“Upon the corner of the moon There hangs a vaporous drop profound; I’ll catch it ere it come to ground: And that distill’d by magic sleights Shall raise such artificial sprites As by the strength of their illusion Shall draw him on to his confusion”
– William Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’
If, as Samuel Coleridge suggested, the birch tree is the Lady of the Woods, this lady is definitely the ancient Crone of pagan lore.
In the middle of a stand of Scots Pine, Hecate stands, crooked and twisted, her arthritic limbs misshapen and gnarled. Roughened, dark swellings bulge out of her bark, from the base of her trunk to the very top. Bristles protrude from these warty growths; the dark hairs that every self-respecting witch covets.
One limb extends to the side, its tip planted firmly in the cushiony carpet of pine needles around her feet. Her weight is held, balanced on her walking stick. It seems as though she has paused in her halting passage across the forest to catch her breath.
Despite the blue skies above and the early February sunshine, she stands in the shadows, watching all those who pass by. In contrast to her dark reputation, she is the guide through the darkness, the protector against evil.
Her satiny silver bark gleams, pale against the shadows, and streaked with the signs of age. Her branches stretch skywards, their age and infirmity belied by their lithe elegance. She has already stood here for an eternity and seems ready to stand guard for another.
“Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all! Flowers in the summer, Fires in the fall!“
– Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Autumn Fires‘
This is Tinder Fungus. Or Tinder Polypore. Or Hoof Fungus. Or Iceman Conk (for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment). Or Fomes fomentarius for the more scientific amongst us. It grows on dead or dying hardwood species across the globe, from Dominica in the Caribbean to North America, from Japan to Iran and Turkey. In the UK, its host is primarily birch, but also occasionally beech and sycamore. It starts off life as a parasitic species, entering the tree through damaged bark or broken branches. Once the tree dies, it then becomes saprophytic, breaking down the wood and recycling its nutrients. The fruiting bodies are perennial and can survive for up to thirty years! It’s a polypore fungus and, as such, has pores on its underside rather than gills.
It is not an edible species. If you’ve ever found these, you’ll know that saying they’re solid is somewhat of an understatement. But that doesn’t mean that it’s of no use to humans. Because the fibrous inner flesh of these fruiting bodies burns slowly, it’s ideal for use as tinder.
In 1991, hikers found the mummified body of a man in the Ötztal Alps. Nicknamed Ötzi, radiocarbon dating established that the man was alive in 3300 BC, dating him to the Chalcolithic period (Copper Age). X-Ray analysis in 2001 showed that he had been shot with an arrow in the shoulder and also had significant head trauma; he had likely bled to death. In a detailed study in 2012, the arrow wound was confirmed as the cause of death. Alongside Ötzi, archaeologists also found a leather pouch containing a tinder fungus, a scraper, a boring tool, a bone awl, and a flint flake. It fascinates me that we can identify a fungus to species level, even after over 5000 years. The existence of the fungus in Ötzi’s pouch was obviously the origin of the name Iceman Conk.
I find this all the time on my walks; it’s not at all uncommon. These ones were on a Sunday wander through Cranberry Rough. The muddy, leaf strewn pathway of the Great Eastern Pingo Trail runs between large areas of birch woodland, studded with shallow pools. Trees lie where they’ve fallen, gradually falling apart and returning to the earth. Bracken obscures the earth in patches. The colours are autumnal in the extreme; oranges, bronzes, and subtle shades of brown. Even the hollies are bejewelled in ruby red at this time of year. There are no pathways leading into the reserve itself, just the one I’m on tunnelling through the undergrowth. Fungi are scattered over the floor in drifts, ochre yellow, burnt sienna, and amethyst.
Birch trees lie supine, their streaky cream and grey bark staying solid, long after the wood inside has turned to damp piles of dust. Moss straggles messily along the tops of branches, fence posts, and tree stumps. Protruding from some of the logs are irregular shapes in a dusty, purplish brown. These are Tinder Fungus. Like the hooves of some twisted mythical creature, they have a gnarled upper surface, cracked and unkempt. The growth rings are obvious and irregular. The newer growth is paler; cream, and pale ochre taking the place of grey and purple. On the lower surface, circular indentations pock the velvety texture, ringed with a denser white border.
“They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.”
– Gerald Durrell, ‘My Family & Other Animals’
I have just finished reading Elif Shafak’s book, ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ and I absolutely loved it. Part of her story is told through the eyes of a Fig tree that originally grew in a tavern in Nicosia. I love the idea that trees also have a story to tell, if we only knew how to listen. Taking a leaf (pun intended) out of her book, this post is inspired by her ability to translate the inner narrative of a tree into a story. I hope you enjoy – please let me know what you think.
🍃 When you think of great explorers, I expect you conjure up names like Sir Francis Drake, David Livingstone, Marco Polo, or Christopher Columbus.
But I’m a Birch. One of the great Betulaceae family. I’m an explorer, too.
Let me start at the beginning. Time is measured using a different scale when you’re a tree. We don’t think about what day of the week it is. We don’t anticipate the weekends and dread Mondays in the way humans do. The seasons turn around us in their endless cycle; the renewal of spring, the hard work of summer, the excesses of autumn, and the deep sleep of winter. And in those seasons, we thrive.
My people came from the Klondike mountain range in a place you now call Washington State in the far north of the USA, but forty-nine million years ago, when we first began, it was just called home. There are imprints in the rocks there, even now, recording those very first individuals. My ancestors. From there, those pioneering, ancestral trees slowly chased the receding glaciers of successive ice ages across continents, finding their places; members of our family can now be found across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. Each of us has adapted to our local surroundings, often to the point that we would be unable to survive if anyone was foolish enough to transplant us too far from the home we’ve made.
I know these things because we are able to share our stories through the mycorrhizal network that surrounds our roots, microscopic fungal signals passing information from tree to tree. We pass on messages of survival, of warning, and of distress. I hear your scoffing, your anthropocentric certainty that trees, that plants in general, can’t feel distress, but you’re wrong; not only do we feel distress, but we work together to overcome adversity. If I receive a distress call from one of my neighbours, no matter what their species, I will send nutrients to them through those same fungal hyphae that we use for communication. Humans could learn a lot from trees if they would only listen.
But I digress. This is a more personal story; the tale of being an explorer in Norfolk.
I found my home in a section of Thetford Forest, just outside Mundford. The soil surrounding my roots is sandy and slightly acidic. It tastes of the heathland that used to make up the Brecks; the taste of ancient heather will forever signify home to me. I share my space with individuals of many different species; Oak, Scots Pine, Larch, Beech, Hazel, Alder, Sweet Chestnut, and Sycamore, to name but a few. Around my trunk, Bracken grows tall during the summer months, Fly Agaric springs from the ground in autumn, brambles sprawl, and wildflowers flourish. Birds call from my branches, pecking amongst them to remove the worst of the caterpillars. Grey Squirrels use my body as a thoroughfare, and a Red Fox has dug her den between my roots. I can feel her there now, waiting for the dim, twilight hours in which she can hunt most effectively. Insects use my leaves as both shelter and food. Even though you might imagine them to be irritating, I rather like the feel of tiny feet on my leaves and the satisfaction of providing sustenance for so many tiny mouths. Despite producing millions of offspring every year, they’re transported so far by the wind that I rarely get to hear from my children.
From the moment the days lengthen in the spring and my sap starts to rise, I, like every other member of my genus, spend my days recording our history and my own explorations in my leaves. On every single one of my thousands of leaves, I inscribe detailed, intricate maps. Maps of where we came from, maps of our travels and maps of where we’d like to go. Every line, every dot, every circle has significance. They represent places we colonised and the location of individual trees and fungal bodies in those distant forests. I’ve recorded the hyphae stretching between trees, in time as well as in place. Because that’s part of being a tree. At any given moment, there are so many generations of us alive that we tend to consider the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. My tiny maps tell our stories, from the first pioneers to the more recent. They tell of brave individuals who conquered icy landscapes, freshly scraped by enormous glaciers. They tell of trees lost to loggers, to disease, and to the horror of wildfire. They tell of chancers who try to push into managed heathland and who are conquered by the fierce rangers who patrol there. I’ve included the Ojibwe legend that Birch trees are impervious to lightning and the Celtic belief that hanging our branches over a cradle would protect the child within from fairies.
At the start of the year, my maps, my stories, are mere suggestions, the underpinning of our world. The hyphae, those green veins of connection, are shown, yes, but further details take time to record. But in the autumn, Oh! In the autumn, my maps come alive in an explosion of colour. Details that were previously hidden are revealed as I withdraw the chlorophyll into my core. Ancestral trees are marked in brown, more recent, perhaps more vigorous, trees bear a ring of green. Dryer land is marked in yellows, from an acid tone to a deeper, more subtle shade of sulphur. Damper areas are etched in shades of green from bright lime to a dark forest green, the colour of those deep dark spaces with which I’m so familiar. I send my stories, my explorations, out into the world, tossed gently on the autumn breezes, sharing my history and my stories with everyone.
The glorious colours of autumn fade quickly, but the beauty remains. Faded, papery, the sepia colour of my leaves reflects your own written histories. They last all winter; designed to be treasured and pored over when the evenings draw in. And yet, so few humans bother to read them. They are disregarded and ignored. Foolish humans to ignore the cumulative wisdom of an entire genus. We were here for so many millennia before you and we will still be here when humankind is a mere whisper on the wind, exploring our surroundings and travelling through them.
Next time you come across one of our libraries, stop, take a moment and enjoy. Maybe even borrow a few documents to read later.🍂
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
– Socrates
I give up! The more you think you know, the less it turns out you actually know. Want to join me on this journey to bewilderment? Come along then; look at the picture above, and say what you see.
🐛🐛🐛
Bet you said they were some type of caterpillar. If you didn’t, please don’t tell me … I’d like to think I’m not alone in my idiocy. Because these are not caterpillars.
No beautiful butterfly wings lie in their future. They are, in fact, the larvae of the Flat-Legged Birch Sawfly or Flat-Legged Birch Tenthred (Craesus septentrionalis), and will metamorphose into a reasonably dull looking blackish sawfly with a chestnut brown abdomen. I can’t help feeling that they got the short end of the stick.
🐛🐛🐛
What I like best about these little critters is that, if you look at all threatening (and when you’re only 3cm long, everything is big and scary!), they curl their tails into a s shape above their head in a defensive posture, looking like a troop of acrobats. I’m not entirely sure what this is intended to achieve; it feels more decorative than anything else, but it is impressively synchronised!
Their only other defence mechanism is that, when injured, they emit a substance that scientists believe is possibly toxic, derived from the plants on which they browse. Little consolation if you’ve been injured by a bird that’s in the process of eating you, but you take what you can get, I guess!
“Tonight would be easier And our dreams would all be deeper If the world had a mother like mine.”
– The Band Perry, ‘Mother Like Mine’
It was raining yesterday. I mean, why wouldn’t it be? It’s half term, so of course, the forecast is terrible. This is a lesser known, but binding, clause of Sod’s Law; May half term includes a bank holiday, therefore it will be soggy!
Taking advantage of a break in the cloud, I headed over to Santon Downham, and it wasn’t long before I found another species of shieldbug. Nestled in a cozy spot in a cluster of leaves on a Downy Birch (Betula pubescens) tree was a pale bellied bug with yellow legs. Being logical, I decided that it was probably a Birch Shieldbug, took loads of photos, and moved on.
A little further along, this time on a Silver Birch (Betula pendula), clinging to the underside of the leaves were three or four of the same little bugs. Each no more than 8mm long and standing protectively over a patch of tiny, polished jade-green eggs. All of a sudden, I realised that, despite being on Birch trees, they weren’t Birch Shieldbugs, but rather Parent Bugs or (Elasmucha grisea). Thanks Science, your naming system got me again!
The defining characteristics are the black and white chequered connexivum (the bit down the sides) and the exhibited behaviour. I did feel very much like an expert when I counted the segments on the antenna and knew that there would be four. I know it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it was a good feeling nevertheless!
Now, when you think of good parents, I’m pretty sure that the first example that comes to mind is NOT an insect. Me neither.
But of all the shieldbugs, this is the only species that stays with its eggs. And she stays with them, standing over them, protecting them until they are adults, hence their common name of Parent Bugs. If her eggs are attacked by beetles, earwigs or parasitic wasps, she will face off against the predator, making herself look big and calling their bluff. If all else fails, she, like other species in the family, will emit a foul scent from her glands.
I will absolutely be keeping an eye out to see one of these bugs leading a gaggle of young behind them. (And yes, I’m going with ‘gaggle’ as a collective noun. Technically, they would be a swarm, but that sounds horrific, and they’re really not!)
“I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
– Robert Frost, ‘Birches’
I’d currently quite like to scratch my eyeballs out with a rusty teaspoon. This may seem a little extreme, but I would hasten to point out that the itching across my whole face is extreme as well!
Trees are one of my favourite things in the world, and I love taking photos of them, sometimes up close and personal …. which is why it’s distinctly ironic (and very inconvenient) that I’m allergic to their pollen. Academically, I knew that we were getting to that point of the year, but the notification from my weather app this week abruptly brought it home to me that things were about to get itchy!
I’m consoling myself with the fact that I know this won’t last forever, that the Birch and Ash trees (the dirty, rotten scoundrels) will have finished their annual pollen offensive in a few short weeks …. I’m not sure it’s making my eyes itch any less though.
The Silver Birch (Betula pendula) is very common around here and provides me with interesting features to photograph all the way through the year (and an irritated face … yes, I’m holding a grudge!) This weekend is the first time this year I have seen Birch flowers and leaves emerging, their bright green glowing brightly in the sunshine. The leaves are neat and tidy as they unfold themselves from their buds, their perfect pleats soon flattening out into the instantly recognisable, almost triangular leaves.
The tree is monoecious, which simply means that both male and female flowers appear on the tree simultaneously. The dangling, yellow catkins are the male flowers, carelessly scattering their pollen to the spring breezes, while the smaller, more tightly packed, bright green catkin above is the female flower.
Birch twigs were traditionally used to make brooms, which are known as besoms in Scotland. Apparently, this term was historically used in England as well, but has fallen by the wayside somewhere. When my niece was much younger, my sister, who, having lived in Scotland since her teens, is now regrettably Scottish in her accent and phraseology, used to refer to her as “a wee besom”, meaning a mischievous young girl, when she was being a bit of a madam. This stereotypical association between an instrument for sweeping and women has existed since at least the 1800s when it was originally a disparaging term, meaning “a woman of loose morals.” Modern Scottish usage has made it slightly less judgemental, and yet still links it to those of female gender and not their, equally irritating, male counterparts. That said, the phrase was probably better than some of the other ways that we could have referred to my very lovely but impressively strong-willed, independent, and occasionally awkward niece!
Thanks to their ability to grow almost anywhere, Birch trees are known to pioneer species. They were among the first plants to colonise the newly exposed, rocky, scoured ground after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, which may go some way to explaining why they are so common in Norfolk. They are known to improve soil, bringing nutrients up from far beneath the surface of the soil and depositing them in the top layers when they drop their leaves in autumn. Because of this soil improving ability, they are the nurse trees that enable other species to move in, creating new areas of woodland over time. This also means that if you’re managing heathland and don’t want it to become forest, you spend an awful lot of time getting rid of Birch saplings.
Perhaps because of their status as a pioneer tree, the Birch is associated in Celtic mythology with new beginnings, renewal, and purification. Pleasingly (at least in my mind), this could also be linked with the use of Birch as besom-making material; the act of sweeping is, symbolically at least, getting rid of the old to make room for the new.
The adventures of an exploring ladybird
But right now, what I’d like to do is find that teaspoon and start scratching. Perhaps I should start with antihistamines and see how that goes instead.
absolutelynotnormal 