Issue #48 The Misc Adventures Digest

A meditation on decay and beauty in the woods

These days, it is true that you will often find me in the mountains, or following rivers and waterfalls, but the woods will always have a special hold on me. It is in the woods that I feel the most connected to Nature, where I can sense the complex web of interactions taking place and where I can watch the unfolding of remarkable tales.

It was the woods that opened my eyes to the interconnectivity of all things in Nature. They taught me the value of curiosity, of making connections, of wondering and of watching and waiting. They showed me the fragile, precarious beauty of life and asked me, quietly, to ponder how best to live.

I may not live in a woodland anymore, but thankfully I still get to spend many days in the company of trees and woods. This week I was working in a woodland wonderfully rich with fallen trees, decaying trunks and moss covered stumps, which for me is a joy.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do so love trees standing tall and full of vigour, but I am also fascinated by what happens when they fall, rot and decay. What excites me most about Nature, is the dynamism of the forces at work; how nothing is ever really permanent, constantly in flux, always in motion, even if at a pace imperceptible to the human eye. Windblown trees with colossal lifted root plates, or storm damaged trunks half decayed are snapshots of this dynamism frozen in time; they are windows into a process taking place. A sentence in a story not yet finished.

Here in the UK, we do not have many woodlands where Nature is allowed to carry out its work uninterrupted. We humans tend to see disorder as neglect - we love to tidy, to meddle, to ‘improve’. Yet in Nature, wildness thrives in tangle and chaos.

Woodlands (and I suppose most other habitats) are naturally created by succession - that is to say a species or group of species’ gradually succeeds another. It starts with thorny, prickle bearing, industrious types like bramble, blackthorn and briars which shelter seedlings from browsing beasts. Gradually, pioneering fellows like birch and hazel, or alder and willow emerge from the tangle. An oakling may already be slowly growing in the darkness, biding its time. Soon the young trees shade out and suppress the bramble, and jostle between themselves for space and light. Some will go on to grow tall, reaching up towards the cosmos, making connections with countless creatures, fungi and neighbouring plants, before succumbing to senescence or storm.

A windblown tree makes the unseen visible, an insight into the hidden workings of Nature. Here a tangle of roots on a lifted root plate radiate out from a central point on a recently toppled birch.

When a tree falls, it is not the end. It is the beginning of a new phase. Often times, the tree will continue to live, sending what would have been branches vertically up from its prostrate trunk to create multiple new trees - we sometimes call them phoenix trees, which I rather like. Even if the tree dies, its capacity to furnish life is not over; it becomes host to fungi that feast on decay; a home to critters that like to burrow or lay eggs into rotting wood; a substrate onto which mosses and lichens take hold and ultimately breaks further and further down until it becomes nourishment for the new wave of plant life that moves in to take advantage of the clearing and succession can begin all over again. In time a woodland becomes a patchwork of life and death, young and old. A tangle of interconnectivity and community.

I love the way fallen, decaying trees make the unseen visible, shedding light on the hidden workings of Nature. I’m thankful for the chance to spend the day marvelling at small details, discovering little connections as I work - the cluster of cherry galls on an oak leaf, the intertwining of roots and boulders, the way a new pond has formed in a recess where a tree once stood, the holes created by woodpeckers in decaying alder trunks and the red deer stag that looks at me before silently disappearing into a tangle of willows.

There is no doubt wisdom to be gleaned from witnessing these interactions. It would be easy to dwell on the fragile nature of life and the inevitability of death and decay, yet for me, I’m reminded of how much beauty there is in these complex connections with joy and wonder to be found in Nature, even in the most unlikely places.

The woods hold many lessons, and I feel fortunate to have learned some of them, yet there are more stories waiting to be told - so what are you waiting for?

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Well, that’s all for this week. We hope you’ve been enjoying the cold and frosty weather - we certainly have.

With warm wishes for the start of meteorological winter,

Andrew, Emma and Benji

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