Reeds, Rushes and the Spaces between Trees

On a quiet day of winter sun and muted activity from woodland birds, I arrive at King’s Myre again. Reed Mace flowerheads from last year cluster around the watery margin, clogging the channel by the little jetty where the boats wait and fill with rain. We used to call them “bulrushes” where I grew up, and it wasn’t till Mr. Illesley, in Rural Studies, enlightened us all about the differences between reeds, rushes, sedges and grasses that I ever learned their proper name– or that Reed Mace is related, but none of these anyway!

It is the same plant known as cattails in America, and valued throughout its distribution for its edibility. The rhizomes – root like underground stems, or underwater ones in the case of this plant – are starchy and filling when baked. They can also be dried and ground into flour, though I never have. The pollen from the male flowers can be used as flour too, or to thicken sauces and soups. It has many medicinal uses. But the best part is the emerging shoot – which will be appearing above water level any time now. Cut, cleaned, steamed, baked, sauteed – it is a lovely spring vegetable to rivals asparagus or bamboo shoots for flavour and versatility. You can keep eating the shoots until the flower spikes start to emerge, you don’t need waders to forage it, and, as Reed Mace is actually quite an invasive plant, it’s pretty sustainable to nibble bits off the clump! Last year’s flowers are starting to burst apart now, revealing the dense, cottony-fluffy seedheads inside.

I creep through the spongy, saturated margins of the little loch at the heart of the King’s Myre, to peer through the cattails to see what wintering birds are on it today. Goldeneye, a few gadwall, mallards, a coot, typically swimming against the tide of the rest, intent on his own adventure. No sign of the swans, too early for the osprey to be home yet. In the damp woodland, waterlogged alcoves and scrapes, from which spiky, angular trees grow erratically, wait for frogs and toads to arrive for spawning. Between bare branches, multiple trunks and stems and a storm of tiny twigs, the blue sky seeps as if caught in a vast, arboreal net, reflected in patches of water.

Bracket fungi show off their smug Cornish-pasty smiles of concentric bands, on wood they share with moss and lichen, and a thousand invertebrates. Spread across the leaf-carpeted floor, long-dead logs, un-barked, silvery, yielding, are home to thousands and thousands more, riddled with holes and channels and hidden tunnels in the fungus-softened wood. On cue, somewhere in a dead tree, a woodpecker begins his first tentative drumming and drilling.

I look up into the Scots Pines, their narrow crowns dancing around each other like polite or nervous teenagers, and see the shapes of jagged sashes of sky, so clear, so blue….

Look up, look through, look between – there is much to see. Or is there only sky?

When Clouds Don’t Float on High….

Sunday looked a bit damp from the bedroom window, but we wanted a walk, and we wanted to be in the hills, so with beginners’ minds, not choked with assumptions about walks in bad weather not being enjoyable, we set off to Little Glenshee, to walk the Obney hills to the Obelisk on Craig Gibbon that overlooks Glen Garr. As we neared the ford, we realised we were not going to get any fantastic views from the Highland Boundary Fault over the flatlands of lowland Perthshire. The cloud base, already low, was decidedly sinking like a lead balloon. I wondered where Wordsworth was actually wandering when he spoke about “a cloud that floats on high”. It is not in the nature of any self-respecting cloud to float. Sink, envelop, infiltrate, surround, creep into you…. Not float. Anyway, we donned the waterproofs and walked.

And this is what came of it.

First came the rocks; a stony uphill path;
clear water running over
the blue slates, the shambles of old quarries.
Upthrust from the plain, the sudden rise of hills unseen but
felt in thigh and chest, heartbeat thundering in swaddled air;
stones shiny, metamorphic, tale-telling, momentous.

Stones too, marked on the map,
rearing through a drenching mist:
“Cairn (remains of)” – markers, unknown burials or
merely outcrops – “Pile of Stones”: piles which shrink
as you approach across heather and fescue grass.

Then, the little things that lie
beside the track: startling pink of late-flowering heaths
pounce on you from the greyness of descending cloud;
tiny water buttercups, iridescent ferns.
And the spiders! Stalwart and smug in their jewel-encrusted orb webs,
Waiting in pole position even though there’s
Building still to be done. Every stem, every
firework explosion of rush and moor-grass holds a magical web.
Higher up, orb spiders fade away, their places taken
by crowded, ill-designed but functional hammock webs,
their makers hiding from shame or cunning, or just from the rain.
The democracy of glistening crystal water-gems adorns them all.

And so, the water: the cloud paints
every surface, you included, wet without knowing how.
A little pool, no more, stretches in the mind…
Arthurian legend, told by the poet:
“…and fling him far into the middle mere. Watch
what thou see-est, and lightly bring me word….”
No arm today “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful”
rises to catch a sword, no lady in this lake.
Just the mist weaving between the rushes and the ripples.
Mist magnifies the shade of a ghostly tree,
Tall as a mountain, shivering in and out of focus
-is it there, or is it just your eyes?

And finally, the Obelisk….

The track seemed to go on forever. We had no way of knowing how much further it was to the Obelisk, since there was no chance of picking out landmarks with visibility only 20m or less, and the risk that the map would dissolve if we got it out. We waved in the direction of the much-vaunted views that weren’t there. But I was happy having my vision curtailed; there was so much to see close by, so much that surprised and intrigued. The cloud muffled sound: occasionally, red grouse materialised and flew off – “go back! go back! go back!” – or a plaintive meadow pipit called damply.

Then on our right, where the view would have been, a monstrous hill seemed to rise sheer from a deep valley we knew wasn’t on the map. But no, it was surely a bank of darker cloud – there are no hills that high here. It faded in and out of sight, until the penny dropped – it was the start of the trees in the midst of which the Obelisk stands. But so tall! And so far away, across a great canyon of a valley. “Not going there,” we said, as the track ended abruptly and we ignored ourselves to head south towards the top of Craig Gibbon. I don’t know how mist and cloud so trick the eye, but the great gulf was actually just a slight dip in the terrain, and the supernaturally gigantic trees were but mature pines and larches clustered on top of the little summit.

The Obelisk itself, looming like an ancient pyramid from the foggy tangles of tree and heath, was a wonderful thing that day. Its history is rather pedestrian – just an expression of a 19^th century landowner’s ego who wanted everyone to see how far his land stretched. But the cloud slithered into its window-spaces; ferns flourished on the wet grey stone. Tiny frogs hopped among the slippery, exposed pine roots, and there were wild blaeberries for lunch.

River Tay, January

Early morning, sunny and dry. Silence, save for the mutterings of a river almost out of its banks and racing to reach the sea. Ground solid, unyielding – the type of hardness where you trip up on embedded clods and frazzles of vegetation hiding in the whiteness of a fourth consecutive deep frost – on ground already frozen solid by over a week of snow-half-thaw-freeze again.

Walking along the south shore of the Tay on a winter’s morning kind of ensures you won’t be in the sun very much, no matter how it dazzles the eye. In any case, the river has merrily engulfed the lower fishermen’s path that hugs its margin, so we walk, me and the dog, on the higher ground beneath the limes of the castle drive. Where are all the birds? I wonder. Not even the ubiquitous wood pigeons are out braving the cold. We pass an eroded river gulley and went down the steepish bank to the lower riverside path, joining at the point where it rises above water level and becomes what must once have been an elegant stroll for visitors to the castle. Fishing on the Tay is big business, and not affordable by ordinary people (unless you live in Perth and have the right to fish the stretch within the city boundary). We pass fishing huts on both banks that would make acceptable homes for small families. All locked up, today. No one but me and the dog.

Now I’m closer to the water, I start to notice a large number of white birds swimming rapidly downriver. What are they escaping from? Then I realise the white birds are actually lumps of ice, breaking away from the frozen banks and joining the ice and snowmelt that, with extended periods of rain, has made the river so massive today. A couple of gritty black-and-white ducks obstinately battle upriver, against the flow. What strong legs they must have! They veer off into a little eddying backwater on the opposite bank, and I see other water birds lurking there, taking a break from morning chores.

Beaver have been along here recently, but I struggle to fathom their purpose in felling one solitary tree, up the beach from the tumbling water. Maybe just hungry, or doing a bit of coppicing for future regrowth food supplies. I think the water birds could use a few more beavers to create respite backwaters.

Skirting a long curve round the back of the castle, I pass between forbidding walls of rhododendron bushes. Although they provide some shelter and a small stretch of unfrozen path. they block the view. I spend too much time trying to eliminate them from an ancient oak wood to appreciate their aesthetics. I guess they may provide good roosts for birds, though I still don’t see any.

The core path takes a long, curving route by a bend in the Tay, high above the river and nearly to Birnam before it joins the castle main drive which will take me back to the start if I go left. Closer to the castle, the trees are less scrubby and include many spectacular examples of exotic species, such as Noble Firs, Coast Redwoods and towering Pines. It becomes a landscape of avenues – tottering rows of limb-dropping beeches, stately Sequoias in orderly, sentry-like placings, frowning yew trees in sombre ranks, new avenues planted in recent decades to replace older ones that refuse to lie down and die. Best of all, to me, are the ridiculously shaggy and spreading avenues of old lime trees – each hiding in its own twiggy skirt of epicormic growth. In spring, they provide me with juicy, tender leaves for salad, and intoxicatingly sweet-smelling flowers in summer to dry and make into a sleep-inducing tisane.

As I walk between and under these vibrant specimen trees, I suddenly realise birds have started to chatter, and mixed flocks of finches, secretive tree-creepers and purposeful, hopping blackbirds are awake and accompanying me. Gazing up through the close pine trees, I can just see avian silhouettes flitting busily.

There are paths that could be taken to make a short-cut through the castle garden. Scottish access laws, some would say, give walkers a perfect right to take them, and no doubt some do. I’ve lived in a tied house on an estate where summer visitors frequently asserted this right to take a short cut to a beach through our garden, where we had small children playing and hens free-ranging – and on at least one occasion, hens were killed by loose, uncontrolled dogs. So personally, while I’m proud of our access laws, I think we should respect the privacy of residents and remember those laws also require the walker or cyclist to act responsibly. I’m fine with taking a long way round. The core path eventually passes in front of the castle at a distance (more avenues!), and I note the large, standing stone nearby, like an iceberg itself in an open, frost-enveloped field. It has no name. Does it link with other, less ancient perhaps but curiously-named stones in the area? One day I’ll hunt down the Witches’ Stone (well, this is Macbeth country!) and the Cloven stone….. but not today.

Today, I dawdle back under the limes to the gate, salute the mighty Tay with its miniature ice-packs, and begin to think about breakfast.

In the Woods of Atholl

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.

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 Blood of the Ploughman

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Have you ever been seduced by those advertisements in colour supplements for NEW! UNIQUE! varieties of fruit or vegetables accompanied by dazzling photos of their technicolor extra-ordinariness? The exciting modernity of red-fleshed apples is one example of excitable marketing – and many fall for it.

But rosy-fleshed apples are not new. Discovery, an early-ripening apple bred in 1950, is one example, and deservedly popular. But this is a story of a much older apple, first recorded in 1883 – but who knows when it first appeared….

Once upon a time, when the Carse of Gowrie – that rolling, flat and fertile plain of drained marshland on the north side of the River Tay that stretches from Perth to Dundee – was famous for its orchards, a weary ploughman was plodding home after a long day in the field. It was September, and an Indian summer, the sun had been blazing all day and the ploughman had finished his drink early and was very thirsty. To get home more quickly, he decided to take a short cut through the orchard of Megginch Castle – one of the finest orchards in the Carse.

As ever, the productive trees of Megginch were laden with fruit; apples of every type and colour, small, golden Scottish pears, plums and damsons. Many were ripe and even falling into the long grass. The tired ploughman thought how handsomely a ripe apple would quench his thirst and assuage his growing hunger – it was past suppertime.

Well,there was nobody about, and surely no-one would begrudge a hard-working labourer a windfall, so the ploughman helped himself. So delicious was the apple that the ploughman was struck by the idea that to leave these windfalls would be an awful waste, when his wife could make good use of them in the kitchen. The gardeners had all gone home for the evening, so who would notice? The ploughman began to fill his smock with ripe fruit, as the light began to fade from the day.

A warning shot rang out, and a furious cry: “STOP THERE, THIEF!” The ploughman swung round, and recognised the loping gait of the estate gamekeeper coming toward him. He began to run, apples held tightly in his smock. “I’m warning you man!” called the gamekeeper, but the ploughman blundered on. There was the sound of another shot……

At this point the story grows different arms and legs and embellishments depending on the audience and who’s telling the story. I confess to my part in encouraging flights of imagination. For genteel adults and those of a sensitive disposition, the story goes that the ploughman was wounded but escaped, managing to get home with at least some of his “stolen” apples. For children, the gorier version suits, and if you can throw in a ghost, so much the better.

So, either the ploughman fell, shot dead, in the orchard, his apples scattered, or his disgusted wife patched him up, but threw the apples on the midden to teach him a lesson. Either way, one of those blood-streaked fruits set seed to become a tree the following spring. And when that tree was grown, it bore dark red, deeply ribbed apples that ripened on the anniversary of that day in September when the ploughman was shot. And when the crisp, thirst-quenching flesh was sliced, the flesh of the apple was streaked and stained with the ploughman’s blood.

Thus was born the famous Scottish dessert apple, the Bloody Ploughman. From the dwarf tree in my garden came this exquisitely juicy, neither sickly sweet nor yet sour, apple for my breakfast, with cereal and yoghurt.

As for Megginch orchard, it’s still there, not just surviving but thriving. After all, it’s practically next door to the Cairn O’Mhor cider makers. Many of the old trees from the age of Victoria remain, and still bear excellent crops, but also there is a new orchard of modern, productive varieties, and a new heritage orchard, containing all the Scottish apple varieties that can be found.

You can be sure the bloody ploughman found his way home safely.

Mushroom-hunting, between Lowlands and Highlands

mushrooms1 A full evening, two nights and two days of rain. Humidity hangs in the air, the soil beneath my feet pulses damply, the mosses are full and green. Raindrops still coat every flower of grass and frond of bracken, but the sun is shining. The timing is right.

I go for mushrooms in the place where the Highlands meet the Lowlands, where the land is rent by fault-lines and rainbow-coloured slate out-crops and erupts. I pass the court hill where outlaws were tried and hung from the oak trees of Birnam Wood, three hundred years after Macbeth was king of this nation. I stalk through the devastation where the larches were, before they got phytophthera and were felled. There is nothing there now. But in the crowded wood beside the path, one big larch has been missed, and the sun shines in tawny patches upon last year’s fallen needles. It catches on a small group of Larch Boletes, glistening and tawny themselves in their cosy cohabitation with the tree. I take one. A deadly Panther Cap smirks nearby and I ignore it.

Broken and battered, an old sweet chestnut tree is mushrooms3 surviving the metallic blundering of the foresters’ vehicles, harvesters and forwarders, along the track. How did it get here? Not a native tree, so planted a long time ago, when this haphazard forest was occupied in a different way. Who planted it? Did they hope for chestnuts to roast on autumn fires?

I follow the hint of a track down a slope towards the thicket where rhododendron is making its usual bid for world domination. No more than a wisp of trodden grass and bent fern, my path diverges and peters out at a crop of the biggest chanterelles I’ve mushrooms2 ever seen, tucked into the side of a rugged bank that oozes water. Was this path made by a human who knew where to look, or by another animal? Someone told me yesterday that the best chanterelles are on banks and slopes because the deer can’t graze them there.

I’m always competing with other animals for my dinner. But I’ve had lots of chanterelles this summer and there is still a dish at home in the fridge. I take a couple. I have rules when I’m foraging. Never take more than I need, only take a percentage of whatever I find, leave old mushrooms to sporulate, leave young ones for tomorrow, for the next predator or none, for others just to see and love.

Under birch, I acquire some young Brown Birch Boletes and a single Cep. Ploughing through forest, I note the tiny horsehair mushrooms are up and about, trooping on twigs and the needles of conifers. I ignore, too, the many “wee brown jobs” of mushrooms that once I diligently took home as single specimens to try to identify with hand lens and spore print. Some I succeeded in pinning down, too, only to forget them altogether until I came across them again in another wood, another year. Life’s too short now, I am focused on my prey. mushrooms4

Huge shaggy mushrooms shout out to me as I pass another grove of conifers and I am lured in. But they are the uneaten halves of massive fir cones – red squirrels have eaten the succulent tops from every one, and laugh at me from the tree tops.

They cluster in the fallen forest by the dam, the new flush of Saffron Milk Caps, just where I thought they’d be, and just at the right stage before the fungus gnats lay their eggs. They are sound, and plentiful and could make a wonderful painting, with their improbable colours of orange, cream and khaki-green. But they won’t, for I take my portion and weave them into a spell of dinner.

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Feral Berries

These fields, which now yawn under the predictable rotation of wheat, barley, potatoes and the occasion excitement of peas or beans, were all berry fields once. It was the biggest and best-known of five plantations around here, where canvas tinker villages sprouted annually at harvest time, and the needs of the workforce were met in this now silent, gone-to-work, wee town by a wealth of grocers, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, tailors and shoemakers. At least five surgeons lived here in case of accident or emergency. The berries that weren’t eaten on the spot or smuggled home by the pickers all went south, on the new branch line connected to the village for the purpose, to become jam on well-to-do breakfast tables.

Now in the quiet forgetfulness of displaced industry and commuter inertia, tangled woods wrap themselves round the margins of large exposed fields. The old track takes you past the farmhouse that is no longer a farm, the steading that is no longer a steading, and wanders aimlessly north, between the remnants of its hedgerows. Long ago, it was the only road north, save for an older track across the moss.

Here and there, a narrow change in fencing or a wooden post marks where one of the many footpaths to and from the berry fields used to run. A curious right of way plummets through someone’s back garden and still has legal status. Patches of No Man’s Land persist, and where they do, the ghosts of the berry fields haunt and echo.

feral berries 1 In the dense shade of a triumphant elder spinney, a smattering of redcurrant bushes blooms and fruits, scant rich redness catching the eye as the berries ripen. They are small and sour, yet somehow incandescently flavoursome. Where the track narrows to a muddy path, wild gooseberries make a wee thicket. Their fruits are also tiny, and round. Are they genuinely wild?

Or the depleted progeny of an old cultivar, maybe Scottish Chieftain or Lord Elcho, prized a century ago, now nearly forgotten?

But the raspberries, they are everywhere; an abundance that makes cultivation seem a frivolous and needless expenditure of time. They spring from lawns and borders in untidy local gardens, in numbers that cannot be put down to the activities of a large and hungry population of blackbirds. They line the hedges that border the track, they rise lushly above the willow herb and tall grasses of woodland clearings. They are bountiful enough to gather for the freezer, but, more often, they make a wayside breakfast for people out with their dogs on sunny summer mornings, staring vacantly into the trees, popping raspberries like pills.

In one small hedge remnant, the raspberries go unseen and untried by strangers. These IMG_20190727_093257760 diminutive rasps are a pale golden yellow. They hide behind fiercely protective stands of nettle, and amid the jaggy stems of the hawthorn. These are the sweetest, most succulent of the feral berries. They melt in the mouth and almost dissolve in the hand. Any attempts to gather a large quantity fail; they are nought but juice by the time they get home. Those who know about them keep a close eye, and say nothing, then give the game away when it’s picking time by beating narrow paths through the grass and nettles to get at this choice fruit.

All in the past now, the Auchtergaven and Bankfoot berry fields. The history of a place often speaks through its plants, and may have something to say about its present..