Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

February, A Week Spent Quietly Among Friends.

It felt like I was last here in another life. These old friends I hadn’t given a thought to for a couple of months, I saw afresh in their mid-winter nakedness. Wide, wind blown, mossy and knobbled, these woody giants of the Cumbrian fells astound me every time I see them. And yet there is nothing particularly remarkable about them. They are just big trees. They are trees which have been, if not cherished, then at least left alone for centuries. Growing by becks, along walls or giving shelter to houses, no one has had any reason to remove them. 

To have come straight from a landscape devoted to the worship of intensive agricultural production and the chasing of short term grants, where hedges come and hedges go and where trees mostly go, to this place where trees grow unmolested for hundreds of years, is profoundly moving.

And so, I spent last week visiting my favourite Cumbrian trees. I sat snugly between the roots of the enormous High Cross oak, completely sheltered from the insistent north wind while I quickly drew Black Crag and High Nook farm. It’s bare oaks are as bright as emeralds and heavy with ferns. I walked through woods of soaring beech, into old oak coppice getting smaller and more tortured until the prevailing wind puts a stop to it. Down to the exposed bay at the end of the lake where twisted thorns have braved that violent wind for years. And into woods of huge Norway spruce and European larch. I marvel at the multitudes of warts on the holly growing out of a wall, I reverently walk between ancient ash coppice hedges. And finally I shelter under a wide sycamore branch as it begins to snow.

Silently, I begin to walk home in the freezing half light, when four luminously dressed mountain bikers flash past me. I hear their yells as they hit the bog below, eight wheels cutting through years of slow grown vegetation sink into wet mud. And then they are gone.

Deep silence accompanies me as far as the Scots pine behind the house, where the soft hissing of wind through needles tells me that I’m home.   

August, A Rowan Tree.

The rowan is a tree of the mountains. It’s the brave clinger on of steep gullies. Sown wherever a bird can perch, it’s a speck of colour against black rock. It can even grow in the cleft of another tree.

They’re magical trees too. In Scotland rowan boughs were placed over the door to keep witches out. Hung over the barn door, it stopped those witches stealing milk from your cow. The merest glimpse of one can transport my father back to his childhood in the Scottish highlands.

There’s one here, outside my studio, in soft, lowland Norfolk. It’s roots spread unhindered, there are no rocks to squeeze between. Sheltered by large oaks, it can grow tall, not crippled by cruel, sculpting winds. And this summer it is positively dripping with bunches of orangey crimson fruit. The first harbinger of autumn, this young tree is alive with birds. Blackbirds quietly gorging themselves. Black silhouettes briefly and then gone Two mistle thrushes, pale and clacking loudly at each other, such bounty is worth fighting for. And pigeons, clumsy, bending branches.

The rowan takes its place, now, in the succession of fruit borne on trees and shrubs. It comes after the cherry, at the same time as the blackberry and before the spindle and hoar. The beautiful little rowan steps into the lime light, and it’s berries quickly vanish down the throats of hungry thrushes.

July, The Feeling of Being Under Water.

I’m sitting on a mown path in a little wood that was planted the year my daughter was born. It’s just a small belt of trees that runs between the road and the hay field. I’m painting in here because I’m in love with the colour and texture of the ash tree’s trunks. Tall and slender and smooth grey green blue, they’re more like seaweed than trees. There’s a real feeling of being under water in here. The long grass each side of the path is hanging heavy with pale blue seed heads, each one coated in a mother of pearl rain drop. And through the layers of different leaves above my head, come trembling pools of brightness.

Cars drive past, nobody notices me. A yellow council lorry pulls over and two men sit and drink tea,I hear their chat about football. Then Arthur drives past and stops to unlock the gate. He’s looking summery in his hay making clothes; purple shirt, mustard tie, pale blue knitted tank top and floppy hat. As he swings the gate open I wave. He hasn’t seen me. I shout Hello Arthur! But he doesn’t hear me either. I feel more than ever submerged, invisible to the outside. I’m in a strange wooden, watery bubble,where trees have blue trunks and girls have blue hair (yes, my daughter really does have blue hair this week!) And as I look up into the canopy I wouldn’t be surprised to see Edward Lear’s Jumblies sail over my head in their sieve.

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

In a Sieve they went to sea;

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winters morn, on a stormy day,

In a Sieve they went to sea!

And when the Sieve turned round and round,

And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!”

They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,

But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!

In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”

Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

And they went to sea in a sieve…….

May, Poplars.

The poplars create a vertiginous edge to this place. A mile long, five abreast, they act as battlements against the rest of the world. They halt regiments of chemically controlled wheat and rape. They offer look out points for crows and buzzards. They are our loud, fidgety boundary.

A Bryantt and May match factory in Norwich paid good money for poplar in the sixties so plantations sprang up all over the place on damp unpromising land. The factory has long since closed but these landmarks remain. Blocks of one clone or another, their uniform sameness is their beauty. All exact in hight and habit and colour. Each clone has it peculiarities. These ones are square topped and prone to rust. Dry, red leaves, the size of plates, clatter high above your head on a windy autumn day, until winter blows in from the west and strips them naked one by one. Within a week, from west to east, a mile of shivering skeletons.

Not far away a different stand, a more branching variety, produces flames, not leaves. My eyeballs gently poach in their warmth as I look at them. Monster matches, igniting spring. The tallest of trees, grown for nothing but splinters.

These genetically engineered giants mark wet places. They tell a story of fashion and economics and science in our man made landscape. They add layers of light and movement. They stop a view in it’s tracks, forcing your gaze up and round. They run at unexpected angles, bend to the wind and dare to prick our famously vast Norfolk skies.

April, An Unloved Jumble of Plants.

Bored of lying in bed, too ill to want to move, not ill enough to sleep. I decide it’s a case of mind over matter and lug myself outside. I’ve missed three days, three days of spring, warm and exploding. I sink down beside the stream and draw the first thing that catches my eye. It’s a jumble of plants that I see every day without really looking at.

The young monterey pine at the back. Usually so blank and black. Today, the bright green of park benches, jauntily dotted with ochre cones and soft growth tips.

Then the sycamore. Twenty years old and with a carpet of seedlings at it’s feet.

Next, the contorted pear. Old and misshapen, clothed in the tight buds of it’s unequalled blossom. Occasionally this tree produces one or two small, warted fruit, so delicious, their memory never leaves you.

And the tangle of wild plum. Invading with suckers. Showing no sign of life. But later so generous with their exquisite purple fruit, blushed blue and dripping sweet. The air will be filled with their fragrant harvest, the humming of wasps audible from where I’m sitting.

The holly. Slow and dark and waxy behind a young thorn, delicate in the light.

And finally the daffodils, loud and stiff. My least favourite member of this strange grouping.

But the spell breaks, my head throbs, my back aches. Shivering, I creep back to bed and dream feverish dreams of plucking succulent wasps from trees.

April, Take Shelter in Trees!

Samuel Palmer’s exclamation, ‘TAKE SHELTER in TREES’ strikes a familiar chord. He wrote it after yet another disappointing exhibition, which certainly sends any artist running for cover. Hiding from the world is one thing but Taking Shelter in Trees is another. It’s about comfort. The otherness of trees, their unconcern with the human world. They are just trees, being trees. Beautiful, solid, sure, life giving, what ever you want. But the uplifting part about being in trees is surely, the knowledge that you are completely insignificant.

I sought the shelter of the wood this week in an attempt to hide from the tsunami of noise our new neighbour has unleashed, A busy road, for decades silenced, roars. Machinery drones. And although being in the wood can’t extinguish the noise, it dulls it, makes it less important. The worry and the fear pale at the immediacy of what’s going on around me. The squirrel angrily clucking and waggling it’s tail, eventually runs straight at me…. help!… The chiff chaff, the wood pecker and a host of warblers intent on reproduction take no notice of me. A crimson spider flashes it’s slow progress across the leaf litter.

Sitting in the sun with my back against a smooth ash tree I try to draw the emerald slick of dogs mercury. Pulsating green at the feet of trees since February, it’s time is almost over as the nettles begin their unstoppable surge upwards and the canopy far above it’s head begins to close over. Drowning hopelessly in green, my pastels and my talent (?) no match for this vivid carpet. I leave, revived by all the riches in the world, found in trees just being trees.

January, In a Grove of Ghosts.

I am in a grove of small ghosts. Pale in sunlight, blinking in the rain and invisible at dusk, these young trees almost disappear in the winter. Soulless beings, purple grey, and floating. They freeze in my warm stare, vaguely giving the impression of rootedness. I turn my back and they continue their undead pacing. Playing a phantom game of grandmothers footsteps. Little bruised spectres, completely empty. Smudged by the howl of the wind. Dissolved by frost. Their tenure on earth is still undecided. These little woody mirages, keeping their fragile vigil for spring fill me with such hope that I almost believe anything is possible.