March Blog 2019

Synchronicity

A letter popped through the door last week from the tree-surgeon. I opened it as I left for the station heading for a day at Edinburgh’s National Library. In his survey report he strongly advised that our forty foot gean tree has to go. The local tree officer agreed. It's because of the massive creamy-brown fungus that took up residence years ago in the scarred gorge which meanders for five feet up the length of its trunk. For a while the gean has been leaning precariously towards its nearest neighbour, an ancient cathedral-spired yew. The fungus, Laetiporus Sulphureus, more commonly known as ‘Chicken of the Woods’ has mutated and grown fleshier year on year. Now it’s nearing the end it’s becoming crusty and brown. My trees heartwood is slowly dying.

My gean has been on this earth three times longer than me, maybe more. Despite the disease it has flowered every spring bringing almost two centuries of joy. It forms a favourite squirrel runway and launch-pad. Because of the way it leans, they can cross the entire garden at canopy level without the need to touch the ground, thus avoiding Attila, the cat next door. The owls will need to find a new roost, and, the cerise-pink rhododendron, that has curled perfectly around the higher sections of its trunk using it as a trellis. Nature doesn’t seem to mind the decay and the pungent whiff of woody-vanilla it emits. You can smell it if you stand close and lean your cheek against the smooth silvered bark on the north side, to look up through the tree canopy at the sky. But if it falls down, people may die.

I will miss the delicate white blossoms swirling in the wind and powdering the driveway. In her poem ‘The Gean Trees’, Violet Jacob called them ‘pairls fae the branches snawin’.

I've decided I won't let them take her until this spring has passed.

I’m still contemplating her imminent loss hours later in the silence of the National Library Special Collections room as I flick through the papers of the Greenock born poet W.S Graham (1918-1986). His handwritten poems cluster across the paper, scratched out in his spidery handwriting with little plant-like drawings doodled on the sides in black ink. I’ve the notion that the paper exudes a similar musky scent to that of my dying tree. The section I’m reading covers the early years of his time in London, the big, brash city, where you get a deep sense of his loneliness; his yearning for home and the simple things in life.

In the silence of the library my stomach flips as I read his words. I have to read them again –

‘I am detained, gean trees

I am locked in a London autumn evening

We have a death time between us, gean trees to the north,

gean trees in the Calder Valley spring.’

(1959, from WSG ‘Golden Gate North’)