This story was written and shared as part of the Read Now Write Now workshops which took place during the Look Climate Lab 2022. To find out more about Read Now Write Now, click here.
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I am two hundred years old. I am the Queen of the forest, and of this Park. I know my Latin name, Fagus Sylvaticus, although the tiny creatures who tend and chop my branches and keep my trunk free from brambles and deer, call me “Beech”. I don’t mind this name, it preserves the mystery of my ancient connection to the old God, Fagus. He and I helped the tiny creatures, in their travails in bringing new creature-seedlings into the world. They made medicinal teas from my leaves, and prayed to me, to make their birthings easy. As one should, to a Queen.
Fagus was particularly fond of the tiny creatures with red hair; and when he chose the white-robed priests to make obeisance to me, they were often red-headed. Ah, that was long in the past of me and my ancestors; but I feel the connection still, with the creatures who owned the parkland where I stand rooted: they owned it for three quarters of my long life. So many of these creatures, called ‘Egerton’, were red-headed, too; and I liked to see them ride past under my swaying branches, so close that I could almost reach out a leafy twig and touch them.
I am two hundred years old. I stand in a long line of my noble brothers and sisters, double-planted, to make what the tiny creatures call a ‘Drive’. We have been spaced apart to give us room to grow tall and strong. Our trunks have been pruned to show our straight, smooth bark-skins to their best advantage, and to allow our green canopies to spread and form impressive helmets of green. Not all of my siblings are as old and well-formed as me, many are younger and have been planted to fill the gaps as my first relatives passed on. But I remained, the Queen of them all.
I have seen so many changes, but I did not anticipate the change which has sundered my great trunk and felled my winter branches; which has ripped my upper roots from the soil and tossed me onto my side like a broken plaything.
I have weathered so many storms and winters, learning, with each season, to send my anchor roots deep into the soil, bending with the tempest. Underneath the grass, deep in the underworld, my delicate network of roots are complex, intermingled and interdependent on chains of fungi roots and bacterial spores, mixed with the outlying roots of my woody neighbours. We communicate to each other. There is a precise balance to be maintained, as important as my straight and upright posture. Our root systems, as delicate as filaments, are sensitively attuned to change, and we are constantly talking to each other. I am a Queen, but I am not alone in splendid isolation: I am part of a great grid of natural things, and I have listened and adapted.
But recently, the storms have grown stronger and more frequent; and the winters have been mild and wet, loosening the soil to a greater depth. Then two fierce storms arrived; one after the other, in the space of a week, together with so much rain. I tried to cling on, buffeted by a fierce north wind: but in the end, my grip loosened, I felt the change in the camber of my mooring; I felt the ground being wrenched apart. With a dreadful, ear-splitting crack, my heart wood broke, low down at my base, and I fell, my trunk falling square across the ‘Drive’.
With that rending, with all my core exposed, I am dying. But that is only part of the process of what I know will follow. In endings, there can be beginnings.
When the storm had passed, the tiny creatures gathered around my great fallen mass. I understood, in a way, their fear and concern. They were afraid of the changes in the Park, and that things would never be the same again.
I am two hundred years old. I have witnessed so much. I remember, when I was but half my present age, when black sooty smoke blew in on the wind from the place the tiny creatures called ‘the City of Manchester’. It was their new religion: instead of worshipping me, they started to worship something called ‘Money’. But the by-products of Money were dirty, and toxic. The soot settled on everything in the Park, coating our bark-skin and choking us of light and oxygen. It began to poison us. My noble relations the Oaks were much affected; many died.
I adapted. I learned to re-balance myself, to adjust the chemical process of what I absorbed during the day, in order to continue to release my own oxygen at night. I slowed my growth, learned to conserve my energy. The rain was my friend, then; it washed the soot away. And the tiny creatures learned, too, but more slowly. Gradually, gradually, they stopped burning the ancient bones of my long-dead ancestors in sharp black lumps. The air cleared, and the soot stopped falling; and I survived.
And I shall live again, although not as the Queen that I once was. I shall pass my ancestry on, ensure my kind survives, for in my passing, as the canopy along my Royal avenue is opened to the sky, tiny seedlings from the mast of my last summer flowering will get their chance. We Fagus Sylvaticus will endure! My offspring will grow up towards the sunlight, genetically imprinted with all that I have learned in my two hundred year reign. They will know to dig their roots even deeper than mine; they will be primed to siphon up the excess moisture in the soil, to prevent it destabilising their grasp on the land.
The tiny creatures will help too, I sense it. As the life drains away from me, I know that they will look to plant the strongest, the most adaptive, seedlings from my kind. They will help to continue our regal lineage. Their efforts, entwined with my seedlings, is a different kind of offering to the ones their white-robed ancestors made, so many centuries ago. But it is still a kind of offering, don’t you think?
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