ALSO BY DIANA BERESFORD-KROEGER
A Garden for Life: The Natural Approach to Designing, Planting, and Maintaining a North Temperate Garden
Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest
Time Will Tell
40 Ways Trees Can Save Us
DIANA BERESFORD-KROEGER
PARTICULAR BOOKS
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
PARTICULAR BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010
First published in Great Britain by Particular Books 2011
Copyright © Diana Beresford-Kroeger, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978–1–846–14411–0
A palm so small
it fits in mine,
Mother and Child
of the universe.
You are of me
a song of love,
you sit beside
all that is beautiful
in you to be.
Introduction
Bloodlines
The Sweet Savannah
Magical Trees
A Suit for Sustainability
The Paranormal
Home, Sweet Home
Heroes and Hormones
A Handful of Nuts
The Forest, the Fairy, and the Child
The Aboriginal
Bioplan for Biodiversity
Smile, Monkey, Smile
The Medicine for Mammals
Oh Mother, Dear
The Flowers of the Forest
Of Forests and Art
A Chat About Climate Change
The Paper Trail
Fragrance
Two-tier Agriculture
“Let There Be Light …”
Sacred Trees
Forest Food
Hedgerow Heaven
Warning from the Forest
Silent Sound
Medicinal Wood
The Sexual Revolution
Computer Country
Nutmilks and Creams
The Invisible Forest
Global Warming
The Birds and the Bees
Dream World
The Marriage of Lichens
Green Sex and the Affairs of the Heart
Dirty Laundry
Passion at Play
The Medicine Walk
The Forest and the Fire-keeper
Acknowledgments
References
The landscape of my youth was an Irish one. The fields were filled with the brilliant chrome yellow of furze. In between these bushes the grasses grew that softly sang the green of a perennial life. There never was one word spoken to remove those bushes and make way for more pasture. The furze was part of nature, part of the whole that worked together to sustain both man and beast.
I was small enough to squeak through the holes in the hedges to follow the horses and the one brave donkey that endured my affections. The cows were there, too, with a handful of sheep. They were all out in the morning pasture that they loved. This field was large and steep. It rolled down to a stream that ran out of the foot of the field amid some outcrops of black rocks. This field gathered up all of the morning sun and the grasses held all of the morning dew.
I knew what the horses and the donkey would do. They would approach the furze bushes. They would dip their noses down into the bright yellow blooms and smell along the cropped line of the bush until they got to the spot they wanted. Then they would pull back their upper and lower lips in a grimace, exposing a double row of long browning teeth. They would open these teeth and continue the contour of the browse line with a sharp neat snip. This was followed by the comfortable ruminations of a green breakfast and all of the soft sounds of swallowing and gentle mobile breath. Tails would flick at nothing, always in a cascade of unison.
I was in forbidden territory. I was five. The horses and especially the donkey were dangerous. I was told time and time again to stay away from their feet, especially the hind legs. But I was not interested in those legs. I was interested in the teeth and most especially in the bushes they were so carefully eating. I got my own reward from all that observation and it came in the form of a field mushroom, Agaricus campestris, a delicious product of dung. The bush the creatures so delightfully clawed was the furze or common gorse, Ulex europaeus, the larger of the two Ulex species common to Ireland’s hills and valleys.
This one of the two species on the farm firmly hugged the hedgerows. The other smaller, squatter species was down near the stream in the company of the black rocks. This dwarf version, U. gallii, was more prostrate and easier for me to examine. My overwhelming interest in these shrubs was in their yellow pealike blooms which could be opened by a slight sideways squeeze to reveal a hidden interior. And both shrubs had unmerciful thorns of unbelievable sharpness. I could not bear for my small hand to rest on them, but the horses and one donkey quite readily managed to eat with relish. The cows did not share these same fodder feelings.
When I was still younger, somebody in the household had brought me along while they were hanging out the week’s washing. All the clothes, including my dresses, were stretched out on these furze bushes. The weight of the damp clothes pressed down on the thorns which pinned the clothes in place. As the clothes dried in the sweet sea breezes off the Atlantic, my dresses were filled with pinholes of aeration. The cotton fabric took on the look of the furze bushes, which delighted me no end.
As the autumn sun parched the mountains, they and the distant fields rolled into a purple bed. The tiny bells of heath, the flowers of heather, rang the way for the scorching of brackens. The dung from the horses and donkey melted, crumble by crumble, into the green grass. And from this mixture a mushroom arose. It was huge, with wide breathing gills like a fish. When I looked down the field from my perch, there were mushrooms everywhere, brown and white stalwarts with ruggedly strong stipes and pink-fleshed buttons just blinking at the first morning light.
I gathered up the front of my dress and picked into it. I arrived back at the farm with my first feast. In the kitchen, a laugh followed by several chuckles greeted me. The mushrooms were shaken free of their dirt. A nub of homemade butter was put into each. They were placed on the bastible baking dish over an open peat fire.
Strings of knowledge connect this memory in my mind. The furze, the Ulex species, are members of the Leguminosae or pea family. This family is an avid nitrogen fixer. The horses need this nitrogen in their diet. The dung was rich in it. This, in turn, induced the field mushroom to fruit. And, then … I had my feast.
This was as impressive for a five-year-old as it still is to me today. The forests and our lives are connected and interconnected in ways that we can only wonder about. Sometimes science walks in and answers. Other times the answers are so simple that they are obvious in themselves. It is out of this child, this field with its golden furze, that this book was born.
But this book has experienced the hand and mind of another teacher, one that is long gone, one who was a drifter in the Irish landscape. He landed like a butterfly filled with knowledge of the ancient sort. He always came in the night, through the scented darkness of the bótharín, the little roadway, into the farmhouse. That man owned a piece of tradition in the turf-warmed kitchen in common with all of his kind. That property was a settee, a leaba shuíocháin, a hard, deal bench that was his bed and his seat by the community of the fire.
This drifter was the Seanchaí, or traditional storyteller. He was the keeper of legends and oral traditions of his Irish brethren. These were passed down within his family lines to share with all who would hear. He was the living memory bank of his race … “he was the one!” The Seanchaí was the most important visitor to the farmhouse. All else came after him in the pecking order. His voice held the mysteries of life itself and his riddles encased them in that ancient throne of Gaelic wisdom.
When he was fed and settled by the turf fire, the hills emptied to his heels. The local farmers came smelling of sweet hay and freshening cows with rod and perch in their brains. The mountain people came through the half-door with a windy billow of an Irish poem. They all came. They always stayed because the night, that night, would be so sweet.
The Seanchaí began like a wet dog, rounding his backside in the three-time circle of the wolf. He threw his idea as a refrain into the flames for it to float around, to be chewed upon, to be thought about and finally to be digested. The idea was always short, sometimes in Gaelic, sometimes not. The words were carefully fed out, as the backside settled into its stride, forming the short refrain. This piece was passed along from person to person in the wonder of itself like an echo of the past into its own domain. And then the story began.
And so, each one of my stories is presented to you first as a refrain. This is for thought. Ideas are the food of the mind. Thoughts and ideas beget curiosity. Then my story begins. There are forty of them. Each is in essay form. Combined, they are called The Global Forest. Each leaf of every tree makes up the global forest. This forest is the environment that drives and fulfills the dream of each leaf in a vast rhythmic cycle called life. Nothing is outside. We are all of it in a unity that transcends the whole. Maybe, just maybe, this resonates of God. If that is so, then we are all His children, every earthworm, every virus, mammal, fish and whale, every fern, every tree, every man, woman, and child. One equal to another. Again and again.
Red and green have been mystical colors since ancient times. These colors were symbols for the human race long before written language. Red and green were the colors of the warrior Celts who stamped across Europe into battle naked, while at home the cult of their Druidic priests plied their sacred image in prayer. In the end, colors are like names; they are carried in the mind. Their visual simplicity allows them to be retained deep in memory. The colors red and green ride the tides of civilization with instant recall. They net in their meaning and symbolism intact, to be fed as advertising bait into our modern techno times.
There is in the global garden a very well-known tree. It is holly, Ilex aquifolium, an evergreen of Europe, Africa, and China. It has a deciduous cousin in North America, I. verticillata, winterberry, as well as the evergreen holly, I. opaca. They are all important medicinal trees, being used in the management of elevated fevers. The Druids had long adopted the holly for their pagan festival of light and darkness, which comes down to us today as Christmas.
During the season of Christmas, holly is now transported all over the globe. Since its old name is “holy plant,” it fits in with the birth of the Christ child. This species, with its forest green leaves and tight cymes of bloodred berries, is used to decorate homes for the Christmas holidays. Even the Christmas pudding is somewhat surprised to find itself ablaze with its topknot of holly, all an echo of those pagan times.
Holly is that mystical plant of green and red. In times past the deep color represented the green of the ancient virgin forests and all of the secret powers that they held. These were considered to be holy places and for many still are. Holly achieves its forest green color by a trick of optics. The upper layer of the leaves has a waxy film that amplifies the color and gives it an optical depth. For the Druids the berry color is exactly that of fresh blood, that particular scarlet of sacrifice, human of course.
In addition, to the Celts, red and green represented the dichotomy of our lives. It was true then and it is true now. The forest green represents the plants that serve us and give us sustenance for life. And red is the deep limbic knowledge of self, the circulation and the blood that flows through us. Both systems of man and forest depend on each other.
The symbolism and perhaps even the mysticism of red and green originate at a molecular level. Blood is a red pigment that functions like an oil. It is primarily made up of flexible, mobile hemoglobin molecules contained in doughnut-shaped sacs, the red blood cells. It has genius in its design and this design is shared in a remarkable way by the green oily pigment of plants, chloroplast. The chloroplasts are also sacs containing the flexible, mobile chlorophyll molecules. These two sister molecules, hemoglobin and chlorophyll, the red and the green, conduct the pattern of our lives. Without them we would not survive as a species or as a planet.
But there is more to the molecular story. Both hemoglobin and chlorophyll are molecular machines. They work in a similar manner almost as if they were related to each other, which they are in a wider global sense. Their family kinship is built on the design they have in common, four aromatic rings that contain nitrogen. Sitting in the center position of these rings, like a solitaire diamond, is an atom of metal. In attendance to this metal, holding it in place like a diamond in its setting, are the four nitrogens of the four rings. The nitrogens hold an atom of iron in the case of the hemoglobin molecule. The nitrogens hold an atom of magnesium at the center of the chlorophyll.
Both of these metals, the iron and the magnesium, present two faces to the world. And these two faces operate like a quantum clock that tick-tocks with time. In one quantum state both metals are loaded with incoming electron energy. They tick into one valence. And in the other quantum state the metals unload and they tock into a second valence. Both metals, when held by nitrogen, tick-tock for all of their working life in a quantum state.
This is how oxygen is passed into the hemoglobin molecule that sits inside its doughnut sac. This is how oxygen gets into every tissue of the body to bathe it with its kiss of life. And this is how oxygen gets delivered from the chloroplast sacs in the mesophyll of the leaves of all plants and trees. Mesophyll is the tissue that opens up into the breathing pores or stomata of a leaf. This tissue is the flexible carrier bag for chloroplastic sacs. It is surrounded by air spaces. These air spaces are open to the atmosphere for gas exchange. This, too, is how oxygen is delivered into the atmosphere and to the oceans and the soils of the world for all of the aerobic life-forms within these systems. It seems like part of a divine plan, these twin sister molecules working hand-in-hand in their quantum homes to forge life for the entire planet.
So, what is old is new. Red and green have been mystical colors since ancient times. What is new is the story these colors hold for the human race, but like the old, their importance goes beyond human language and the written word into the mystical Celtic conundrum of the question of the meaning of wisdom itself.
The voice of the aboriginal was heard in North America long before that of the pioneer. This voice was a sacred one on the landscape. It begat an oral tradition. The words that were spoken were not wasted. They arose afresh from thought into a tradition of dance and meditation. The silence of the continent distilled the words and focused the thoughts behind them. Each word was born in its own silence. Out of this embryo of silence came the Savannah.
The most daring idea in all of the world at that time was the Savannah. It was a concept of land governance that multiplied game and kept the landscape intact. As the architecture of the trees arose, it housed the wilderness at its feet. This stable monument nurtured a wildflower meadow that was grazed and relaid with the seasons. A fine tuning was weaned out of the wildflowers by burning. This adaptation to fire was felt by the trees, copied by seeds, and greeted by grasses. It made many plants of North America unique.
The face of North America is a long one. The continental profile catches the sun fresh from the east. The solar exposure to the land of the continent is high. The sun itself is strong. The product of this strength is fed into the North American trees. These trees yield crops that are immense. The crop is the nut for non-nitrogen-fixing trees. And the crop is the pod for the nitrogen fixers. These trees favor this landscape.
The native trees of the Savannah are the oaks, Quercus, the hickories, Carya, and the walnuts, Juglans. These trees spread out a mighty canopy to the sun in great arches of horizontal branches. These deciduous natives have bud tips that are clocked into spring temperatures. When the heat units are sufficient the apical meristems of growth unfurl their green flagship to the sun. The leaves, too, reach a rapid maturity for photon trapping. The leafstalks called petioles move, tracking the sun, and the midribs of the leaves are stretched and taut for the photon catch. The roots of these trees bore down into the soil and anchor the canopy in place.
These trees have developed their own quirks. The oaks produce their own sunscreen. It functions as a suntanning cream for these sunbathing trees. These aromatic biochemicals are called quercitrin and quercetin. They absorb the high-energy region of the light spectrum and resonate the excess energy in a quantum change. This bleeds off any damage this energy may cause to the internal metabolism of the tree itself. The hickories, Carya species, are masterminds of carbon sequestration. These trees feed the carbon into the organic chemicals that make up the dense polymeric structure of hickory woods. And the walnuts, Juglans species, produce root allelochemicals that act as a soil drench of chemistry, scouring the ground around the mother tree and keeping the area free of her children’s saplings. This is because the competition would kill both mother and child. The pod-producing trees, like the honey locust, have mobile leaves that open and close. At night and on cloudy days the leaves are closed. They open flat to receive the sun.
The vast parklands of the Savannah were flash fired in April and November. At these times the native grasses are brown and dry. The roots nearer the ground are still damp and safe from fire. The woodland perennials, too, are asleep in dormancy. The fire spreads very rapidly with these light burnings but stops at the dry rough trunks of the trees. Many of these species, too, became fire resistant over the millennia. The flash firing produced a fine powdered ash. This ash condensed one important element for the Savannah. It was potash.
From the dried ash the potash seeks water. This becomes potassium hydroxide. This chemical is a fertilizer, especially for nut trees. Potassium hydroxide also protects cellular tissue against the oncoming frost and the crystalline damage of winter. It makes the potassium readily available for the forthcoming nut crop because it is water soluble. In addition, a potassium hydroxide solution is a potent fungicide. Landing near the trunks of the trees, it protects the trunks during the fall and winter months from fungal spores, especially the heavier ascospores. The ash creates a high pH on the surrounding plant surfaces and acts as an insecticide, keeping populations of pathogens low.
In the past, the trees of the Savannah were groomed by two species of birds. The larger, the heath hen, particularly liked the succulent curculios. These nut weevils arrived to feast and to lay eggs on the large and swelling buds of the spring. Once nipped, these sweetened buds were vulnerable to disease. A little later in the season carrier pigeons flocked in to feed on the insect populations of the Savannah trees. It has been said that the sun was darkened with the density of these incoming flocks. The heath hen and the carrier pigeon are now extinct. The hungry pioneers did not know of these birds’ importance to the Savannah.
The Savannah produced enormous crops of nuts. These were a first-class protein, fat, and carbohydrate food for human consumption. It did not go unnoticed by the animal world. The squirrels, with their love of the nut sugar d-Quercitol, were first off the mark. Then in succession all of the mammals and large birds increased in number based on the nut food source and predation. The foxes, coyotes, and wolves increased. But the food that was the lifeline of the aboriginal peoples increased by a hundred fold. That was the deer herd. The deer represented food and clothing to the aboriginal peoples. It meant something far greater, it meant sustainability on a landscape that could be harsh to them and to their children. The Savannah created sustainability for food, for water, and for life itself.
The Savannah was a concept in American commonage that blended the tree with its habitat into a canopied parkland for successful hunting. It was a brainchild of the native peoples on this continent, an idea so singular that it was immediately copied. It can be seen today in splendor, around Europe’s castles of the powerful, the rich, and the famous.
Magical trees and mystical forests are as old as father time. Magic is known and recognized worldwide both in the past and in the present. The word itself is very old and arises with the birth of civilization. Its source is from the Old Persian maguš, meaning sorcerer. And magic is universally understood as something that has extraordinary powers bordering on the supernatural. Some trees of the global garden fit the bill and these trees are indeed magical trees.
The elderberry, Sambucus, and the hawthorn, Crataegus, have long been considered to hold magic. This knowledge was held parallel in time by different cultures of the new and old worlds. It was known in China and Japan as well as Russia.
The elderberry was a favorite in the heady days of the Egyptians and has remained in continuous use to modern times. In Northern Europe many people would never pass an elderberry without greeting the tree, either in word or deed. They would doff their hat in respect and bow low. This species was never burned or destroyed, because it was believed that the souls who lived in the elderberry would then be destroyed too. It did not go unnoticed that the elderberry is never touched by insects or destroyed by disease.
But the elderberry does have extraordinary powers. In ancient Egypt it was used as a valuable cosmetic. Indeed, its effects on the skin are rejuvenation and revitalization. The flowers were popular as an infusion used as an eye lotion to rejuvenate weary eyes.
The Seneca aboriginal peoples used the elderberry on their premature and newborn babies. These babies were washed in a lukewarm water in which dried elderberry flowers had been previously soaked. The warm waters contain capillary-protective biochemicals that act as a gentle skin tonic through vasodilation on the newborn skin.