A small person in a big forest

On feeling humbled by trees

Lately I’ve been trying to learn the names of trees. Despite my country childhood and my love of going for long walks in nature, my arboreal literacy is very poor — a fact to which I’ve been politely awakened by the work of the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane is the author of Underland, The Old Ways and The Wild Places, among others, all of which explore what he terms ‘landscape and the human heart’ and contain exquisite, nuanced descriptions of the natural world that both highlight my ignorance in this area and inspire me to address it.

Part of what inspires me is the prospect of developing clearer mental pictures of the things he describes. I also like the idea of writing about landscape myself one day, which might require a slightly larger botanical vocabulary than ‘vegetation’, ‘greenery’ and ‘plants’. But most of all, I would like to start experiencing the natural world from a place of relative understanding, rather than a place of shallow appreciation. Over the course of my life my spectrum of responses to nature has ranged from ‘Whatever,’ to ‘How nice,’ to ‘Wow! Glorious!’ It’s only recently started to occur to me how much richer my experience would be if I saw not an indiscriminate wash of greenery, but hawthorn, lime, field maple and beech (say); or if, for that matter, I heard not just ‘birdsong’ but thrush, blackbird, chiff chaff; or if I saw turkey tail and bolet and inkcap instead of simply ‘fungi’.

It also feels like it would be ethically and politically responsible to develop this kind of knowledge. The idea that humans are not only separate from nature but entitled to dominate and exploit it has a long, damaging history in Western culture, resulting in the myriad ecological crises that now threaten our survival. Addressing my own ignorance feels urgent because we tend to have more respect for things we understand, a keener sense of their value. The more we understand of nature, the more wondrous and humbling it appears, and humility is something we humans of the post-colonial developed world could use a little more of.

My tree-schooling has been happening primarily in Epping Forest, a large area of ancient woodland in the London-Essex borderlands and a deeply humbling place. I confess that I haven’t always appreciated it: the first time I visited, more than a decade ago, I was unsettled by its quietness and its proximity to the sprawl of suburbia, and later wrote a mediocre poem inspired by the experience that began ‘Epping Forest would have been all right / if it hadn’t been gagging for a murder’.¹

Fortunately, I’ve since come to appreciate it for the awe-inspiring place it is. A few weekends ago, I walked the ten miles from the bottom of the forest to the top beneath the fresh greening of the old, wise trees, their trunks gnarled like arthritic hands. I stopped along the way to make some very novice identifications with my tree app and at some point, I realised that I had fallen in love. I got the forest in a way I never had before, and the reason I got it was because in taking the time to try and understand it better, I realised how little of it I understood. This gave me a hunger to learn more, but also a keen sense of its being a whole world that exists, for the most part, beyond my understanding. I can learn as much as my brain can hold and explore as far as my feet will take me, but I will only ever experience the forest from the blinkered perspective of a twenty-first century human. I will never know trees in the way that birds know them, or as squirrels do, or ants, or worms, or even necessarily in the same way as humans of times gone by. Nor will I ever know what it is like to be a tree, to stand for centuries in the same spot, stretching high into the sky and delving deep into the earth.

Halfway through the walk, I found myself in a clearing surrounded by pollarded beech trees. Pollarding, I have very recently learned, is the practice of pruning trees at just above head height — as distinct from coppicing, when they’re pruned down to ground level — and results in new growth that becomes a flourishing crown of branches radiating up and outwards. These beech trees were so enormous, their pollarded branches so fat, that it was clear they had been pruned an extremely long time ago by people who have long since died. I stood amongst them for a good while, feeling small and insignificant and awe-struck.

A fine old pollard

Later, I read that there are many old pollarded and coppiced trees in Epping Forest. There are beeches coppiced so long ago that the pruned branches have turned into full-size trees, now growing in circles and still connected to their siblings via the base of the original, single tree. They are thought to be the most ancient things in the forest; it is possible they are over a thousand years old. This would mean they were first pruned by people in Anglo-Saxon times. Imagine if we could communicate with those trees; imagine the things they could tell us.

In Underland, Macfarlane quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and author of Braiding Sweetgrass.

A speaker of what she calls ‘fluent botany’, [Kimmerer] is careful to distinguish this from what she refers to as ‘the language of plants’ — that is to say, the language that plants speak, as opposed to the language used to speak about plants.

Always, in spring, I think of the Philip Larkin poem that begins, ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said.’ I love the pinpoint accuracy of this image: the haze of tentative green as a holding back, a pregnant pause before something begins. But I’m also starting to feel that all trees, in all seasons, have an aura of ‘something almost being said’. They don’t speak, and so they don’t say it — or maybe they do, and we just can’t hear them. Either way, they are not simply scenery. They live and they endure. Perhaps they even experience. How can we be so certain that they don’t?

I’m aware that I am not going to find out the answers to these unanswerable questions by learning to distinguish between hornbeam and hazel, but it feels like the best — or indeed the only — place to start.

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1. This isn’t an entirely unfounded fear; bodies have been found in the forest over the centuries, including (supposedly) victims of the notorious highwayman, Dick Turpin.