Comments on The Nature of the Universe
Asking questions about nature, the universe, and where we fit into it all
At last, after so long away,
The meandering dunes are crested,
Sky opens like a spangled flower,
High and thrilling, atoms dancing, circling all.
Endless beach compels, beckons,
A siren-call.
Mind empties. Into that void
Comes the sea;
Seeping through sand
In glittering showers of sound,
Echoes of shell and stone;
In waves of cold molten glass;
In sunlit spray.
Nothing is needed.
Only here and only now,
And only this.
The Dukes of Atholl were awfully fond of trees, especially Larch trees, mainly for their timber value but possibly also just because they liked them. They also had an awful lot of land to play with. Still do. Duke Number 2 was responsible for introducing the European Larch (Larix decidua) to Scotland in 1740. His nephew, the Planting Duke (Number 4), turned his attention to the steep slopes of Craig o’ Barns above Dunkeld, and wondered how he could cover it with larch trees. Clearly, trees could grow on the rocky outcrops and once established, gripped the hillside with roots that were capable of splitting and crumbling stone. The issue was how to get men, tree seedlings and planting gear onto the inaccessible hillside the Planting Duke wanted to cover.
His solution, it is told, was to fire seed at the crags from a cannon positioned across the river. Not usually part of the tree-planter’s kit, but hey, this was the Duke of Atholl. Duke Number 7 brought in the Japanese Larch (L. kaempferi) in the 19th century, and the combination gave rise to the Dunkeld Hybrid Larch (L. decidua x kaempferi) in 1904.
Walking the woods above Craig o’ Barns now, and the land that makes up the popular Atholl Woods walks, I am spellbound by the determination and tenacity of trees to hold fast to rock and scanty soil. Although disease has resulted in many larch giving way to spruce, fir and pine, all these forest conifers rise like spindly towers from the steep shady slopes, clamouring for sky.
Not all grow straight, however, and where a deciduous tree has infiltrated the ducal forests by setting its own seed grimly onto rock, it seems to thumb the nose at forest order by growing into as contorted a shape as it can, leaves placed to catch the light.
Sheer cliffs and overhangs challenge the pines, but the darker, older and unplanted yew trees seep into the rock like oozing blood – and hold fast. Holly trees, with hard, unyielding wood and strong roots, are scattered among the rocks, and huge, unlikely beeches wrap themselves around massive boulders with roots like giants’ fingers, and trunks that should have crashed to the ground a century ago.
Emerging from forest onto the look-out points along the way, I realise how the path has been climbing, just as subtly and imperceptibly as tree roots worm their way into rock-faces. The valley of the Tay sparkles with silver, south to Murthly Castle and north to Ben Vrackie, high above Pitlochry. I bask like a snake in the sunshine.
At Mill Dam, another kind of forestry is in progress. Neat and systematic felling of young trees into water to provide fresh shoots; branches and brash gathered to construct dams and quiet pools.
Such teeth these foresters must have! A match for the Planting Duke’s cannon, perhaps.
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….
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)
There’s a little wood nestling by the River Tay that I love to walk in, partly for its vibrant and eclectic flora – an amalgam of native plants and garden escapes which get washed in when the river gets out and established over centuries, that curiously resembles my garden at times.
Set back from the river, and maybe in a sort of line, are some colossal and ancient beech trees. Why they are there is a mystery. Clearly, as non-natives, they were planted, possibly something to do with the nearby castle, though they look older than that. I’d like to link them to the mediaeval abbey at Dunkeld, whose land I believe this once was, though there is the small matter of a river in the way.
The trees were clearly pollarded or even coppiced, the resulting shoots from the trunk growing into valuable, renewable firewood. Now each “shoot” forms a huge trunk in itself, because they’ve not been cut back for centuries. This leaves the structure unstable, and every so often a tree loses one or more of its trunks, leaving hollows and torn timber crags. The exuberant flowers and grasses of the wood quickly colonise and make them into miniature gardens.
As little will grow directly under beeches, they provide a flat, open and sheltered site for wild campers, and there is very often a tent or two under one of them. Recently having witnessed the idiotic post-lockdown behaviour of people who like to think they are campers trashing and littering lovely places, I am admiring of the most recent wild campers in this little wood, with their orderly, careful fire pits and unobtrusive behaviour.
Some years, it’s looked as though the campers (who I never see) are using their chosen tree as a kind of holiday caravan, setting up for a season. It makes sense not to have to cart everything to and fro. One of the beeches in particular is like a gigantic cupboard or merchant’s chest, with cubby holes in which to hide folding seats and tables, and lofty shelves where firewood and kindling can be stacked to dry. Washed up boards from the river can be balanced across knobbly projections, useful for everything from preparing food to changing nappies.
It’s a comfortable, homely tree, nearing the end of its long life and home to so many plants and animals. I hope it always has special memories for its seasonal human residents.
A Post for West Stormont Woodland Group
https://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.org.uk/
Five Mile Wood today is a wood part-forest, part scrub and heath. When the Forestry Commission took out the last tree crop, they left a fragile fringe, largely of Scots Pine, around the north-east side of the circular path that now forms almost the only access to the bulk of the wood. The Benchil burn trickles through and under the path here, on its way to the Tay, and water from the high water table of the central area percolates into a series of pathside ditches and curious water-holes made by a forestry digger. This is the wet side of the wood. While the trees must take up a lot of water, their canopy also prevents evaporation, and after recent heavy rain, the glades and ditches are alive with summer flowers and butterflies.
Heath Bedstraw and Tormentil are strewn along the path edges like yellow and white confetti, and red clover flourishes heroically on the banks. Meadow Vetchling and Bird’s Foot Trefoil are visited by brown ringlet, wood white, common blue, and pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies, who pause and spread themselves out infrequently on warm stones and bark shreds on the path.
Bright Hawkweeds grow tall and enthusiastic, stretching for the dappled sun that today is scorching whenever the clouds part. In the cooler shade, sweet-scented Valerian grows. It prefers a damp habitat, and its white to pinkish flowers are nectar-rich, a magnet for more butterflies. This plant is widely used in herbal medicine, its roots being a soporific. Common Orchids and Viper’s Bugloss unusually share a habitat. Here and there are thistles, always a good bee-flower, and today a relevant newcomer to central Scotland, the Tree Bumble Bee (Bombus hypnorum) is engrossed with nectar collection.
The true nature of this tract of land gives itself away in the damp bases of ditches and where vague deer tracks can be followed a short way into the springy sphagnum. It is part of a network of raised bog, myre or moss that probably once were joined. King’s Myre in Taymount Wood is another remnant. Damselflies hover over the multicoloured water forget-me-nots in conjoined pairs. The Lesser Spearwort dazzles from many a watery ditch and aptly-named Ragged Robin, dances its frilly pink skirts by the burn. Acid-loving and ubiquitous tormentil abounds, and bell heather is in flower already – another treat for insects.
We humans are such visual creatures, and it’s the flowers that draw us and grab our attention. But flowers are the tip of the ecological iceberg of the wet side of the wood. Ferns, grasses, unidentified rushes and reeds are the matrix of this habitat, while unnoticed and unobtrusive, the sphagnum mosses proiliferate, and go on with their work of creating peat, holding onto water – and capturing carbon.
How the woods work to heal us.
Clockwise from top left: Red Clover, Valerian, Viper’s Bugloss, Ragged Robin, Common Spotted Orchid
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hot, sunshine, slight breeze – a day to cycle to a cool and shady place. We’d often thought about walking into Taymount Wood by the core footpath from Airntully, but before lockdown hadn’t considered cycling all the way from Bankfoot. We left the village on the Stewart Dairy road, in normal times screeching with haring rat-runners with no conception of cyclists or passing places, and up the steep Barns Brae. This we accomplished without pause for breath, thanks to the electric bikes! We were caught out at the top by two “proper” cyclists who had stopped to recover, and who tried very hard, in a typical show of pandemic goodwill, not to look supercilious.
From the hamlet of Airntully, with its handy share-and-donate community phone box, we entered a shady tunnel of hedgerow elms, that enclosed our path. A shivering mosaic of sunlight hovered over the blue of speedwells, the pink of purslane. The path quickly led across a road and over the main line level crossing, straight to the fringes of Taymount wood.
In contrast to our last visit in March, most trees were in full leaf. Violets flowered happily in the shade. It was now drowsy midday, and – again in contrast to March – the birds were silent, save for a welcoming chiff-chaff.
The silver line of King’s Myre appeared through the trees on our right. Parking the bikes, we took a small deer path between the trees towards the water. You cannot “go to” King’s Myre, nor can you arrive. There is no division in this habitat, between wet and dry, no shoreline, no edge. You have to creep up on it, with the stealth of an amphibian or a mudskipper. The ground underfoot grew softer, violets gave way to arching horsetails, until the trees petered out into scraggy bog willow and the soil became sphagnum moss. If I stood still, water came over my shoes.
Under the last tree, whose roots appeared to have made a spot dry enough for tormentil to grow, we sat down to picnic and observe. An osprey, also in search of lunch, circled the lochan. Fluffy seed of the reedmace bowled about the water margin like tumbleweed. Blue damselflies hovered, veering abruptly as if skating on air. Red damselflies were better camouflaged, except the one that alighted briefly on my knee!
There were many small, dark solitary bees. Where they were foraging? They ignored the yellow tormentil, and I could see no other flowers. But a squelchy walk among the bog willows revealed several orchids, probably marsh but I’m hopeless on orchids, and the staggeringly lovely fringed flowers of the bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata), just coming out.
Back to the bikes, and on through the wood to the main entrance on the KInclaven road, streaming away on downhill paths through heady clouds of coconut scented gorse. By the time we reached the birch trees, the birds were singing again. We returned via Airntully phone-box for a book to while away the rest of the afternoon.
This post was written for West Stormont Woodland Group, in support of the plan for community buy-out and wider community use of local woodland and landscape.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another world is possible.
Another world is here.
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.
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?
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 17th 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.
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.
#Everythingmustchange #common weal
commonweal.scot
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