I will not let you go without a struggle

I live beyond the point where the lane through flat fields turns into a track. Even before this, the roadway has been poked into ridges and potholes by tree roots and is rarely repaired. The tarmac has flaked loose and in winter grass flourishes down the middle. For five months my neighbours and I, the handful who live at the end of the track, have been opposing a planning application. Last year a company bought a field on the lane and plans to erect an indoor pig unit, yards from our houses. Heavy vehicles would daily use the narrow, single track route to our homes.
In those months of opposition we have navigated unknown territory – listed building legislation and landscape assessments; regulations for noise and odour and highways. I bring my trade as an ecologist to the table, not expecting it would lead me to love.

Plant and tree surveys are nearly always a solitary pursuit. In the weeks of lockdown, they are incorporated into my one daily walk close to home. I’ve made records of flowers and trees and nesting birds in a section of hedge the pig unit will destroy. My notes are weighed against the government’s hedgerow regulations; with their cautious legal phrases these measure the value of a hedge against scales of history and wildlife importance. I find a nationally scarce plant, sulphur clover, and two birds officially listed as being ‘of conservation concern’: bullfinches, chunky and white-rumped, which nest in the thickest hawthorn, whilst yellowhammers shout from branches at the edge of their territories.

I look for evidence of antiquity at the point where two parishes meet. The regulations, for all of their jargon, recognise that these boundaries were once marked with hedges. Sometimes these are as old as the nearby round-towered churches, which Saxon masons built out of flint. Inside the ends of the oak wood roof beams are graced with carvings of angels. The churches are shut up and locked now, for the first time since who knows when, the services and support all offered by phone or online.

Still seeking, I follow a hunch, call it an ecologist’s training, and commit a small act of trespass. No more than a half dozen steps inside an open gate from the lane. I find what I wanted, but my reaction is a shock to myself. It is not smug satisfaction with my professional skills; it is a heart-lurch, a laugh and cry of delight out loud. It is a desire to embrace and hold on to and the sudden knowledge of where passion can take me.
At the point where the parishes meet is a tree, a field maple, Acer campestre. Acer, a maple and campestre, of the fields, it is the root-word of camping and campesino, the Spanish for a rustic or peasant. A tree of field edge and wood edge. Field maples hide their beauty in summer, the delicate leaf easily overlooked; they are similar in shape to the bold one on the Canadian flag, but smaller than my outspread hand. For a few weeks in autumn the leaves turn so yellow they appear to glow and catching sunlight light up the hedgerows.

My maple is a pollard, meaning it has been cut and repeatedly re-cut at roughly chest height. Pollarding was once a way of producing small timber above the reach of grazing animals. Smaller timber had more uses than large in a time when tool handles and bowls, furniture, heating and spoons were sourced nearby and for free. Field maple is a hard wood with a strongly marked grain still loved by wood turners and the makers of violins and harps. The harvesting of wood by pollarding seems quaintly benign; letting the tree live on, only taking what is really required. Pollarding also has a profound impact on the tree, causing it to grow stunted, the trunk thickened with age, even when the limbs still look young. These distinctive trees can be visible across fields, making them good markers of boundaries. Over the lane, there is a corresponding pollard, a hornbeam, gnarled and rotting, but living.

My arms cannot reach around the girth of the maple and this is slow growing tree, never as tall as the neighbouring ashes and oaks. It is a tree of stories I doubt that it knows; a witness to when horses still worked the land, or even before, when oxen plodded in front of the plough. This tree was already ancient when heavy bombers took off from the nearby hill, heading to war torn Europe. My acer tree marked out this boundary long before threshing machines took over the work of the hand-swung flail. For a decade or more farms near here could not get insurance against fire, for the labourers reacted in anger to the machines that were robbing them of work. A generation before the night time burning of rick yards, the tree stood beside common land that was being enclosed. The fore-fathers of the farmyard arsonists pulled down the fences where they could, although some were hanged or transported for their efforts. Hedges like this, old and tangled and tall, might well be fragments of woodland left when the land was first cleared for cattle and crops. My tree is only a few generations from wild wood, its genes unique and untamed. The field maple bark is pale and rough to my touch. Like all old pollards, this tree has cracks, rot-holes, shedding bark and damp hollows; it is patterned with lichen and moss. These trees are a forest in themselves - whole species of fungi and insects rely on the shelter and slow decay, or the pools that form where the limbs and trunk join. Ferns grow where the wood is crumbling and dark, bats hide and breed in finger-wide fissures and woodpeckers feed on invertebrates boring into deadwood.

My new love is a lonely pleasure for now. The lockdown has suspended all meetings with council planners and I curse this, for I want them to come meet my tree. I want them to see it as I do, ancient and vibrant, a giver of shelter and a fragment of history as important as churches or listed farmhouses. I want them to know it is more than something that stands in the way and that it cannot be replaced with a two-foot tall nursery bred sapling, encased in a plastic tube.

Over a few days I sneak back a few times to look at the tree, smiling in secret to myself all the time, stepping into the gateway unseen. What would I do if the moment came? I have been here before, more than twenty winters ago, on the route of the Newbury bypass. Hundreds of us sat in trees before dawn, freezing cold, holding on for the last moment of hope. Not giving up until there were no trees left standing. For three months and nine long miles, my friends and I watched chainsaws clearing the land for the road; worse was the indignity of bulldozers merely pushing trees over. There is a sound a tall tree makes when it falls that still tears open my heart.  

Here is as strong a commitment as I ever will make. From this moment on, maple tree, I will not let you go without a struggle. And if we win, I reserve the right to seek you out once in a while, to run my hands over the roughness of your surface.