Wilderness: Chapter 11

The Ferns have Captured Stillness: In which we attempt to plant all the trees before the coldest winter for forty years

This is the eleventh chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. This is my story, about my search for belonging and about seeking solace in nature by rewilding a forgotten fragment of Somerset.

Short dispatches from our rewilding journey are available in Wild Notes if you’d like a quick tonic from the natural world.

Somerset - January

I lay out the trees in checkerboard bundles: dog rose, dogwood, guelder rose, hazel, field maple, five times as many hawthorn. I end up using a pickaxe to plant the trees, slamming the point into the frozen ground and then using the broader blade to slide the stones apart. I drop the root into the dark gap and seal the slit in the soil, then hammer in a bamboo cane and spiral a plastic guard round both sapling and stake.

Our neighbour, Mike Johnson, who, along with his wife, Hayley, recently moved into the strawberry-pink Apple Tree Cottage at the end of the valley, takes pity on us and comes to help. We are very socially distanced - he’s at one end of the hedge-to-be, and I am at the other. Mike is an ex-gymnast and professional runner. He’s small and powerful and works five times faster than me, planting several metres of hedge in a double-row in a single afternoon.

Our friend, Lucy, who’s a gardener and allowed to work outside, comes and helps one day, along with her partner, Wayne. For a day - albeit at a distance and with Lucy and Wayne bringing their own coffee and cake - we have a semblance of the communal hedge-planting day I’d longed for.

We plant two rows of saplings along the West Mendip Way from the bottom of Jasmine Orchard, all the way past Lilac Wood and along the field to the start of Bluebell Wood. There are some left over, so we also plant the saplings in a line along the other side of the footpath, past Daisy Meadow, our tiny wildflower meadow, where snake’s head fritillary and wild crocus bloom in spring, and along the border of Willow Field, where we keep the rescue chickens.

It’s not enough to plant the hedge; it also has to be cared for. Grass, for instance, could quickly smother the new plants, stealing water and nutrients. A local tree surgeon has dropped off a huge conical mound of wood chippings in the entrance to the field, and now they all need to be moved to the hedge (which now runs for almost a kilometre) and piled thickly round every tree to help suppress weeds.

I dig my spade into the heap and shovel chippings into the wheelbarrow. The fragments of wood are different shades of cream and biscuit, some edged with shale-grey and mushroom-brown bark, and laced with frills of monk’s hood lichen. The smell of freshly cut wood rises from where I’ve bit into the chippings, maple-syrup sweet, undercut with notes of cedar. As I dig deeper into the pile, it releases a warm breath that hangs suspended for a moment in the cold air, as the wood, slowly starting to decompose, grows hot as it dies.

I’d asked the tree surgeon not to include any Leylandii, as the leaves contain cyanide and we don’t want to poison our fledgling hedge. Unfortunately, there must have been some in the bottom of the truck, so as I reach the base of the mound, the wood gives way to decaying leaves and smells sharply of pine. I scrape the dregs of the chippings down the path from the gate, filling in the ruts and tyre-tracks, with a thick mulch of Leylandii.

Altogether, Jaimie and I shift 17 cubic metres of wood chippings from the field and along the base of the new hedge. We’ve been told by the Woodland Trust that the key to the hedge succeeding is keeping it weed-free, not just at the start when we plant but for at least the first couple of years. They send me an email reminding me - and that I’ve signed a contract to care for the hedge for 30 years.

When I tell Lucy that we’ve finished mulching the hedge, she says matter-of-factly that we will need to weed the entire hedge at the end of summer, and again, the following spring. I feel - after the Herculean task of levelling the ground, adding top soil, planting over 1000 trees in frozen ground, mainly by ourselves, and then moving tonnes of wood chippings - that something has broken inside me.

I am emotionally and physically hollowed out.

It’s early February and the temperature is minus three. There’s been a short, light snowfall in the night; the snow is granular, like chips of hail, trapped between the chips of wood blanketing the hedge. Where it’s been caught in spider’s webs, it’s turned them into crystalline dream catchers.

I watch two roe deer, a young stag and a hind, wander through the field and into Lilac Wood. In the gloom, I can see their white scuts glowing; they look like hikers with backpacks. They reappear in the orchard and seem confused by the fence. Eventually, they retrace their footsteps through the wood, across the field and disappear into Bluebell Wood.

Primroses have started blooming early by the ruined pig style in Hazel Meadow. They look wind worn.

It grows colder. And colder. We have the coldest night for forty years. Icicles hang from the stable roof, and grass lining the edge of the stream has frozen into thick clumps. In the early morning moonlight, I walk down the bridlepath, hoping our new hedge hasn’t frozen solid too.

In the bank beneath the saplings, every vein, every hair, every frilled edge, every stem had been outlined by the frost, hard and sharp and silver. Grass has been transformed into swords, nettles to weapons, ferns to chainmail, and creeping buttercup leaves to shields. I see frozen dewdrops for the first time, round and gleaming like pearls; I roll a couple from leaves, dust them of frost; they lie glistening in my palm for the briefest of moments.

The world has become black and white. In the monochrome, I spot something bright, brighter than blood in the snow. It’s a single scarlet elf cup, a member of the cup fungi family, growing on a dead branch, like a fledgling’s gaping vermillion maw.

In spite of the cold, we have to plant the remaining trees, the fifty extra silver birch The Woodland Trust accidentally sent us. We create a copse at one end of the field, segueing into the edge of Bluebell Wood. I imagine that, as the trees grow, it will be magical: the trunks shimmering with a pearlescent sheen; the wind shivering through the tooth-edged leaves.

A couple of valleys along, in Blagdon, the diary manufacturer, Yeo Valley, has created an Organic Gardens. In the gardens there’s a glade of silver birches with a winding path through the centre: it’s underplanted with white cyclamen, foxgloves and ferns. I want ours to look like that too one day.

Once all the trees are planted and we plot a path through the middle, I noice a drift of wild snowdrops at the far end, below a hillside of hart’s tongue ferns that seems to cascade down the steep slope of Bluebell Wood. I think of Gene Baro’s poem, The Ferns:

‘here on the forest floor 
the ferns have captured stillness.’

I realise that I’m thinking about this all wrong: I’m thinking about gardening, and this is not what we are doing - we are rewilding. We are helping nature recover; we’re not here to manage it. Planting native trees is not the same as dictating what flowers will grow beneath them.

It takes me a while to let go of the ethereal image I’ve conjured. But I know I need to.

Only the oak and the willow have more insects associated with them than silver birch. This glade will one day be home to angle-shades, buff tip and pebble hook-tip moths, to birch milk cap and birch brittlegill; siskin and greenfinches; redpoll and redstart; deer will peel the peeling bark and badgers trundle through a thicket of red campion and creeping buttercup.

Jaimie starts to create a fence using the old rotten fence posts he’d pulled out at the end of the previous year. It will run from the top of our land to the West Mendip Way and connect each end of the new fence. As he works, a buzzard drops, like a magic trick, landing behind the bonfire and emerging a moment later to sit on the stump of one of the sycamore roots the tractor had pulled out to make way for the fence. Its legs are brilliant yellow. It looks confident, assured. I wonder if it’s last year’s youngster who spent so long perched on the telegraph pole at the bottom of the garden, watching us through the windows as Jasmine and I bent over her school books. Now it flies low across the field, ignoring Jaimie, and returns with a small black creature in one foot.

Jaimie’s fence skirts Bluebell Wood so that the field, Jasmine Orchard and Lilac Wood are now fully enclosed by the old and the new fence. (I’ve made this sound easy, but it has taken Jaimie every weekend for a couple of months, and required bashing in the fence posts with a contraption like a giant metal bucket with handles on either side, appropriately known as a post rammer.)

Now we stand at the bottom of the field and admire Jaimie’s handiwork: four buzzards soar high on the thermals above our house, occasionally diving at each other; sun gilds their wide wings; their kee-kaw calls echo through the valley. I think they must be teenagers. Perhaps they’re playing.

We are now ready for our first domestic proxies.

But what animals are we going to get? And, more to the point, who will lend them to us?

People say that good things come in threes, but three events spell the end of this short period in my life when I feel safe. The final one prompts our family to move again.

First, a man kills my puppy in front of me.

Bunty and I are playing in the garden, but then she runs down the drive and squeezes under the garden gate. She tears across the road.

I run after her, panic-stricken, calling her. She abruptly turns and comes racing back to me, tongue lolling out, suddenly a little scared that she’s too far from home. A young man, driving too fast down our suburban road, runs her over just before she reaches me. In spite of her internal injuries and broken back, she sprints back up our steep drive to me and collapses in my arms.

She dies in my lap.

A small part of me also dies that day.

I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been if Bunty had lived and I’d had a companion who loved me unconditionally. I know theoretically that my mother loved me, but she never once told me so in my entire life. My stepfather also loved me. He made it clear from the start that, as he put it, it was ‘a package deal’ - me and my mother. He never wanted to make me feel excluded or that I was not his daughter. And yet, from the time I was three and had already lost my biological father and moved between three continents and two war zones, he called me ‘Awkward Annie’ and said that he  loved me ‘in spite of everything’.

As I grew older, my parents’ love for me felt increasingly conditional: it rested upon how much I helped my mum care for her three children she and my step-dad had, whilst she also tried to work and run a house, and on how well I performed academically.

Like any child, I just wanted to be loved.

I had hardly ever heard from my father, Nazim, since my mum had divorced him. He would occasionally remember to send me a birthday card. This year, I was excited because for my eighth birthday he had not only sent a card but also some money to buy a birthday present.

I write to thank him and say we are going to get a ‘dovey’. Mum laughs at my letter saying he’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.

But as I requested, she buys me a duvet - it’s cold in my top floor bedroom in our Victorian house - with a white cover that has dark blue and light blue wavy lines, which remind me of the sea.

There’s a little money left over and I say I’d like a cuddly toy animal. We visit a large toy store in Belfast and I choose a fluffy white cat with green plastic eyes. Mum, with my baby sister, Sheila, in tow, and pregnant with my sister Deirdre, insists I buy a doll you can feed with a bottle, who wets herself so you have to change her nappies, and a pram to push her around in.

I don’t get it. I already have one real baby I can feed with a bottle and push in a pram. I don’t like dolls. When Simon, the neighbour’s son, deigns to let me help him make stuff explode in his wooden tank, I borrow his cast-off Action Man and toy gun. Mum gives me a lecture on the morality of weapons that goes over my head and tells me to use a stick. I’m mortified; no one will take me seriously if I point a stick at them! She makes me return Simon’s gun. In retrospect, I can see that a brown girl with a replica gun in a country where knee-capping is common could be misinterpreted. We argue and buy nothing.

A couple of weeks later, Mum takes me back to the shop. I’m convinced we’re going to get the white cat; my mother says the cat is disgusting and is still intent on the doll. By now I’m used to trips to Belfast: it seems normal to go through an armed checkpoint, then a ten-foot-high security fence, while the car is scanned for bombs, before having to queue on the pavement to enter any shop, and only finally be allowed to enter once everyone has been searched by a security guard at the door.

This time though, as we drive down the street towards the store, I have an uneasy sense of dislocation. Mum slows the car and we crawl to a halt. This is the place where the toy shop was, but now there’s only a metal frame, three storeys high. Parts of the concrete floor are left, and strangely, on the top floor, the skeletons of prams. Nothing else remains.

Mum doesn’t stop the car and we drive back home. She doesn’t need to say anything: I’ve lived in Ireland long enough to know it’s been bombed.

A second bomb is detonated at the Northern Ireland Polytechnic where my step-father works. His office is destroyed.

Fortunately, he is not in it.

Thank you so much for reading. Do let me know what you think.

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