Arbo-real

Home is where my trees are.

I can see what that sounds like: my trees? And no, I am not claiming possession. I say ‘my trees’ like people now say ‘my person’ (in a certain TV show I watch a lot). Trees are my people, my friends, my symbols of belonging.

Looking back at all the places where I have lived, I remember trees very well – and that is saying something from someone whose memory is sometimes clouded by brain-fog.

I remember the Laburnum tree outside my childhood bedroom window, Goldregen in my native German, literally translated ‘golden rain’. It stood at the corner of the house, right next to where my head would rest on my bed. I remember funny noises at night, that seemed to come out of the walls, which turned out to be birds nesting in it.

I remember the fir tree in front of the house that was planted either at my brother’s or my birth - I have photos of it being not much taller than me as a young child. I also remember my father dangerously climbing it by the time it was as tall as our two-storey house. It was Christmas time, to fix the Lichterkette (lit. light-chain) to it that, even though as a teenager, I thought it was pure kitsch, it still shone my way home in the wintry darkness, returning home late in my parents’ car – the lights were not switched off until everybody was home.

Living in cities in Germany, and then in London, there was the odd tree – like the Magnolia in Bochum Stadtpark that signified spring when its first flower opened, and some trees in Kew Gardens in London that gave me a feeling of sanctuary when I visited, but nothing close to home.

It wasn’t until I moved to Lancashire that trees came back into my life in a big way. I remember a November day in Preston when I walked to Avenham Park, for a botany project in my first year of studying herbal medicine. I found an elder tree! Sambucus nigra – a source of so much goodness, flowers, berries, even leaves, helping humans in times of need. Sadly, I found it just as a gardener yanked it out of the ground, he scowled at me when I asked why – because it was a nasty weed, he said. I was learning to know better than that, and when I began guiding walks about medicinal plants, I made sure to tell people about the Elder spirit who, if any of its body is removed without asking permission first, will bring seven years of bad luck to the thief. If only all trees had protections like that.

My favourite plants grow out of the cracks. I remember a particular Elder tree that emerged from the old red brick railway bridge across the Ribble. It grew at first horizontally out of the side of the bridge, fairly high up, then made a 90 degree turn upwards and continued vertically, in the manner most trees do. For me, it was a symbol of nature overcoming human endeavour, when left to its own devices. A symbol of hope.

It takes me back to my youth when songs like Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand (lit. under the cobbles lies the beach) were sung at demonstrations against US nuclear missiles being stationed on German soil during the Cold War era. I badly needed hope then that the world would continue to live and thrive at that time when World War III seemed a real possibility.

Arbo-real: resistance is real. Trees are real, across time. They are a gift to the future. The trees we planted in our new home in Scotland could outlive us. The Elder tree has pride of place, the sapling placed smack bang in the middle of what was a green desert of sileage grass when we moved in three years ago. It is now as tall as our woodshed/workshop at the other end of the garden.

It also shields the arbour – a bench with sides and a roof that we often sit in on warm(ish – we are in Scotland after all!) summer nights, with the bat detector hissing, trying to see the stars obscured by the glaring streetlights (don’t get me started, that’s another story).

I sit in it reading my new book that I picked up on holiday: ‘How I became a tree’ by Sumana Roy. If you like trees, and reading – if you got this far, I am assuming some interest in both – I can warmly recommend this book.

It is not just trees that we have planted: the huge Larch trees in the churchyard and the three Scots Pines on our daily walk are friends to me, the Giant Redwood in Mabie Forest, all are greeted by my hand, when I remember. And I feel I should mention a tree we brought here from our previous home in Blackpool, a Buddleia. A person connected to that tree, one of our lovely neighbours there, passed away recently (RIP Sandy). It was a sapling when we moved, self-seeded into one of the many pots around our patio, and we assumed that it was an offspring of the one we planted there. But when it did flower here in Scotland for the first time, it turned out to be from our next door neighbours’ tree – more reddish-purple than the one we had bought. Today, I saw a butterfly on one of its flowers for the first time this year, a Red Admiral. There is hope, and life, if only it is left to its own devices. Our garden, a wild mess, is luscious and beautiful and full of bees and bugs and birds, my idea of paradise.

I shall close with a poem that echoes some of what I have mentioned. It was first published in the Open Book Scotland anthology of 2022 titled ‘I give my word’, and I was honoured to read it at its launch at Wigtown Book Festival in the same year.

Belonging

How to make this place home?
I plant trees in the garden
and a hedge, for the bees and the ladybirds,
the song thrush, and blue tits, and the little mouse that lives in the wall.

I put up curtains and blinds, for privacy,
brighten the broad windowsill with flowers;
a prism hung from the curtain rail makes rainbows in the sunshine.

I chat with neighbours, sometimes for too long,
and try to understand why those old people talk about the graves in the churchyard so much.
My ancestors are far away now, buried by war, displaced by violence.

I want to build anew
embedding Haw and Blackthorn, Elder and Hazel
May their roots become mine, with time.

Angela McG