writings

Notes of a Novice Naturalist

No 1. The Shadowing Shroud of Ezekiel: The Cedar of Lebanon

The bark is coarse and deeply fissured.

The spread of its boughs immense.

The very symbol of all that is durable and grand.

The aesthete’s tree, an e p i p h a n y.

The cones stand firm and upright, fat and round in impenetrable clusters.
The bole is short, its circumference
quite possibly exceeding twenty-five feet…

But the finest specimens possess no central trunk at all.

From the great bole, the branches thrust outward and upward in every direction, and the overall effect presented is that of the unhurried spaciousness of antiquity.

The Phoenician Fleets were fashioned from its wood and with its resin The Egyptians mummified their dead. Solomon built with this wood, his temple of Jerusalem too.

And much later came the casings of pencils…

Further back in time, it is said, Gilgamesh did battle with the demon guardians of the forest, then cut down the Cedars of God to build the city of Nippur.
The logs were floated along the waters of the Euphrates, among the turtles and crabs and fishes, and the great city was built.

The Emperor Hadrian much later claimed the forest as his own.
He loved the Cedars and stopped the felling for a time…
But when Monsieur Belon, the naturalist arrived, more than a thousand years hence, and wrote his Observees, he found that just a few of the ancient trees were left amongst the snows of the Holy Valley of Wadi Qadisha.

“Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars. Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen”
Zechariah 11:1, 2

But I prefer Ezekiel 31:3:
"Behold, I will liken you to a cedar in Lebanon,
with fair branches and forest shade"

I love the Cedars of Osterley Park, in their ancient seat, full of chattering, long-tailed parakeets, and also the Highgate Cemetery Cedar atop its Egyptian mausoleum. My own observations are recorded in a small oil study of the great Cedar in the churchyard of Hambleden in the Chiltern Hills of Berkshire.

The Cedar of Lebanon, like the sky and the sea, remains for me a potent symbol of eternity. When I gaze up into the darkness, the vastness of its boughs, I am ushered to a place distinctly outside of time. I feel welcomed there, by its needles and cones, its coarse and fissured bark… and by its comforting immensity…

No 2. The Onset of the River Bore

Whelps in the Trent Bore…

The manner of the bore’s approach is frightful.
When it appears in the half-light of evening, its colour is black.

This strange manifestation of the ocean’s tide arrives
Suddenly and without warning,
caused by the great inrush of water at spring tides…
And in the absence of wind, arrives without a sound.
(The sea’s silent reminder to the land that it is not exempt from Infiltration).

The Severn River’s bore is the most famous and the most destructive in the British Isles (the Trent and the Wye and the Solway all have lesser bores).

But the Bore in a high wind is truly fearsome.
It may appear as one wave or take its form in several,
which begin to break and foam as it pushes inland,
and its low rumble sends vibrations through the riverbank
and across the surrounding landscape.

To the unsuspecting boatman, it is disconcerting, to say the least.
A wall of water traveling at perhaps ten miles an hour
Requires immediate action…

The Trent bore, known to locals since antiquity, as the “aegir”,
pushes up the river from the Humber for quite some distance,
kicking up its V-shaped “whelps” which upset smaller boats and even
damage larger ones… “Ware aegir!” the boatmen cry, as the waves advance.

The causation of the bore lies in the coincidence of high tides
with a funnel-shaped estuary opening out to widely separated shores
From a narrower river.

As a phenomenon, the bore occurs in many of the great rivers of the world:
In the estuaries of the Amazon, the Indus, The Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The Amazon bore reaches seven feet in height and a speed
of eighteen miles per hour… the very definition of the fearsome…

No 3. The Spindle Tree

It is not an unattractive little tree.
Its waxen berries are a pale green and yellow.
In autumn, its fruits darken and dry and split
And inside their cerise-lined, star-shaped vessels
Are bright orange seeds.
The fruits are mounted on dainty angled stalks,
Which take on a delicate and ornamental appearance.

The Spindle never grows to more than twenty feet in height,
And often resides within a hedge (unlike the Spindle shown above).
Its twigs are smooth and covered in shiny greenish bark.

Its leaf buds are pointed

And the branching of the Spindle

Takes place almost at right angles…

The young shoots make a particularly fine charcoal stick

For drawing purposes.

And of course, because the wood is very hard, it was used to make

Spindles, once upon a time.

And skewers and pegs and buttons and other small objects.
And dyes too, were made from the fruits
And also medicinal purgatives.
From the naturalist’s point of view,
The Spindle is related to the Dogwood, to the Buckthorns,
And to the Privet… and is not an unattractive little tree…

No 4. A Brief History of Lightning & Transient Luminous Events

It is mid-July, and an oppressive heat wave has borne down on the French Ardèche Uplands for the past ten days. In the haze of late afternoon, the great dome of the cumulo-nimbus cloud I’ve been watching, has been slowly building over the Rhône River Valley to the east.

Intermittent flashes of yellow and orange sheet lightning can be seen, illuminating the interior of the cloud’s turret and now the first signs of rain are issuing into the darkened forests below. During the next few hours, several other towering thunderheads develop and by 8:00 o’clock in the evening, bright bolts of fork lightning are passing between the clouds overhead and striking the surrounding hilltops. And now the rolling of thunder, as sound rebounds from cloud to cloud and then, as the rain begins to fall here in the hamlet, there are huge and deafening claps of thunder directly overhead. Mon Dieu! Et bouge de là! It is time to take cover…

Lucretius, the Roman poet-philosopher was certain that when one cloud collided with another, it produced the sound of thunder and that lightning
resulted from the spark caused by the friction between the clouds. In his De Rerum Natura, he stated it as fact (he was also certain that the world was flat). It took Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with high-flying kites to set the record straight… but atmospheric electricity remains a compelling subject. How could it not be? In Earth’s atmosphere, lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Along the equator, where temperatures are higher, the sky rumbles all the year long. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the mountain village of Kifuka was thought, until recently to be the most electric place on earth, boasting 158 lightning flashes per square kilometer every year. It has now been outdone by Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, where there are 250 lightning flashes per square kilometer each year.

There are two sorts of lightning which occur during thunderstorms, and both produce significant pyrotechnic displays… the cloud to cloud and cloud to ground varieties. What are less known as they occur in the upper regions of the Meso, strato, and ionospheres are what are now being called Transient Luminous Events. A virtual menagerie of odd phenomena, they have acquired rather whimsical names on account of their very fleeting nature and physical processes, which have yet to be precisely determined: Red sprites, Blue jets, Blue starters, Elves, Trolls, Gnomes, and Pixies. Red sprites, occurring at an altitude of around forty miles, last only a few milliseconds. They are large, but rather weak luminous flashes, shaped like jellyfish, carrots, or columns. Hanging down to a distance of sometimes twenty miles beneath them are blue tendrils—shifting filamentary structures. The first description we have of red sprites is from the year 1730, when the German historian and naturalist Johann Georg Estor observed them from a mountain in the Hessian Vogelberg Range: “I saw the blue sky above me and the cloud beneath like a white sea, from which flashes mounted directly up into the sky and shot down to the earth.”

Red sprites in the Mesosphere

A Blue jet issuing from a thunderhead

The world remains a very mysterious place. Like so much of what occurs in our environment, these phenomena are mostly not visible to us, yet they are obviously essential to the functions of the natural world…

No 5. The Yews and Skylarks of Norbury Park

“In Norbury Park is a famous grove of giant yews of great age, known as the Druid’s Walk, which no doubt mark part of the track which, leaving the main east and west road, called in modern times ‘The Pilgrim’s Way,’ near Bagden Farm, crossed the river near the Priory, and thence led over Letherhead Downs to Epsom and London.”

From Parishes: ‘Mickleham’, A History of the County of Surrey: Volume III (1911)

Ancient woodland. The month of May.
Small Leaved Lime, Wych Elm, and Field Maple
A ‘clay-with-flints cap’ covers this white chalk hill
The River Mole meandering below, kingfishers on patrol

We ascend the path towards the top of the ridge
Through Ash and Sycamore and Box
Across the eastern slope of the hanger wood,
And here:

“The Druids walk is long and narrow, with a declivity, in some places rather steep,
to the left hand, and rising ground to the right, all densely covered with trees.

The Yew begins to make its appearance… like the advance guard of an army.
In certain spots it seems to have successfully driven out all other trees.”

From Field paths and Green Lanes: Louis J. Jennings (1878)

All around us lie the giant blackened, moss-covered
corpses of trees passing back into the earth
Great Yews stand everywhere here- apparitional—
ghosts of bygone epochs, fibrous shoots flung out in
all directions, in gestures of unkempt exclamation, like
the frozen music of an archaic, forgotten architecture…

We meet tree after tree along the path, each presenting its own peculiar
expression of bewilderment, surprise, tenacity, remorse…
Through storms and gales and drought, as men have lived and died,
these old souls have quietly resolved their tribulations.

Leaving them now, to their perpetual, slumbering machinations,
We climb the steep path upward through dense box to the edge of the wood. And emerge quite suddenly into a vast field of waving grass.
Skylarks are nesting on the ground here at the very top of the ridge and call across the brightly lit field. Ascending air currents carry Red Kites above our heads.
Far to the west, the needle of a church spire rises above the woods, and further beyond, Victorian red brick houses are stacked neatly up the hillside.

The Pilgrim’s Way and The Druids Walk have led us to this lovely place.
We have arrived, but where, exactly, is this?
And which place is the more secret?
the shadowed home of the ancient Yews, or this open field?
The nesting skylark’s call is our answer.
We return, to the cool darkness of the hanger wood.