One of the things about exploring your local map is that on some days you are going to be walking streets and paths that you are very familiar with, but there is still the opportunity for seeing them differently.
To start with, it’s not every day that I walk down Gypsy Lane and see a flat-capped fellow trying to coax a reluctant pony with only a rope halter to exert his will. The pony was having none of the idea of walking on the pavement and insisted on being in the middle of the road. The man was completely at ease with the situation.
The first part of today’s route is an almost-daily walk that I do, not as “a walk” but as a means of getting from A to B. But on those days, I don’t spend time with the hedgerow. It takes having a notebook or a camera in my hand and more importantly the intention of noticing in my head, for me to take the time to look. To spend a few moments with the first red nettle of the year, its leaves still juicy green, its flowers still holding the flush of youthful pink before they take on their darker hue. To pause by the sun-bright celandines. The first daisies and dandelions. Even a buttercup, which is really not right in March.
The Alexanders are already tall and vibrant, overshadowing dog violets.
If I’m naming wild-flowers without saying very much about them, it is because this is part of my own learning process. This is what I should have been doing when I was six years old. Reciting the names against recently gathered images. To match them up. A kind of mental game of “snap” – except I keep having to look things up because I’m not sure yet.
When I was six years old my grandparents were dead and my parents were busy bringing us up and earning a living and teaching us history and maths and world geography and English grammar and myths and legends, and how to not complain too much about skinned knees, and to swim, and to watch where you’re putting your hands before you cartwheel, and how to make jam tarts, and when to harvest peas.
They were teaching us many things, but I don’t remember wildflowers ever being high on the syllabus. Maybe there weren’t so many where we lived.
We did trees and woodlands, and even snakes because there were slow worms and adders locally and Mam was ophidiophobic – an unhelpful trait for someone who otherwise loved Tarzan movies.
We did star constellations and cloud formations and a few birds, and farm animals, but not wild-flowers. So far as I remember. It could always be that I just wasn’t paying attention.
So today – and on many of my walking days now – I am. Paying attention. Looking closely and wondering what name this thing goes by. What is its common name? What is its professional name? What are its uses? Why is it here? I don’t snap-&-app (an aversion I will talk about some other time) so all my wonderings will be stored away to come back to later. Later today, or some other day when I remember that I still don’t know what a thing is.
I figure that if I’m really curious enough, I will get around to looking it up. This too is a link back to my childhood, to my Dad answering a question with “I don’t know…let’s look it up…” There were books in the house that might help, sometimes they did, but just as often we’d have to store the question until the next visit to the library – where we’d only delve a little deeper if I remembered to ask again. I don’t think he’d forgotten the question. I think he just decided that I needed to be interested enough in knowing the answer. I think that was one of his subtle teaching methods. Don’t forget your questions, just because the answer isn’t immediately apparent…as he never once said but might have thought.
The truth is: I would rather forget my questions than spend all my time outdoors rummaging on my
phone. I would rather look at the beauty of the hedgerow and only intermittently remember to look up what my current curiosity is, than treat each walk in the semi-wild as a cataloguing expedition.
The truth is: I will forget most of the names anyway.
The truth is: unless I am going to eat something, how much I know about it really doesn’t matter. If I am thinking of eating it, that’s a whole different story.
The Christmas rose (which isn’t a rose, but a hellebore) has delighted me for a few weeks now. I first noticed this single plant flowering at the beginning of February. She is still flowering, albeit hiding now behind the more robust spring growth of taller, greener things. I am sure she does not mind that it is only today that I have remembered to seek out her name. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Helleborus Niger translates as Black Winter Poison. I may have liked her more before knowing that, but now that I do know, I must also respect her.
Like many poisons, hellebore was used medicinally in ancient times. It is said that an overdose of such medication was implicated in the death of Alexander the Great.
The sweeter story about the black hellebore – black-named even though her flowers are white – is that at the time of the Christian Nativity, a young shepherdess called Madelon was watching over her sheep and saw the Magi pass by with their gifts for the baby. Madelon wept because she also wanted to honour the child but had nothing to give. As her tears fell upon the ground, the snows parted to reveal a Christmas rose, a pure white flower that would be her gift to the newborn.
Black is the colour associated with the plant, not because of the flowers, but because of the root – and it is the root that has been used medicinally. The root is, as one website attributes, “a violent purge”. The inducement of vomiting and diarrhoea is not without its medical uses – the killing of intestinal worms for instance – but there was always the risk of getting the dosage wrong and killing the patient instead.
My wanderings down internet alleyways also instructed me not to confuse this white-flowering ‘black hellebore’ – the rose which is not a rose – with the white hellebore which is not a hellebore. The once-called ‘white hellebore’ Veratrum Album is also known as the false helleborine – it is a different species altogether, bearing no resemblance to our Christmas rose, except in that it is just as, if not even more so, poisonous.
Learning about wild flowers is something that I may not have enough years left to do.
Isn’t this the point of wandering down our local paths and paying more attention than we usually might? Trips into childhood. Myths. Medicines. Poisons. New and ancient knowledge. And I’m still on a path I walk most weekdays without knowing any of this. I don’t have enough years left to learn all there is to learn, but I will use the ones that are, to learn what I can…purely for the fun of it.
Looking at today’s map, I want to explore the Blackdale Plantation, but it is fenced off. Signs tell me that it is the day nursery forest school. I pass the edge of it often and I do regularly see pre-school children in high-vis vests, like mobile daffodils, wandering about among the trees. Sometimes they seem to be playing. Sometimes they seem focussed on looking for something specific. Always they seem engaged. The weather doesn’t seem to interfere with whatever they’re doing. I hear occasional laughter. I rarely hear anger or pain. I feel the energy of enquiry, of curiosity. I feel a tiny envy – of wanting to be one of them – except that I wouldn’t want to be that age in this world,
and sometimes I remember that we did similar things at that age, in smaller groups, with less supervision, outside of the fences and without the high-viz jackets and risk-assessments. My envy dissipates. I’m just glad they’re getting the experience of being in a woodland-like environment.
It's a very small space, but it might seem huge to them. There are enormous trees. There are daffodils. There is a bug hotel. I’m sure there will be fungi and hedgehog trails and leaves (both new and old).
I walk beneath my two favourite local oaks, and the Scots pine that stands with them. I notice that the three-cornered garlic is coming into flower, and the white deadnettle. I photograph a buff-tailed bumblebee and as ever it is the delicacy of the wings on these bumptious critters that fascinate me. I remember being told as a child that logically the bumble bee should not be able to fly, and yet it
does.
That lesson is one we must all learn: the things we think we cannot bring to pass because they are logically impossible – might just turn out to be really necessary and really beautiful once we’ve gotten past the fact that they can’t be done.
In the park I notice how the still skeletal trees are softer edged. They look less stark against a spring-blue sky than they do against the winter-grey ones, as though the leaves we cannot yet see are already muting the outline of the branches.
Walking up a suburban street I find another unknown entrance into the trees.
In my head I have started to call these survivors of what might have been before “pocket woods”. Little bits of things tucked in among the bigger urban stuff. Patches of trees-scapes. I know they are more than that. I know that for our suburban foxes and deer and the smaller mammals, these are link-ways. I refuse the idea of “wildlife corridors” an expression that smacks of control and permission. I think of these left-overs from development as something more organic than that.
How many trees (or acres of trees) does it take to make a wood?
How many years of management or neglect does it take for a wood to become its own self?
I clamber up a steep incline, only because it looks the harder of the options, and because tree-roots seem to offer an enticing stairway. I find myself on an upper storey of woodland. From the map, I later realise this straggle of trees follows the line of an old lane…but its current extent, I’m guessing, is no more than a spoil heap from the construction of the 1950s council housing on either side of it. Much like ‘the seven hills’ I played on as a child. Tossed up earth, left to grow wild.
And why not, if this is what it produces when left to its own devices. There are mature trees and saplings. There is a felled ancient oak, its girth three- or four-person linkage round, gnarled and forgotten, something like an ancient altar, and from its centre a slender sapling stem reaches once
again skywards. It reminds me once again, that when we talk of ‘dead wood’ we have no idea how much life it might still maintain. I have no idea whether this is a resurgence of the same tree, or something new, seeded in the mulch that has accumulated in the bole of the older rotting trunk. Part of me would like to know (my scientific brain), part of me knows it doesn’t matter (my soul).
The simple truth, either way, is that the old cradles the new and will continue to do so if we give it breathing (breeding) space.
I find a green man carving nailed to a trunk. He looks angry – or in pain – or maybe just tired. I wonder if he will look different when I visit him in summer…if I remember where to find him.
I hear small songbirds. I hear but cannot find a woodpecker. The sunlight filters through the open tree tops…and it smells like Spring.
Where an ivy covered oak and a Scots pine arc into each other, I remember reading about something called ‘canopy shyness’ where trees veer away from each other in search of light. It seems that elsewhere they lean into each other in search (I assume) of support. Not so different from humans after all.
I know that I am back in Twenty Acre Wood.
I wonder again why I didn’t explore these nearby idylls during the lockdown years.
Maybe it was because of my need for water. My fixed element is wood, but my mutable is water. When life is constrained, we seek out the wildness. When we are free, we seek out our grounding. When I was told to stay home, I needed the freedom of a river flowing to the sea. Now that I can access the seas and all the rivers, I need the grounding of trees.
Maybe.
For the record, this is not ancient woodland. Records from the 1850s show this patch labelled “Sandy Plantation”. It is speculated that it would have been part of the Earlham Hall estate. As plantation it was almost certainly a single- or limited-species growth area, a commercial enterprise at the outer edges of the estate. There are a few 3-metre+ girth trees (oak, beech, sweet chestnut) which may be from the original plantings which suggest trees intended for shipbuilding or construction. There is no record or remaining site-indication of coppicing, so the trees planted were intended to mature and the understory was of no importance.
Old Larkman Lane runs within the wood. It is presumably the lower path that I climbed out of. The web suggests that this is an old drove road, taking cattle down to the grazing of Earlham Marshes. If that is so, it would be interesting to know how it ties in with Marlpit Lane, which leads down onto
Sweetbriar Marsh. The two lanes meet at the Dereham Road. Was that artery into the city also a divider of grazing rights, way back when?
I wonder.
And maybe one day the question will resurface with enough curiosity for me to delve deeper…but for now, I’m actually just pleased to have more questions to ponder.
Something I’m learning about myself is that maybe I love the questions, the speculation, the possibles and maybes, much more than I love the definitive answers.
Certainly, I love that every little bit more I find out about my local patch, leads me into other (as yet unexplored) avenues of enquiry. I am always delighted by a discovery that has me sharing an I did know... snippet that I now do know about, but to be honest, I think I'm even more entranced by the questions I don't yet have even speculative answers to.
And figuring out how much there is still to learn so close to home is a deep joy. I love the idea that I don't know, but I might find out.
