I love trees
This month's IndieWeb carnival is being run by Juhis asking us to write a love letter. A delightful prompt. My brain got very excited and went "Trees! Fanfic! Worms! Love!" and so on, in rapid succession. It's nice to have so many things to be enthusiastic about ready to go on the tip of my tongue.
A selection of the treescape behind my house, viewed from lying on the lawn
I'd never call it that but I love a bit of forest bathing. Twice this month I've gone and had a nap in the woods. The first time the bluebells were out, the latest time we watched a stag beetle ambling around like a drunk.
We all know trees are amazing but they also kind of fade into the background sometimes. Treemap.uk collects all London's trees thanks to some pretty great public data on London's trees. I used to go on great tree walks. Obviously they are great for the environment for wildlife and all that photosynthesising plus their shade cover will become more and more important in our cities as the climate gets hotter. They are also great for our mental health and wellbeing.
I'd like to improve my tree identifying. I have a book or two, I just need need to practice.
A famous tree, The Major Oak, in Sherwood Forest, legendarily hidden in by Robin Hood. Obviously it's getting on a bit, it's a thousand years old, and is held up with crutches.
There was a silver birch in a park I used to frequent. Before we moved I took some of the (fallen) seed and saved it. It's now about a metre high and happy in my wild border where I try to stop brambles strangling it. I love silver birches. There's a huge one two gardens over and I have a lovely view of it from my bed, framed against the sky in the window.
This time from my bedroom window
We've barely begun to understand how trees work and what they can do. For example, Pando, an aspen in Utah, USA:
Pando has an estimated 47,000 stems (ramets) that appear to be individual trees but are genetically identical parts of a single tree connected by a root system that spans 42.8 ha (106 acres). As a multi-stem tree, Pando is the world's largest tree by measures of weight, landmass and species, and is generally held to be the world's single largest organism by weight.
Books about trees: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. For fiction, inspired by those two, The Overstory by Richard Powers. Also The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, part of which is narrated by a fig tree.
Another landmark tree: the dead buzzard tree, on the corner of my favourite field. The buzzard isn't dead, the tree was, and the buzzard used to sit in it. The dead tree the buzzard used to sit in blew down a couple of winters ago and straddles a stream, hedge, and two fields. Last time I was there a fox was curled up sunbathing on the trunk. It grows some spectacular fungi. Loving trees means losing trees but dead trees are incredibly important for wildlife and biodiversity.
One of Britain's most famous trees, in Sycamore Gap, was cut down by two guys, apparently just for the lols. It prompted an outpouring of grief and awareness of how much we love our trees as well as conversations about how to better protect them. Forty-nine saplings have been dubbed trees of hope and distributed across the country and... the stump is regrowing! Trees!
I'll leave you with this incredibly chill video of Sandi Toksvig wielding a chainsaw.
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