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?

The Difference a Drop of Rain Makes

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.

Sphagnum, Lesser Spearwort, ladder ferns and willows congregarte in wet ditches.

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.

Chickweed Wintergreen peeks out from ferns and sphagnum mosses

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

Ambushed by Birdsong in Taymount Wood

“Much laid plans” and all that. I knew exactly what I was going to write about in my second post for West Stormont Woodland Group. It involved walking quickly and without distraction to King’s Myre in Taymount Wood.

But on this sunny, yet briskly chilly morning in March, the birds had other plans for me. We hadn’t got far when the dog was infuriated by an ear-piercing whistling made, apparently, by a bush. Eventually a tiny bit of the bush detached itself and was revealed as the smallest bird with the loudest voice – the wren, bustling ahead of us from twig to twig. The dog hates wrens. They scold, scoff, and shout at him, warning everyone he’s about.

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We dawdled on. Taymount contains a fair variety of tree species for a plantation. Tall Scots Pines lifted their crowns to the sun. Here and there, where selective felling had left a pine with elbow room, the narrow confines of its growth could be seen morphing into the mighty spread of the Caledonian pines. Larger clearings now host dense, self-seeded birch, through which a flock of greenfinches scurried. Brown bracken, unusual in this wood, lay beneath, thick enough to bed a herd of beasts.

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We were on the cusp of spring. Robins proclaimed territories sweetly, compellingly, from field walls. We saw and heard shrill blue-tits, piping long-tails, busy coal-tits, always on the go. Great tits were most strident, high in the trees. “I’m yours! Look at me!” they seemed to cry in their repetitive, compulsive mating calls. Gazing up focused my attention on the trees, too, as silver firs soared into the blue sky. We fantasised about crested tits, one day, coming here.

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We came to some Sitka Spruce which had evaded felling. Sitka is a splendid, statuesque tree when grown as a specimen. If it has no place in the Scottish ecosystem, tell that to the coal-tits. These spruces were laden with dangling ginger cones and coal tits moved systematically from branch to branch, eating the seeds. Then a spotted woodpecker, who’d been ever-present with his drumming, exploded out of hiding and passed right over our heads, a massive spruce cone gripped in his bill.

By the time we got to King’s Myre, we just enjoyed the sunshine by the loch. Another day for that tale!

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February: Five Mile Wood

beech saplings

Dreich doesn’t begin to cover it. Weeks of rain, sleet or snow, and the wood is wet, dank, chilly. One storm has passed, another is forecast, and a group of multi-stemmed birches, green with lichen and algae, droop and wait despondently.

I take the rutted cycling path that skirts the woodland edge. Under the tall, fiendishly straight Scots Pines, many scattered beech saplings nestle in their winter boleros of retained leaves. Beech mast is everywhere, but I do not see the older tree from which it has fallen. Beech seedlings tend not to come up near a parent tree, but somewhere there must be a Mother.

Snow lingers crystalline along the clay-bottomed ditches where black, cold water lurks and trickles. There’s a pond under the pines which so looks like it was formed by an explosion I call it the bomb crater. No signs of frog spawn yet. Several tracks and paths meander where animals come down to drink. Duckweed covers a third of the surface; in the increasing rain thousands of ripples intersect and make diffraction patterns over the other two thirds.

bomb crater

Birds – except for a robin – are silent and glum. A flock of pigeons clatters off towards the field; freshly ploughed, it offers them nothing but the stones that lie heaped in the field corner. How many decades or centuries of cultivation have contributed to this pile? This side of the fence, someone a long time ago arranged stones round a favourite tree, where they remain, moss-covered and half-buried. Larger rocks with wavy patterns etched onto their surface erupt in groups from the forest floor, scarcely distinguishable from the stumps of felled trees. Moss, lichens, algae democratically envelop all.

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There are charred-looking remains of mushrooms by the path. I think they were Blackening Russulas, an abundance of them. I follow their orbital trail and suddenly find myself under a towering old beech tree, with many spreading branches and a hollowing trunk that makes a chimney of dead wood and fungal rots. Swings hang from two branches; insects and other invertebrates burrow into the soft core of the tree and make their homes. The woodpecker will soon come calling for her dinner, other birds will nest and shout from the canopy. I have found the Mother of Beeches, and of much else besides.

mother of beeches

Five Mile Wood and Taymount Wood are former Forestry Commission plantations just north of Perth. They have for a while been transitioning from industrial timber production to a subtle integration with the wild, and people are part of that wild change. The Commission have put them up for sale, and local people have formed West Stormont Woodlands Group. We are hoping to implement a community buy-out. You can find out more about the plans and group activities at http://www.weststormontwoodlandgroup.org.uk Over the coming year, I intend to write a monthly blog post “Words for Our Woods”about the wildness of the woods, in support of WSWG. This is the first.

Among the Caledonian Pines

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These are free-range pine trees, the Scots Pine, Pinus sylvatica. Not the heavy, lowering plantation evergreens erroneously referred to as pine forest, but which are more likely to be spruce, fir or sometimes the non-native black pine, Pinus nigra nigra. Recognise the Scots Pine by the gingery red of the bark on the upper trunk. Black pines stay grey.

These pines do not grow in battery-cage rows. They give themselves space to expand, to stretch out to unseen horizons; they live with dignity and grandeur; they are splendid and heroic in their dying. The Caledonian Pine Forest is multi-aged, thanks to decades of careful management to reduce deer predation and facilitate natural regeneration – seed from local trees giving rise to progeny that fits the landscape that made it like a glove. Because of age diversity in the trees, there’s also diversity in height, spread, form and density. That means greater biodiversity. And beauty.

The forests made by the spreading Caledonian pine are light and airy. The ground is soft with layers of needles, kind to the dog’s arthritic paws, so he bounces puppy like full-tilt along meandering paths and up and down banks and ridges, grinning like a mad thing to encourage his slow, plodding humans.

Look up.

The overground network of branches, which look too heavy for the boles to support, whispers with the quicksilver flow of red squirrels. Titmice flicker from bough to bough – coaltits in pairs, long-tailed ones in squeaky flocks. There may be crested tits in pursuit of pine nuts, for the Caledonian pinewoods are home to species rarely seen elsewhere. Shy and secretive, many of them, like the Pine Marten; or striking like the Scottish Crossbill -possibly the closest we have to a native parrot. Or the Horse of the Woods, the iconic, pied Capercaillie, whose shyness vanishes embarrassingly during the mating season, when you really, really don’t want to bump into a male bird.

Look down.

Roots lie just below the surface; barely visible but easy to trip over. Mosses cover them; the translucent yellows, greens and pinks of sphagnum are almost luminous in the wetter areas. The smell of peaty soil mingles with the soft fragrance of resin and bark. Fringing the shallow bogs are ling and heaths, the former still in flower, blaeberries and ferns. Throughout, fallen twigs and branches, last year’s needles and crackling debris of fern make a thousand homes for maybe a thousand life forms; plant, animal, invertebrate, bird, fungus and bacterium.

Onto these worlds within worlds, light rain emerges; rain so light, so like to air the raindrops are quantum particles which move and spin, randomly, beyond the realms of gravity. This is light-rain, on a world shrunk to infinitesimally small or seen from afar, from where the Scots pine woods become mere fractal patterns on the margins of time.

Once the Caledonian Pine Forest was the dominant vegetation type of much of Highland Scotland. It lightly brushed the sides of tall mountains; it thrived on islands in linear lochs, it swept through the glens. Farmers and crofters cleared some of it, but also made homes among the trees, for shelter and because it was a lovely land. Then came the changes, borne of greed, fear and hatred, that nearly pushed the Caledonian Forest and all it nurtured to extinction. Both sheep and the deer on the “sporting” estates which displaced poor or powerless people ate the succulent young trees, preventing regeneration – the story’s well known. Then there was the snatching of the big trees for the war effort. They were cut down to make boxes to store ammunition. Doubtless someone made a lot of money from that.

Now, thanks to hard work, vision and the dedication of many unsung heroes and heroines, the all-embracing arms of old Caledonian Pines are spread wide, young trees erupt vertically, baby trees get underfoot and choose odd places to grow. The trees are back on the mountainsides. Long may they flourish and grow.

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Other Tree Species are Available

In Devon, they say they have hearts of oak. Here, in the sun-baked, heat-islanded south of the County, where the thick-hedged meadows run up and down hills like a lumpy quilt on a badly-made bed, you can see why. Oaks are everywhere, dominating the treescape. They surge out of the deep, dark lanes, they march along tangled, towering verges, and straddle the corners of the fertile fields.

oak1 Broad-crowned and rooted like mountains, they are the very epitome of strength. In the minds of humans, they are usually labelled “he” and associated with male-ness. Strong, protective, enduring, courageous …. dominant, powerful, overbearing, masterful? Strange to note (if not surprising) that trees thought of as “she” (such as the Silver Birch, Devon’s “Lady of the Woods”) are graceful, delicate, drooping and indecisive in form. And is it only Devon Men who have “hearts of oak”?

Oak trees, Birch trees, most trees in the British Isles, are hermaphrodite anyway, both male and female. Oak trees are much more than a gender stereotype. They form worlds in themselves: roots, bark, branches, leaves, roots and fruits all playing host to a myriad of organisms, fulfilling many functions. They are home, food source, shelter, entertainment, nursery, recreation ground. Allegedly, but probably only mythically, oaks have even housed the occasional human wearing a silly crown. In their own right and as part of the natural world, they are extraordinary, important and awe-inspiring.

Even when they die, they will take centuries about it, growing steadily more stag-headed and gaunt, silver against the blue summer skies. From a distance, no sign of life is discernible. Get closer, and leaves spurt from odd branches below the hollow, woodpecker-mined, bark-less upper limbs where a solitary crow keeps an avid watch on the meadow. Dismissed as dead, and yet they survive. oak2

People pin not only their assumptions of gender onto indifferent trees, but also sometimes their anxieties and aspirations. They look for reflections of what they’d like to be, and how they’d like to portray others. In Scotland, we pin some of our national psyche on the Scots Pine – another giant of the landscape given to vast and spreading majesty when rooted in Caledonian soil. But also, beneath the surface of the obvious, on the subtle, fey Rowan, reverenced if not revered, the magic totem of croft and byre. What characteristics do we borrow from our trees?

Hearts of Oak– that Kiplingesque phrase so redolent of Drake in his hammock, Queen and Country, the ships that saw off the Armada. Do the men of Devon – and others – who identify with the oak tree incline, as a result, to certainty, strength of purpose and an assumption of their own inevitable survival? Are they made sure of their ability to go it alone, to forge their own paths, to take back control? Are they programmed never to doubt that to succeed against all odds without need for cooperation or compromise, is admirable and right?

What if the oak trees were to fall? What does it take to make people change, to reach out?

Just as assignments of gender onto trees only mean something to humans, so too is attributing nation status to any species. Oak, Pine, Birch or Rowan – none are English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and neither do they “belong” to any other race. They are not the property of local government. None are even endemics; they are uncaring of borders and boundaries. They follow no human creed, political standpoint or philosophy. They are trees.

Oaks have wonderful heart-wood, but no hearts. Heart are muscles found in a wide range of animal species, including humans. Change of heart is a condition humans sometimes get, too.

The Forest on the Beach

It’s a man-made entity, on the face of it, this forest merging with the shifting sands of a vast, energising chameleon of a beach. Planted once in an orderly and respectable fashion, tall pines rise obediently from thin, infertile soil and duly make timber. Deep inside, away from salt winds, they have done as they were asked. They have stabilised the soil, reached for water, made partnerships with their own particular fungi. They are the forest they were asked to be. tentsmuir3

But on the edge, where the horizontal reigns in the landscape, where the sands continue to shift and grow, retreat and fail, and merge into mud, they cannot sustain their sheer verticality. Bald-headed individuals hesitate, stagger, lean, tip and fall. Blasted by sand, they desiccate, warp. They become subjects of the horizontal, their limbs curl and contort, sculpted by vicious winds from the sea. Beautiful in their carved and etched simplicity of form, they lie frozen in the hot, drying sun.

The forest on the beach shrugs off its manufactured origins, and enters the wild.

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The beach goes on for miles before the trickling waves are reached, even when the tide is high. At the point, it is a self-contained, secret world, traversed near the forest by tracks through the dunes made by a largely secretive population of animals, including domestic and human. The tracks join and separate, re-unite, diverge, vanish into long grass or an unexpected creek. They seem to make no sense.

Do shipwrecked sailors still dwell in tents among the dunes? Where are they hiding?

The dunes and butterfly-filled dune slacks, where wild thyme and cross-leaved heath celebrate summer, give way to wide, subtly merging, littoral zones of shimmering sand. Eventually, wave-patterned beach and tidal inlets signal that the old sea is near.

puffball

Curiously, between the two, right in the middle of the beach, there is a small wood, mainly made up of towering, stag-headed alder. Under it, stunted or dwarf willows (who knows which?), broom, tall grasses, flowers. Unlikely eruptions of puffballs appear where cows have grazed. There is quiet shade, a rustling of leaves louder than the still far-off sea.

How did this little wood get here, in the middle of a beach? How long has it been here, where once was ocean? Will it survive long enough to bear fruit?

Then, movement from the bushes below the alders; an indelible assertion of dark brown hide against sun-washed grass and striated shade. A deer is moving through the little wood on the beach. tentsmuir1