of the jetty. From here, boats once plied a busy trade up and down river to Perth or Dundee, and across to ancient Port Allen in the Carse of Gowrie. Did they trade grain for Fife coal? Carse apples like the Port Allen Russet for Newburgh plums and Lindores pears? Did the monks from Lindores Abbey and their fellows at Grange in the Carse send each other scions and grafted trees?

Follow the path east, past salmon high and dry and leaping above mown grass, beside inaccessible muddy inlets bordered by reeds and willows and deep cuts where the old mill-stream threads unseen but laughing to the Tay. Vegetation is exuberant, chaotic, oversized and riotous. Great Hairy Willow Herb towers over the umbrella-sized discs of Butterbur leaves; nettle and insidious bindweed tangle through, the bindweed erupting in white trumpets of triumph.

Ponder the great bear with her raggedy staff on the hill above the town. It is not as old as you think, but is rooted in history, via a stone. How does the symbol of the powerful Warwick family (best known as mediaeval kingmakers in that other country, England) fit into this landscape? Was the first Earl of Warwick, Henry de Newburgh, really from this place? Or is it there because William the Lion of Scotland gave the title to his brother David – the founder of Lindores Abbey?

And the stone – the Bear Stone – at the centre of the story – where is it now? What did it mark or measure?

In the cool quiet of the Abbey ruins, trees and ivy hold up the remnants of walls. Old walls support vegetation and keep their secrets. Tread softly, slowly, let your thoughts be measured, as the sun moves the shadows across grass and stone. Be still. Wait. Centuries of contemplation hang heavy, and even the bees and insects of summer are subdued. Move on, quietly.

At the centre of the ruins, there is a Cretan labyrinth. Does it seem out of place? Follow its path – there is only one way – and do not cheat by stepping over the boundaries. Yes, you can see the centre, but you can also see there is nothing to gain when you get there. Just as when the monks of old walked their cloister, it is the journey taken, not the destination that matters.

When you leave, and come again into the town built on orchards, the world will shift again.

The Mushroom at the End of the Wood

A Post for West Stormont Woodland Group

In Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World*, she tells the story of landscapes ruined – or seemingly ruined – by the greed of human activity. In particular, forests. In one unpromising forest in Oregon USA, where commercial forestry had stripped out all the trees of value and left an empty terrain of broken ground and scrubby volunteer pines, she met some mushroom hunters, refugees from Laos. They were gathering Matsutake, one of the most prized and valuable edible mushrooms in Japan and – allegedly – the first living organisms to appear from the wreckage of Hiroshima after the Bomb.

Matsutake mushrooms, like many fungi, only appear when they can be entangled with the roots of a suitable host tree in a mycorrhizal relationship. They got on very well with those scrubby pines. Tsing tells how the accidental introduction of the Pine Wilt Nematode on a shipment of American Pine into Japan had devastated the Matsutake’s natural host there, hence its rarity. It is not a serious pest of American Pine.

Incidentally, Scots Pine is a good host for Matsutake, too….

Abandoned remnants of the commercial forest

Mushrooms disappearing when a forest changes is familiar to me. All forests and woods are in the process of change, but our two ex-commercial forests, Five Mile and Taymount Woods, are forests in abrupt transition. Before the Commission took out the last valuable trees and wind-throw did for many more, Five Mile Wood was my happy mushroom-hunting ground, the place I’d take people to for foraging walks. I knew exactly where to find the biggest chanterelles, the white Angels’ Wings, the logs where real oyster mushrooms could often break out. The ditches beside the path were home to many fascinating species, including several edible Boletus including the Cep and the maggot-free Bay Bolete – and, of course plenty of highly poisonous examples too. Some years, the tantalisingly similar but inedible False Chanterelle outnumbered the real one – which is exactly what you need when teaching people not to harm themselves by misidentification. One damp corner was an emporium for the delicious Slippery Jack, which turned up in troops like clockwork, every year in late summer and autumn. I used to dry the ones we didn’t fry up right away, and store them in jars.

The fragile associations which had built up over the decades were shattered by felling. The self-sown birches that are colonising parts of both the woods now will eventually reel in their own, interconnected fungal friends, and the chanterelles will surely re-emerge one day, because birch is their main host tree. But from my experience, it takes at least a decade before mushrooms start to appear in a new wood, and the first arrivals are never the ones you want to eat! The precarity of a habitat for specific mushrooms is alarming – involving water tables, shade, parasitic plants, weather patterns, nematodes, beetles, animals – including mushroom pickers. Tsing’s book includes chapters on the equally precarious lives of the pickers – refugees, indigenous peoples, itinerants. Humans aren’t in control of what the mushrooms will do, because there are so many variables in play. Humans are just part of the landscape, and the landscape is changing because of and despite them.

So, I can only observe and enjoy the new but mushroom-free habitats in parts of our woods, note the changes, watch new worlds forming out of devastation and realise we are not in charge, not that clever, and maybe, not that important either. I scoured the ditches in Five Mile Wood for boletes recently, and right at the end, I did find a couple of lingering and determined specimens. I left them there.

But who knows what will be the mushroom at the end of the wood? And where is the end of the wood?

*Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt: The Mushroom at the End of the World – On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princetown University Press 2015)

World on Fire

World on fire.
Bats dart and dive
From dusk to dawn
And flicker through the short time in between.

Midsummer comes once more:
Ignites revolution. Sparks fly.
Lightning strikes.

Mutely, between fear and hope,
Once more, we feed flames.

Bonfire: symbol of
What may be a future;
Misunderstood prayer of longest days.
Wild sun on simmering clouds,
Broods still, on midnight’s horizon.

Dawn or despair lies around the corner.
Night is short, disturbed by thunder.
We fan the embers, even though
The world’s already on fire.

Desertification and Horticultural Imperialism

Spring 2020 has seen an awful lot of fields round here go unploughed and unplanted. Whether this is connected to the global pandemic, I’m not sure. Twenty years ago, a good number of fields were left to grass as government-subsidised “set aside” land, but I don’t think there’s a payment scheme at present encouraging non-cultivation.

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At least, I hope not, as some of these fields have been so heavily and repeatedly sprayed with herbicide they are now ecological deserts. The spray (probably including glyphosate judging from the distorted and curled up stems and foliage of broad-leaved plants that got in the way) has drifted across verges and footpaths, decimating wild food plants such as raspberry, nettle, hogweed and roses that local people forage. It was probably sprayed on one of the many windy days, and/or the tank residues emptied onto the verges. I won’t presume to tell farmers what to do in their fields here, but that is a no-no.

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It’s interesting to see that the spear thistles, presumably a prime target of the desertifiers, are remarkably resistant – except where the dose looks to have been doubled.

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Garden owners with too much time on their hands during lockdown have been at it too. Every garden hedge not yet ripped out in favour of a fence has a bare strip of brown, dead vegetation at its base. Weedkiller run off from precious driveways, in which nothing must be permitted to root, oozes onto formerly quite pretty road verges and banks. I do understand the temptation, really I do. The patch of 6×2 concrete slabs mis-called a patio here can come to resemble an untended flowerbed in no time, and yes, I do half-heartedly remove the “weeds” when I can be bothered.

It gets to me, however, when garden owners start speculating beyond their own boundaries. Just as agricultural spray drift and chemical dumping on publicly-used land is bad practice and breaches all pesticide regulations, so spraying, strimming, mowing, “prettifying” or planting with rhododendrons the verges, banks and roadsides near, but not part of, a property is offensive to me.

Very offensive. What people do with their own verges is up to them, whether I think it desirable or deplorable. It’s none of my business. When they inflict their personal idea of what’s attractive – and their personal conceit of themselves as above nature – on land that has absolutely nothing to do with them, that stinks. It is so weird that so many people with money jingling in their pockets buy up property in the countryside and then occupy and worry themselves non-stop trying to make it look like a posh city suburb.

A friend of mine coined a good term for this – Horticultural Imperialism. Yet another form of imperialism we need to grow out of, reject and set aside as a species.

The Ultimate Alchemy

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They are as diverse in shape, size, colour, decoration as any flower. They are self-contained, yet everything is contained in them, however small, to make the tallest tree, the juiciest berry, the wheat we eat, the biggest sunflower, the rarest orchid.

Hold seeds in your hand. Feel the faint pulsation of life, no matter how dry, how hard and rigid they seem. Feel that faint warmth, the tiny voice that says. “I know. I am coming. Plant me”.

In your hand is magic.

Remember biology classes at school, as dry as these seeds, the dreary terminology of meristem and cotyledon and radicle? No-one spoke about miracles. Yet no-one understands the rapture of the “hooked plumule” until they see their first-ever home-grown seedling – maybe tomato, maybe a pumpkin – shoulder its way through the soil into the open air, then to unhook and open those first seed-leaves.

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You stare, open mouthed. I did that, you think. I put that seed there. And lo, it is growing. It worked. In that moment, you are caught. You will see this happen again and again, pots of seeds, rows of seeds, the longed-for yet always somehow unexpected eruptions of “seed” potatoes breaking through the mounded soil. But always it will dazzle you, floor you, make you giddy with sudden brief joy.

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It is the ultimate alchemy – the transformation of small hard mote into living organism. So far beyond the base-metal-into-gold aspiration of mediaeval alchemists, for it has succeeded. And it is a collaborative feat. You may have sown the seed, but the seed has made use of you, and you have grown.

From each seed is the potential for flowers. From flowers, the prospect of more seed through pollination. The promise of seed is the promise that we may eat again, that our children will eat. It is no less than the promise of survival.

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In today’s world, a pandemic virus coupled with spiralling concern for an environmental emergency has got us all sowing seeds. An army of growers and gardeners is multiplying like dandelions. These aren’t the old-guard, nature-controlling gardeners. When the garden centres closed, we realised our children cannot afford to be at the mercy of a few big seed companies, or side-lined into dead-end F1 hybrids that will not produce viable offspring. We need seed we can collect ourselves, share, save, and keep for following years and new generations. Seed banks and seed libraries (a kinder term, that speaks of sharing and co-operation) are springing up across our land. Is there one near you? Can you start one?

We are a people terrified by the present, grasping for a past that was never really going to sustain us, and reluctant to look at the future, in case there isn’t one. Seeds, in their understated humility, their quiet, warm still voices, carry that germ of a dizzy rapture, that incredible potential.

Seeds are the promise of a future.

(The quotation at the start is from Melissa A DeSa. Community Programmes Director, Working Food)

May 2020: The Bluebell Wood in Lockdown

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There is no lockdown here.

Cascades of bluebells pour unrestrained down slopes and banks in teeming armies. They crowd thick and close and unrepentant, in teeming armies, nodding to kiss and touch the air, the sunlight, their neighbours. bluebells2020b

Black, loping St, Mark’s flies dangle above the bluebells, lost in the still air that’s full and fragrant and intoxicating. Bees softly hum, preoccupied, beyond concern, without anxiety. Birdsong surrounds us, meshing into the stillness and silence till it becomes part of it. Woodpecker nestlings can just be heard, grumbling in nest holes in elderly trees.

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The wood breathes deeply, unmasked, unshielded. Stitchwort and purslane gather together, jostling around stumps and falling branches, pink, white and all the shades between, small exuberant stars in a sky of riotous blue.

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Humans are few, and we are all quiet. We greet each other in joy and friendliness, as if to apologise for the distance we must put between us. A young woman walks slowly, murmuring quietly to her baby who peers out in wonder from its sling. A small girl is carried in her father’s arms. Both gaze silently, smiling.

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Another world is possible.

Another world is here.

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The Back Mill

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He’d dive in, dump his school bag, raid the fridge and be off.

“Where’re you going?”

“Dunno. Backmill probably.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Backmill was what they called it, these prepubescent and young teenage schoolboys with more energy than sense. The little wood accessed by a rusting stock feeder converted to a bridge over the Garry Burn lies not far from the primary school. For me it was a place to find edible fungi in autumn and clouds of wood anemones in spring. For them, it was an open woodland opportunity for creating ever more ambitious bike jumps and mini skate parks, housing a roughly square, slightly sunken area they called the Curly, whose banks made a race track or skateboarding wall.

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As summer progressed, he’d pop home to borrow a spade, loppers, a bow saw. I railed, and refused the axe.

“You’re not to saw down any trees!” They did, though to be fair the old curling pond was thick with self-sown sycamores of suitable diameter for log ramps and bridges. The tracks and jumps became quite elaborate. My son and his pals were probably following a long tradition in which they were the current top dogs, and learning about engineering and practical skills in the process. Health and safety, too, I suspect.

Twenty years on, I never see a child in the woods, but the evidence indicates that to some extent the tradition continues. The burn is forded by new stepping stones, the soil is bare over the bumps and jumps, and someone’s parent has welded new metal onto the old stock feeder to keep safe-ish access going. There was a village campaign to build a “proper” skate park a few years ago. I kept quiet, but suspected an improper one would remain more attractive.

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At the end of the wood and across the burn is a cluster of old buildings and a modern barn used to store straw bales. When you look closely, you can see where a water wheel once was attached to the wall of the biggest building, though nettles and rank vegetation choke the pit where it would have turned. This is the real Back Mill, after which the wood is locally miscalled. Once, it must have been a hugely important hub of activity for the village.

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It’s a sizeable building, and across the road a second building of similar age was, I think, the granary. A door on the upper floor was probably where the grain was unloaded into wooden carts, perhaps like the one now parked in another outbuilding.

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The lower floor is crumbling, but suits the swallows and martins for nesting, and has been used for housing the beasts in winter – the old wooden manger is intact.

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But where is the water? The Garry Burn is much lower than the mill wheel, and the track into the ford now only leads to a field. Behind the mill, a stretch of level grass looks like it leads round the side to meet the wheel. Go several hundred metres up the road from the ford, looking carefully through the tangled vegetation, and you can discern a straight, broad channel. You soon come to a stone dam, and the remains of the mill-pond. From here the water would have been diverted on milling days via the lade at a slight incline to the wheel, which would start to turn and grind under its power.

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I’d love to find out more about Bankfoot’s Back Mill, and whether the wheel was an overshot or an undershot. It’ll have to wait now till the library re-opens, and I can delve again into the local history archives. Meanwhile, children of Bankfoot, keep building dens, jumps and bridges in the woods by the Curly!

The First Thing that Must Change

coronavirus — Photo by CDC on Pexels.com

We are in strange times. Things are changing. People don’t like change. Many people will be yearning for everything to “go back to normal”. The media incessantly bleat that expression “back to normal”, interspersed cleverly with “business as usual.” People listening assume that’s what they – and everyone else – want to see. People won’t raise an eyebrow at this assumption, because people like to feel they are in the majority and agree with everyone else. They think there’s safety in numbers, even when the numbers are imaginary or made up.

close up photo of a herd of sheep — Photo by Ekrulila on Pexels.com

Some of us – many of us – don’t. We want things to change. Some politicians even want change – or at least can see that it’s inevitable. But they sugar the pill by calling it a “new normal”. What do we want to change?

People to stop over-consuming the planet’s resources
The widening gap between rich and poor
Greed and Injustice – social and environmental
Air pollution, plastic, environmental degradation
Wars, bombs, threats, dictatorships
Governments that chip away at democracy
People thinking biodiversity loss is inevitable “progress”
What Tennyson called “the faithless coldness of the times”
….and so much more

We want, well, everything to change. It’s too much to ask. Where do we start?

We are in a pandemic, caused, not by China, Johnson or even Trump, but by a virus. Viruses are funny things. Are they even a life-form? They have no life and no power to reproduce on their own. They can only do that by hijacking the DNA or RNA (the genetic element of a cell) of another species. Plant or animal, whatever the virus finds suits their need. Did you know that stripy tulips only got that way because of viruses? A virus made them worth a fortune in the 17^th century.

Viruses are very small, smaller than bacteria. Indeed, they can even infect bacteria. Some of them – including the coronaviruses – are incredibly beautiful structures. We have learned, in recent decades, to applaud our “friendly” bacteria which protect our digestive system or power our sourdough fermentations. Bacteria aren’t being friendly or unfriendly, though, they’re just getting on with their lives, and we happen to benefit sometimes. Other times we don’t and we go all antibacterial and kill off the useful bacteria as well as the harmful ones, leaving ourselves open to more infection.

But no-one ever applauds a virus. Even though within the lining of the animal (including human) gut, live viruses called bacteriophages. Guess what, they eat up “unfriendly” bacteria. Other viruses help develop and support the human immune system. Just like the bacteria, they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, which of course they don’t have. They’re just being viruses. Viruses, bacteria, slime moulds, fungi, algae, tardigrades, invertebrates, mosses, insects, molluscs, fish, flowers, trees, amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals (including people), and all the groups I’ve missed out – they’re all just organisms in a complex web, getting on with it as best they can.

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Sometimes – but not very often – an organism will get above itself. It will be clever, but hellish stupid. It will decide that it’s superior to all the other entangled organisms and it will start acting in a way that’s detrimental to all of life on earth. Destructive, actually, and stupid enough to believe – no, to CHOOSE TO BELIEVE – that destruction won’t include them.

It might take something as small as a virus to bring them down with a bump.

If the sound of arrogance crashing around us is louder than the soothing noises of those with vested interests in “business as usual”, more people will start thinking everything must change. And here’s where to start: drop the conceit that you are apart from the rest of the natural world. You are as entangled and connected to every other living organism – and many which may not be living – as the Covid 19 virus. You are no better and no worse. You are part of nature. You will never, ever, be above it.

Come back down to Earth, and then together we might really hope to change everything.

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#Everythingmustchange #common weal
commonweal.scot

Bees, Butterflies and an Old Straight Track

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The things you do in a lockdown. I wouldn’t normally walk from the house to Five Mile Wood, I’d call in on my way to somewhere else, parking the car. It’s not an especially long walk, but since they felled most of the trees on the Bankfoot side, cavernous ditches and hollows have made the entrance to the wood treacherous, wet and debateable, and the track to get there goes on a bit and is not especially interesting.

Or so I thought.

I marched out from Bankfoot on one of those dazzling, sun-struck mornings of which we’ve seen so many this April. We crossed the pleasantly deserted A9 and the field to the edges of Cairnleith Moss and turned right along the track to North Barns. The path stretched ahead in a tediously straight line, the wood in the far distance looking nearer than it actually was. At some point, I turned round to let the dog catch up.

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It was a VERY straight track. North, it pointed directly at Birnam Gap, the space between the hills where every Great North Road is forced to pass. Ahead of me, beyond Five Mile Wood, the conical East Lomond Hill in Fife lay in a direct line. Suddenly, it fell into place. With these landscape markers aligned, this was the ancient route north – preceding the drovers’ track above my house, which preceded the winding old A9 through Bankfoot village, which went before the current A9. They all run roughly parallel, and all have to go through Birnam Gap. (Later I consulted the maps: this old straight track seems to have continued beyond the wood to meet the Tay at Waulkmill, then probably followed the straight road through Stormontfield, and on to Perth or beyond).

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On either side, vast, treeless fields stretched forever, brown, homogenous, dusty and devoid of hedges. In a hollow beside the track were a dozen beehives. I realised the field I’d just passed did contain a crop – oil seed rape, yet to flower. That’s why the bees were there. A farm vehicle traversed the horizon on the other side, trailing an enormous boom sprayer. Dust and chemicals billowed behind it. The smell in my nostrils was like an airport runway. How on earth, I thought, did the bees keep going, while waiting for the rape to flower? There were no wild flowers in this agricultural desert.

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Reaching the edge of Five Mile Wood, I crossed the gate into the ravaged landscape of felled trees. The footpath sign directed me, and I could see where I needed to be, straight ahead on the old track, but a new route had to be picked to get there. Others had succeeded; makeshift log bridges across water-filled ditches, meandering paths that skirted the boggy areas. I reached the main path which circles the interior of the wood amid the heady coconut-scent of gorse – and there I found the bees, working the flowers sprung up in the new heathland created by felling. Beautiful birches, freed from forest, leaves just opening against a vivid sky. A border of dandelions edged the path, dancing golden and perfect in the sun of noon. Goat willows, pioneer trees of clearings, still in flower, had attracted a small swarm of peacock butterflies. In the new landscape of a one-time forest the bees and butterflies and all the creatures of the heath found sanctuary.

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Returning home, I thought about how important this chameleon landscape is, set against modern farming. I thought, too, about the old straight track that entered the woods, and how its purpose was muddied by activities that had made it so hard to follow. I thought how approach and access is so important, in any plans we may have for these woods in the future.

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Everything Must Change

Radio voices infiltrate
Birdsong, and the low murmur of bees.
They demand our patience,
Promise clever plans, speak wistfully of
Getting back to normal.

Cold winds
Have blown the smog from the skies,
Hushed the traffic, sombrely
Slowed the world down.
With neighbours and friends afar,
We swap and share: seeds, favours, produce,
Recipes, ideas and goodwill.

Oh, but, the radio voices cry,
That won’t be forever. The economy
Will erupt again amid chattering smokescreens,
Rise and fill the air with busy-ness,
Drown out birds and kindness.
Don’t despair. The economy
Will get back on its rotten track.

We’re not to worry. There’s no need
For co-operation, self reliance or hope.
They’ll feed us bread and circuses again. Meanwhile,
Have some crumbs
From the great loaf of capitalism.

No need for questions,
but they’ll give us answers, anyway;
Answers we don’t need to understand,
Data to depress, figures to make us fear
Those cold winds of change.

Let’s not go back to that normal
Of duped dependency, petrified inequality
And the averted gaze.
Swallows have returned. With eyes wide open
We can see the season changing.

I wrote this in response to the Common Weal #everythingmustchange campaign (https://commonweal.scot/rebuild).