August 2024
I think about trees a lot. I think about the greens of their leaves, the browns and furrows of their bark, about textures and scents. I think about the life that lives in and on their bodies – a hawk-moth pupae, a jay, a wood mouse, a barbestelle bat, the mosses that fur their feet. I think about riverine willows drinking deeply. I think of the trees I’ve climbed and the willow whose branches I sat in as a child, fantasizing about faraway places beneath starry skies. It was my dreaming tree. I wonder if it still exists, if it remembers me.
I once witnessed the release of pollen from a pine tree on the island of La Palma, a subtle breath, light as gossamer thread on a breeze-less day. I remember buttress-rooted giants and walking stilt palms in a rainforest. I remember a Ceiba tree at the gateway to Tikal National Park in Guatemala, standing like a sentry guardian at the threshold between the Upper and Under worlds of the Maya, birds nesting in its branches, mythological bats in it’s roots. I think about roots too, twisting into unknown, secret places in the earth.
Trees forest my mind. I am obsessed with them, more so now that I live in a coastal town with few trees. I am a Woods person more than a Sea person; I am a Tree person – in a forest one can hide.
My love of trees has brought me to the most ancient forest in Europe, the Bialoweiza Forest in Poland. I am walking a path with my partner, Kevin, through the protected area where one needs a guide. Our guide, Joanna, is with us not to protect us from the red deer, elk, lynx, wolves and bison that roam this forest, but to safeguard the forest itself. We walk at a slow pace, listening and watching. It is May so the leaves are all out at their gleaming best and there is much birdsong; Joanna raises her arm and points to a high branch. Through binoculars I can see a small black and white bird, a collared flycatcher. It is the month they breed and the only time they can be heard, a high, piercing trill of a song. It haunts us as we follow the path deeper into the forest.
Trees tower over us, forging their branches into the canopy, ancient oaks, limes, hornbeams and Scots pines. I bathe in their green light, cooled by their dappled shade. The Japanese have a word, ‘komorebi’, which translates as the play of sunlight shining through leaves. It is beautiful that such a thing is recognised. I am thirsty for this light, this green. And there are many greens – the ‘apple’ green of the small leaved limes, chalky lichen green, jades and emeralds, the green of wood sorrel and the darker, green of the pines. I am to learn that our human eyes see more greens than any other colour; once we lived with trees, we came from forests.
I belong here, I belong in the forest says some archaic part of myself.
For a moment I take myself back to the time of our remote ancestors, who were attuned to every nuance of their environment, every sight, scent and sound of the earth.
Joanne points out the scaly, fissured bark of a Scots pine and explains how experts know from its texture and colour that there was a fire here 200 years ago. There are stories everywhere. This part of the forest has been largely unmanaged, as it’s been under the protection of royalty and those in power for hundreds of years. However, from the 14th to the 19th century peasants were allowed to collect wild honey and take some bark for baskets or fuel. High on up on a tall, straight trunk we see a gash that was made deliberately all those years ago to encourage wild bees to nest for their honey. Today, especially in the protected area, the forest is left alone. Even elms here with Dutch Elm Disease are allowed to stand until they can stand no longer, surrendering to the forest floor to become food and shelter for beetles, fungi and countless other creatures.
Despite it being spring, there are dead trees and fungi everywhere. Joanne points out the red-banded polypore and the aptly named ‘hoof fungus’, shaped, as its name suggests, like a horse’s hoof. Rot and decay suffuses this ancient forest. We pass through, but what of the animals, plants and other life forms that live and die here? Briefly I find myself musing on death, about how much lush, verdant life we witness springing forth from it. There are many layers. The forest is a metaphor for life and death and depth, with so much unseen beneath our feet and in the canopy, where intricate lives are lived out, quietly, almost imperceptibly.
Listen. Joanne tells us to wait, to be quiet for a moment. A faint, high pitched squeak emanates from a log. It is not the wind, but the sound of longhorn beetles inside the dead wood; the forest speaks in a myriad of ways.
Piu piu piu – a wood warbler calls and there are chaffinches everywhere. We hear the high notes of firecrests and treecreepers sewing up the trees with sound.
Then we hear drumming, a gentle, rhythmic tap tap tapping of bill on wood. We gather beneath a fir tree, binoculars held aloft, seeking out the culprit. A bird I don’t recognise, circles the trunk. He’s a three toed woodpecker Joanne informs us. You can tell he’s a he from the yellow patch on his head. Looking for spruce bark beetles, he seems oblivious to our gaze. We stand and watch him until we get cricks in our necks and he moves off to find a meal of sap on a different tree.
In the mud on the path are prints of red deer and the scat of pine marten and wolf. Yes wolf. I feel a tingle of excitement to know that wolves come here and that if we were able to follow the trail it would lead us to a live wild predator going about its life.
Here everything – every animal, plant or fungi – has a place. Here every living creature is accepted.
I pause, I want to sit down on a moss covered log and take everything in. I am particularly drawn to the textures – a cross-hatch of twigs here, bark fissures there – and to detail – a sweeping loop of honeysuckle, all the different leaf shapes that surround us. Another time and place, I would take out my sketchbook and make sketches, scribble notes. But now I feel the tug of time pulling at us, so I consciously note visual impressions and follow the others. It was mid afternoon when we set off, now the sunlight slants in gauzy evening shafts through the trees, picking out dancing crane flies and thrumming bees. A hoverfly hangs suspended, holding space, holding time, a pause in which to notice. I savour these moments, secret these memories, replenish and nourish the forest of my mind.
Back home I look out on to the tarmac and red brick of a car park. There isn’t a tree in sight, just a few privet hedges and the lawns around our flats that are regularly tidied and strimmed to baldness by an over enthusiastic army of gardeners. I turn my back on the straight, urban lines and take out a second-hand, hard-backed book from my art cupboard, recently bought from a charity shop. I open it’s pages to the central spread. Here I stick in white, cartridge paper, then draw and cut away leaves, vines and trees, creating layers of illustrated pages filled with bison, birds and other animals and vegetation. I create a forest and lose myself in the detailed tree-filled worlds I manifest. If I cannot see trees close by, I imagine and draw them into being from the forest of my mind.