Bitter Honey

‘God is change.’ - Octavia E. Butler 

I travelled recently to the Himalayas - a mythic place that speaks of permanence. The word Himalaya stems from the Sanskrit roots hima - snow and alaya - abode, a  name given by the pilgrims of India who were drawn to seek life’s meaning amidst the stillness of the mountains. A reminder that people, plants and animals have always moved in search of their place in the world.

We were walking in the foothills of the Annapurna, a place whose name loosely translates as ‘the food that surrounds’ and I was interested to study the local flora and fauna - an effective way to orient a troubled mind towards life’s abundance. Despite the many stories of loss and collapse we are surrounded by, the wild plants still reveal a world of plenty. In this era of climatic shift it is helpful to examine what is thriving, even as we grieve the losses.

Our route took us through villages and dense forest, and I was surprised by the dominant tree, lali gurans, a rhododendron whose blossom is the national symbol of Nepal. In spring it bursts into flower, covering the mountain slopes in a sea of red (see above). As we walked, my guide extolled the beauty and virtues of a plant I’d rarely heard spoken about in a positive way. ‘Here in Nepal it’s a protected tree, and we have a long tradition of drinking tea made from its flowers.’ He also described a honey made from the nectar of another species of rhododendron, intriguingly known as  mad or bitter honey.’*

The Nepali rhododendron (Rhododendron arboretum) is a different species to the hybrid (Rhododendron ponticum) that grows wild in the UK. This rhododendron, popularised by wealthy Victorians for its exotic purple flowers and usefulness as ground cover for grouse, long ago escaped the neat confines of smart estates and made it’s own way in the world. With abundant seeds, suckering roots and easy propagation, it’s an opportunistic plant that easily establishes itself in new territory.

From one perspective a hardy plant to be admired, from another, a non-native bully that threatens native flora and fauna. ‘Rhodeys’ as they are often referred to in the UK are deemed a nuisance by land-owners and ecologists alike. An allelopathic plant,  rhododendron suppress the growth of rival species close to it, (as do our ‘native’ trees pine, yew, and elder). The leaves are poisonous, so herbivores can’t eat them, though bumblebees are besotted by its riotous purple flowers that sit atop proud, articulate leaves. It also makes excellent firewood, burning hot and bright, though few use it in this way.

Regardless of these mixed qualities, ecologists are unanimous in their condemnation,  united in valid concern that this rhododendron threatens native flora and fauna. Time and money are spent on initiatives such as ‘Project Wipeout’ in Scotland, that try to control or eliminate them, while other projects such as Eat the Invaders take a more playful approach, and have given rise to a new food movement called Invasivorism - an attempt to limit the growth of invasive plants by eating them into submission.

My time walking amongst the rhododendron forests of Nepal gave me pause to reflect on the concept of native and non-native species, and the fears we hold about the changes they bring. It’s always bothered me to hear plants described in terms we would be wary of using for people and I notice a subtle violence seeded in language that names alien and local species.

R. ponticum belongs to a maligned tribe of plants, or ‘foreign weeds’, that are said to threaten traditional ecologies through their bullying, invasive habits. Other species in this band of brigands are Himalayan Balsam, Japanese Knotweed, and Common Ivy - plants that are rarely valued in their own right or utilised for their medicinal qualities, instead looked at in terms of the threat they pose to the rightful occupants of a given place. The fact that each of these have something to offer humans - Himalayan balsam is a readily available food source, Japanese knotweed is used to treat lymes disease and common ivy helps to relieve asthma and bronchitis -  tends to be overlooked.

The Greek philosopher Protogoras wrote that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and this sentiment is echoed by Dutch ecologist Perry Cornellisen’s warning that human attempts at natural stewardship often fall prey to our tendency for preference. ‘We understand the world through a narrow window of what we consider good or normal.’ he says. ‘We like some animals and plants more than others, often because they are what we are used to.’

Another ecologist, Fred Pearce, author of The New Wild - Why Invasive Species Will be Nature’s Salvation, makes the bold claim that ‘there is no such thing as a native species.’ This statement speaks of a world in flux, and the steady migration of all species across land and sea since the beginning of time. The arrival and naturalising of R. ponticum - brought here by humans - continues a tradition of migration that is a natural feature of the earth’s evolution.  As with all things human, we have greatly increased the rate, scale and range, but the fact of a new dominant feature might not be as threatening as we suppose.

It’s thought that rhododendron was actually present in Great Britain prior to the most recent ice age, but did not recolonise afterwards so that our present ecologies developed without it. Its re-emergence in the last half-century brings with it the question of time and scale - the tendency of the human mind to measure patterns in human terms and, stemming from that, create distortions as arbiters of ecological balance. It is comforting to think that what we see now is how things have always been, but even our beloved old-growth forests consist of species that only migrated to our shores in 10,000 BC - a blink in the eye of geological time.

A question posed by those who want to get the invading rhododendrons out is whether they can co-exist without causing harm to the native species we love. The fear is that they ‘crowd them out’, and that we lose biodiversity in the process. The ‘enemy release hypothesis’ speaks of these problematic invasions - scenarios where a plant or animal that has co-evolved in relationship with local pathogens, parasites and predators that limit its population, moves to a new environment without these natural checks and so proliferates without restraint. We humans, it seems, have an obligation to keep things under control.

In ecological or conservation circles it is almost taboo to question this, so I was interested to read ecologist Chris D. Thomas’s controversial and curiously hopeful book, Inheritors of the Earth - How nature is thriving in an age of extinction,  in which he states that ‘as far as we know, no native British species has completely died out from the whole of Britain as a consequence of [non-native] arrivals…The chances of a new arrival causing an extinction is a very, very small fraction of 1%. At the moment in the UK, empirically it’s zero.’ Perhaps, he suggests, ‘instead of wasting our time battling rhododendrons and trying to return to an arbitrary version of the past’ we should instead embrace what he calls ‘new forms of biological diversity.’

‘From the perspective of Earth-time,’ he goes on, ‘it makes a lot of sense. In the past 500 million years there have been five mass extinctions triggered by supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and other enormous planetary events that dramatically altered the climate. After each of these, the survivors regrouped, proliferated and evolved…People are prone to equate change to loss.’ Thomas writes, ‘and they see the arrival of a new species as almost equivalent to a loss as well, because it represents a further departure from a previous state.’

As I stood beside a stand of Nepali rhododendron trees, huddled like ancient pilgrims on the mountain slopes, I was able to reframe this plant in the context of geological time. Both rhododendron and the Himalayas pre-exist humans by many millions of years, our own human story a mere glimmer by comparison. The immense presence of the mountains might have felt timeless, but in fact the ground was moving. The night before this picture was taken an earthquake had killed over 150 people - the inexorable shifts of a world that is always giving birth to itself.

The contorted trunks of the trees spoke of heavy torque - the pressure exerted on them by wind and their own weight. It was helpful to see their twisted forms and remember that letting the world shape us, and itself, keeps us in tune with the weather we are called to weather. Attempts to keep things as they have been can lead to a dangerous brittleness. Resilient ecologies are flexible ecologies, and allowing our environments to alter might help us move with this always-changing earth.

A Sensory Fortress

A deer bed, photographed by Katherine Wollson for her project Deer Bed

‘The highest aim of every living being is to feel safe.’ - Monty Roberts

During a recent tracking walk I came across a deer bed positioned halfway up a ridge. It was tender to feel the still-warm ground and to imagine the deer, replete with herb and heather, selecting the place where it felt safe enough to ruminate and draw out life’s inherent goodness - even while scanning the surrounding hill for danger. In this case, me.

A few years ago I l was taught by a tracker about the idea of a ‘sensory fortress’ - the places chosen by grazing animals in which to rest while they digest. They are usually on a slope, providing a high vantage point, and positioned in careful relation to the wind. Sometimes they are surrounded by bramble or scrub, providing a further layer of protection.

The root of our word fortress lies in the latin fortis, strong, which evolved into the old French fortresse, a strong place. Another root brings in the meaning of being held or supported, and in this light a sensory fortress speaks less of defence and more of sensory empowerment. The brambles do not create a wall, instead they heighten the deer’s innate capacity to detect danger. Security is desired, of course, but in the natural world this is always of a permeable kind - both life and death can get in.

Aldo Leopold wrote that an ecological education means living in a world of wounds, and my research into indigenous tracking and hunting practices (both human and animal) has often meant learning about nature through the literal wounds that life inflicts on life. It is inevitable that all creatures will die, but learning about the many ways we kill each other can be troubling at times.

Learning about predation is an unsentimental education, a world away from the gentle wisdom of plant-based learning. To study hunting is to encounter opposites - the challenging drives of threat and security. Meat is a life-saving gift for many traditional hunting cultures, and yet one that necessitates loss. Almost all hunters I’ve spent time with live with the sorrow and joy of this paradox, and it sits at the heart of the reverent cosmologies that exist in human cultures towards the animals who sustain them.  

© Katherin Wollson

It's also helpful to remember that every eating animal ‘takes’ from the world in one way or another. Even herbivorous creatures we characterise as peaceful, such as deer, are a danger to that which they eat. As Aldo Leopold writes in his essay Thinking like a Mountain ‘I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.’ In the eyes of a birch sapling, a hungry deer is as dangerous as a wolf.

In Scotland, where many hills have been grazed to barrenness, this point is made vivid. Many rewilding projects here are focussed on growing trees, an endeavour that is mostly carried out by culling large numbers of deer. This is a new form of ecological hunting - for neither meat nor sport - and I find it difficult that these efforts to restore plant life bring with them so much animal death.

It’s often said that the highest aim of every living being is to feel safe, but I sometimes wonder if our human desire for security has made us forget how to take part in the dance of precarity and trust that all wild animals learn from birth. Without this part of life - moving with the vulnerability of the hunter or hunted - our own engagement with life’s wild edge atrophies. Deer do not build their sensory fortresses with methods or materials that cut them off from life. Instead they select places that bring them into deeper relationship with it. Without an ability to eliminate danger they instead remain open to it. A deer on a hill listens, smells and looks, alert and waiting. Its sensory fortress is nothing more than a body in tenuous relationship with the interesting world around it.

There is a moment on all our Plant Listening walks when we take time to stop and engage the senses, closing our eyes and feeling our way into the surrounding trees through our own subtle, sensory capacity. It’s something we humans rarely do automatically. In our human-dominated and head-strong culture it can be hard to remember that we’re also equipped with finely-tuned animal bodies that exist in a feedback loop with the world.

In the UK, where we long ago exterminated all the other apex predators that once created a sense of genuine fear, alongside developing industrial farming systems that allow us to forget the effort and responsibility of taking life to sustain our own, we now live with different anxieties. Our worries are still about threat and security, but spun into complex global systems that go far beyond the here and now.

Living with fear isn’t easy, and it can be tempting to barricade ourselves away from, or lash out at, that which threatens our safety. A daily decision remains as to whether we remain curious about, or shut down, that which scares us. It might be easier to tune out the things we’re afraid of, but in the process of doing so do we miss the opportunity to live a wild and trusting life?

The lion is often heralded as a symbol of courage but I would also propose the listening deer. So open and without defence, and therefore so free, these animals accept the large and small events of every day. When you next find yourself in a difficult place, take a moment to simply pause and lean towards whatever it is that life is carrying towards you.

In a wild ecology safety doesn’t involve certainty and a sensory fortress has no walls. What might we find if we stay open in the face of that which scares us? To trust our bodies - these beautiful instruments so adept at feeling rather than conceptualising - is to better acquaint us with life. For the deer that sits on the ridge, there is no separation between itself and the surrounding world. Life is blown in on the wind, that messenger of all that’s beyond our understanding.

© Katherine Wollson

Your Own Gentle Pace

Earlier this year I took part in a project called Day of Access - a series of walks designed to support vulnerable bodies amidst vulnerable ecologies. Alec Finlay, the project’s founder, invited me to lead the walks after a conversation we had about the way in which the practical endeavour of foraging (looking for food and medicine) creates opportunity to slow down and take the world in.  

Many of the plants we encounter on our Plant Listening walks are known as vulnerary herbs. Common weeds such as yarrow, plantain, comfrey and ground-ivy. The collective term is taken from the latin for wound vulnera, the root of vulnerable - to show one’s wounds. Most of the participants for these Day of Access walks, people living with chronic illness, did just that, without shame or self-pity. These were not walkers who were familiar (or particularly interested!) in foraging, and at best the idea was met with resigned bemusement. Regardless, the invitation to take part was the same. Whoever you are and whatever ails you, come and walk gently amongst the trees. No aim, no timeframe - just a time of moving with awareness through this healing, wounded world.

Meandering with a foraging gaze doesn’t require a lot of physical energy, in a sense the opposite - an ability to walk very slowly. Walking in this way is something that those of us who are used to an easy physicality often find hard to do. Our world runs at speed, we are impressed by scale, and so the walks for Day of Access allowed me (the ostensible guide) to be tutored in a different way of walking by participants who have learned that a short walk can still be a great adventure. It was a lesson I sorely needed. Shortly after these walks I began wading through a post-viral malaise that made life’s basic tasks feel monumental. It has been helpful to shift the value of a walk  from distance to depth.

Alec and I developed a rhythm for each walk. With the help of his xylotheque walking sticks, the various groups or individuals held a piece of the surrounding highland or lowland woods in their hands, inviting contact with the trees - a practical reminder of the way they support us. Alec selected each of the places we visited, exploring their topography through maps and thoughtful translations of their Gaelic place names. I was then invited to lead the group into that place, looking closely at the vital, verdant details that fill it with life.

Each place, known and named by long-gone people whose bodies are now part of the ground, had its own charm and richness, just as each group did. We walked the tree-covered slopes of Taynish with a group of young people suffering with chronic anxiety. Dripping lichens and rare orchids gave way to a sunny bluebell-covered hilltop, the remnants of felled rainforest, giving pause to reflect on how change and loss can reveal life in new, illuminating ways. Moving from these lush but depleted forests and across the majestic, heather-scorched hills of Braemar was to observe both health and frailty. A  picture like the one heading this piece looks impressive, but on closer inspection tells a story of a burnt-out place in need of rest.

Alison, a blind woman who I walked with in Braemar, drew my attention away from the forlorn surroundings and towards the sound of peewits, curlews and Greylag geese she was noticing as we made our tentative way across Glen Feardar. ‘I can hear them all,’ she smiled, ‘so much life!’ Another participant, Brian, listening to the sound of rifle practice rolling off the sea at Tentsmuir in Fife - rolled his ninth cigarette and recalled a rough past life in the army, before gamely eating some sea rocket and declaring it 'not as nice as a roll.' Another participant, June, struggling at the emotion that was emerging from moving through Kirkcaldy Park at a slow, reflective pace, told me that she hadn’t had any feelings for over 30 years, and didn’t intend to start now. A moment spent meditating on the beauty of a common daisy (another vulnerary plant) in St Andrew’s Botanical Garden, led to a rousing rendition of ‘Daisy Bell’. 'I thought I'd forgotten that' said Angela who lives with Alzheimers, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

Tamara and walkers in the pine woods at Nethy Bridge

As I’ve reflected on these walks over my own recent strange, energy-zapped months, I’ve thought a lot about the struggle we face in allowing ourselves to slow down and simply be where we are. Why is it so hard to do? ‘When I became blind I lost many friends.’ Allison told me. ‘People didn’t know how to walk beside someone who couldn’t see. They either tried to lead me or left me behind at a loss. It’s rare to find someone who can walk beside you at a faltering pace.’

And yet doesn’t the earth, life made manifest, invite us to do just that? Beneath the culture of speed that has us all running, and perhaps the deeper evolutionary need for quick agility in finding food and evading prey, is a world of presence that encourages rest. Threaded through all my experiences of tracking animals who live in close, reciprocal contact with the land, is evidence of this. Whether predator or prey, all wild creatures understand the balance of stillness and hurried movement. Tracking moves at a varied pace, and along the trail we find beds, forms and dens that speak of rest. Time taken, when needed, to sleep, ruminate or lick one’s wounds.

Foraging and tracking both teach us about the wonder of the local, all that we already have. Slowing down - with an eye on the ground and a hand on a supportive stick, allows us to go at a saner, quieter pace. These walks for Day of Access inspired a deep appreciation of the often-overlooked people and plants who live on the margins and, going deeper, the neglected parts of ourselves we tend to neglect. For a moment  we stop thinking about the world as a series of abstractions - and our life as a collection of achievements - and simply put one faltering foot in front of the other. As David Polmadie says, ‘there are different paths, they don’t all reach the summit.’

Meander

It recently struck me that it had been a while since I’d gone for a walk without aim or limit, so decided to take some time and let myself be led by the world instead of my own agenda. Early summer is a fine time for this kind of wandering, ideally amidst damp meadows that teem with life.

As so often happens when I walk in this way, I soon picked up a deer trail that followed the course of a river - an animal inclination to walk alongside living waters that wind intelligent routes through the landscape. A new hierarchy emerges in being a human following an animal who, in turn, follows water that is both shaping and being shaped by the ground. There is leadership - but of a fluid and transient kind.

Rivers are agile, living things that live out braiding, meandering patterns. Without human interference they choose their own way, creating routes that can seem unnecessary to minds that run on straight lines and work to consistent targets. Far from just being a ‘feature of the landscape’, rivers are vital veins that bring life to the earth. The work of straightening rivers, one of the many endeavours of the sometimes insanely rigorous Victorians, has done much harm to the wise waterways of the UK. In our quest for fertile ground and dominant order we turned many meandering rivers into straight runs, stripping trees from banks and pouring concrete over the floodplains, stopping the absorbing conversation between river and bank.

This quest for dominance and order missed something important. Floods are part of a river’s life, and as long as there are floodplains, this need not be a problem. An essential part of river systems – ‘floodplains are the wide, flat banks that are covered with water during long periods of heavy rainfall. They are like speed bumps – holding onto water and slowing it down.’ (Czech et al 2016). They are also places of fertile growth, peopled with water-loving trees, fragrant flowers and myriad insect life. Far from unproductive, they hum with business.

To stop seeing a river as alive and to treat it as a resource is to degrade it. This is true of all bodies, be they made of earth, water or flesh and bone. The current emptying of our raw sewage into our waterways is sad testament to this loss of vision. We empty waste into bodies we don’t consider worthy of respect, missing the link that the health of our water directly links to the health of all who walk and live alongside them.  

Happily, there is now a movement to undo these historic straightenings, in the hope that with the return of floodplains and tree-lined watercourses (with their nourishing leaf-fall and tangles of absorbent roots that hold the earth together) we can halt flooding and encourage the return of spawning salmon, trout and freshwater mussels. This process has some wonderful names such as putting the kinks back in the river, rewiggling, and the more technical but still lovely, re-meandering. It is a heartening thought that they way a river rewilds itself is by returning to its wiggly, non-sensical ways.

Allowing myself to follow the winding deer tracks along the river’s inefficient course, calmed me. These animal-river lines give a taste of what it must be like to walk in synch with a world that has a different understanding of time. To walk without purpose or aim is antithetical to how the western human is taught to move, think and do. How often do we allow ourselves to simply wander?

Words like ‘drift’ and ‘aimless’, speak of hazy and intangible life ways often associated with a sense of being lost. But they are how foraging animals, and the world, make their way. A river or an animal is not meant to move in ways that are consistently neat and straight. The straight line is a facet of hunting, either chasing or being chased, and these sprints are always short-lived. Otherwise, at peace, there’s just gentle movement that speaks of browsing - the meaningful relationship between foraging and meandering.

What happens when we ask the world, and ourselves, to sprint at optimum speed for long stretches of time?  Without kinks to slow things down, long loops that turn back on themselves, and absorbent stretches that aren’t meant to do anything, we also, like our rivers, get overwhelmed. We can go so fast these days - voice messages at double speed, 5G super-quick downloads, and projects like HS2 that destroy precious eco-systems, and waste billions, in order to shave seconds.

 But the body, the world, also needs spaces in which to slowly unwind. The only way our Plant Listening walks work is by consciously slowing down so that we allow ourselves to re-attune to the rhythm of a beckoning, meandering world.

You can read a conversation between myself and fellow tracking collaborator Hermione Spriggs on the subject of Meander here.  

Sermons in Stones

One of the first things people often ask during our Plant Listening walks is the name of the plants we encounter. I try to resist giving these for as long as possible, preferring to initially meet the plant through the senses. Using our hands, noses, lips and tongues, allows for a sensory greeting that helps to build a wordless map of knowing. After all, the names we use mean nothing to the plants themselves, and while our systems of order and categorisation are useful, they only take us so far into the mysterious life-ways of a mercurial, living world.

I recently met a man by some standing stones here in Galloway. I’d heard about Joseph from another local, who’d told me there was a man who could be found at Cairn Holy, a local stone circle, every sunrise and sunset. It’s taken me some time to go and find him, but this week I did, arriving with a friend to see a white-bearded man in a fleece and wellies measuring the lengthening evening light against the position of the stones.

’Will you tell us about them?’ I asked, but instead of speaking he motioned for us to look as he had been doing.

‘It’s always better shown than said’ he smiled.

A 17-year apprenticeship to Cairn Holy has done nothing to dampen the passion Joseph feels for a subject that continues to reveal itself with a slow steadiness in keeping with its nature. What is, according to the information board stood by them, a collection of ancient stones put in place by a Neolithic farming culture, is rendered a kind of dance in Joseph’s sensitive enquiry.

He describes the solid stones as gestures and the way they relate to universal patterns as melodies. Listening to him talk about the stones was to stop seeing them as ‘stones’ and understand them as a leaping-off point into an ever-moving and interrelated cosmos. A trained scientist, it struck me that this erudite man could easily present a sense of mastery about his chosen ‘subject’.

‘I could tell you something and you could believe me and I could play the game of expert’ he shrugged with a laugh. ‘But that would be missing the chance to discover something interesting together!’

Learning through shared enquiry is at the heart of Plant Listening. Each walk, at once a practical foray into the medicine, nutrition and folklore of plants and animals, is also a time of wondering. I can talk at length (and often do!) about a willow or a nettle, but as Joseph says, to come at each plant with a fresh gaze creates space for genuine encounter.

Mystery goes against the grain of a culture that likes certainty. It might seem a whimsical waste of time to wonder who a plant, animal or stone is and how they are woven into the fabric of the whole, instead of simply naming and categorising it. But there is much to be said for learning through repeated sensory encounter. We would have once learnt like this as earth-smart children, crawling on the ground and feeling our way into life - cold water, musty mud and bitter leaf - the textures and tastes of a risky, medicinal world.

I recently read about the relationship between the Nunamiut Eskimos of Northern Alaska and the wolves who share their territories. Both wolves and men rely almost entirely on caribou meat for their survival, and so hunt alongside each other in close observance of the other’s patterns of behaviour. In the last century field biologists went to spend time among the Nunamiut in order to also study the behaviour of the wolves who inhabit this region. The local hunters were very interested in the technology being employed to tag and monitor the animals, but did not want or need to employ those methods themselves. To know everything about the wolf was not their aim. Instead, as Barry Lopez writes in Wolves and Men the ‘animal is observed as part of the universe. Some things are known, some things are hidden. Some of the wolf is known, some is not.’ The reason for studying the wolf was not to achieve a mastery of ‘wolf’ but rather a way of getting ‘closer to the physical world in which they both live.’

This idea, of learning about one being so as to better understand the world you share, takes us beyond individual objectification and out towards a shared reverence. To see each being as alive and worthy of privacy and respect, makes us tentative in our quest for understanding. Instead of knowledge for its own sake, we learn so as to better live in inter-species community with each other. ‘How majestic was the wolf in the mind of the modern eskimo’  observes Lopez, making me reflect how extraordinary the stones were in Joseph’s presence, and how full of wonder a flower or stick is in the eyes of a child.

The healing tree is a borderless reality

Spring is about beginnings, those tender tips of emerging green. Up here in the Galloway hills this takes a little longer than down in the south, asking for some patience on our part. At this time of year my tracking gaze always turns toward plants and trees. They ask for our attention during spring, with a boisterous aliveness that is directly imparted to the body when we eat, drink or simply spend time with them.

We are given two doses of green every year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes, beautifully timed to allow our bodies to prepare for, and recover from, a sparse winter. It is good to feel ourselves held in rhythms that work beyond our clocks and calendars - an earth-given intelligence of which we are the receivers rather than the makers.

Winter’s sleep gives rise to many ideas, and these brightening days are filled with rain, wind and healthful herbs that work together to heave us out the dark. There is no more potent time to feel the transition of the seasons. As we slough off our winter skin, it’s energising to step outside and let ourselves be roused with rain and the sun’s increasing light.

But before we leap into too much hurried doing, it’s wise to take time to pause, lean against a well-loved tree and notice the slow and steady way they emerge from their own winter slumber. The sap is rising and the buds and blossom opening, but it’s not a process that happens overnight. It’s a pleasure to feel all that energy steadily working its way through trunks and branches to bring forth soft leaves and flowers – each with its own medicine.

This month I have written an article about my practice of Sleeping with Trees for Dark Mountain, whose writing is a love letter to the uncivilisation of our world. This piece explores my practice of sleeping outside and the simple act of spending time observing the way trees go about their lives.

Surrounding me here in Galloway are many kinds of trees, but best of all is the birch. Spending time in their elegantly unruly company teaches on many levels. With their seeds borne on the wind, these pioneer trees show a joyous disregard for human fences. The healing tree is a borderless reality and observing them asks questions about the boundaries we wish to strengthen and those it’s time to take down.

Birches are found all across the Northern hemisphere, in a stunning variety of form, providing practical and medicinal support to all who are lucky enough to live near them. Sometimes known as ‘nurses’ they grow quickly and improve the soil, their canopies allowing light to reach neighbouring species, while still providing shade to more sensitive young trees like ash, beech and oak, as well as some of the conifers.

They are pioneer trees, said to have followed the retreating ice sheets all those years ago, preparing the ground for other trees. They are trees of extremes, able to withstand great heat and cold (protected by their beautiful, medicinal bark) and transforming unpromising soil, by softening the ground and filling it with nutrition. This work isn’t done with toil and effort, the roots softening the ground and the annual leaf-drop imparting nutrition to the topsoil beneath. What a heartening lesson - that we can nourish the world with our presence by simply being.

The path is made by walking

During our final tracking walk here at the Saari Residence in Finland, I was asked if I ever think about my own tracks. The question made me laugh - how strange to spend so much time looking for signs of animals and plants and yet not give much thought to my own trail. It’s easy to forget that we are always being beheld by an observant world. Deer expert Richard Pryor makes a good point when he states that wild animals ‘know more about us than we know about them, that’s why we so rarely see them.’

An important aspect of tracking is thinking and moving like the creature you seek. Four-legged creatures do not walk as we do, and in order to understand their tracks you have to re-imagine the world from a different point of view. One of the first tracking techniques I was taught is known as the fox-walk. A simple adjustment, it asks you to move very slowly with toe rather than heel first. Used as a stalking method that allows you to get closer to wary animals, it gives more control to the body and helps avoid stepping on noisy sticks or leaves. Imagine comically creeping up to scare someone from behind and you get the picture.

Some animals move in such a way that their tracks appear as a single line of footsteps. Foxes do this, as do cats and wolves - economical hunters that move through their environment with fluid grace. These prints are known as a ‘direct register’ - the back paw fitting neatly into the front. Picture a model on a catwalk and the sinuous trail they leave in their wake.

Unless we are in danger, humans rarely think about how we move through, and are witnessed, by the animal world. You can get a sense of how heavy and loud we are by putting your hands over your ears and walking with your normal tread. What might seem a light-footed stroll takes a vibratory toll when we walk or run. On a city street or paved road, there is little cause to think about our weight and gait. But when we move onto earth, and adopt a tracking mode of attention, the way we are received by the ground, and perceived by animals, becomes more significant.

Many cultures have found extraordinary ways to embody the animals they hunt, such as the Yukaghirs of the Russian Far East, who cover their skis in fur so they slide through the snow in a way that sounds like a horny female elk. The human-following-the-animal-who-leads brings us into dynamic relationship and there is a curious irony that hunters often surrender their human identity and think, and move, like their prey. What might seem like a form of play is, for many hunting cultures, integral to survival.

Moving like an animal softens the borders of self, expanding our understanding of life and with it, our ability to enter into worlds beyond the human. As anthropologist Rane Willerslev, who lived with the Yukaghirs for many years, notes. It ‘is not just some outward mimicry, simulation, or aping, but instead something deeper and more intense, that is, the ability to put oneself in the place of another, reproducing in one’s own imagination the other’s perspective.’

And this empathic imagining doesn’t have to extend only to animals. We can also think about it from the ground’s point of view, or a plant’s. What is it like to be walked and laid upon, or cut and ploughed? How might frost feel, drought or the coming of rain? This isn’t just cerebral imagining, but one borne of thinking with our bodies. I recently read about an old farming practice where the spring planting of seeds was decided by pulling down trousers and sitting with bare buttocks on the soil. If it was warm enough to sit comfortably for ten minutes, then the earth was ready to receive the seeds.

This somatic engagement with our environment can also give us deeper insight into the human spaces we inhabit. At a recent tracking walk, someone spoke about a video game that gives the gamer the experience of being a feral animal in the city. ‘Doing these walks and playing this game, has got me thinking for the first time about how I move” I was told, “I realise that our cities are laid out entirely for humans, and now when I think about navigating as a fox or cat, I notice unforeseen blocks but also new pathways and interesting opportunities. It’s changed the way I see the city and think about my body.’

What would happen, I wonder, if we spent some more time thinking about our human challenges from a wilder point of view. Might we see the world we’ve created from a different perspective? What could a more sensitive engagement with the ground and those who leave their mark upon it, offer us? Perhaps by losing contact with the practices of tracking we are missing a mimetic trick.

As I reflect on the marks I leave behind me this month, I’ll try and remember that the earth and its creatures are watching and listening.

Every creature is a book

This January finds Plant Listening in freezing Finland, sharing tracking~foraging walks at the Saari Residency, a place where writers and artists explore how art can respond to our changing environment. Winter is the best time for tracking (the snow makes it easy!) and each morning is like moving over a new page, deciphering the subtle story of the night.

It’s interesting doing these walks at a writing retreat, a place where we share stories of the human world. On a tracking walk we find other stories, those told by the bodies of animals, the rhythmic tracks like musical notes – the harmony and syncopation of worlds eliding and colliding. As Anna Tsing writes, ‘to follow an animal’s lines of interest makes you realise what a polyphonic engagement they have with the world.’

Following these animal lines of hunger and interest, invites us to move away from ordered paths and move quietly and deftly through the world. In order to read the signs and stay on the trail, we have to learn the languages of both animal bodies and the ground that holds the memory of their presence. It challenges the human mind, this language of mud, snow, and leaf. It is humbling to learn a new alphabet, and in order to see the signs we often have to get down on our knees.

Here at the Saari Residency there is a wild array of moss and lichen sprouting from rocks, cloaking boulders and hanging from trees. As I follow a deer’s tracks I see where it has stopped and eaten some and so, following an animal who is always interested in plants, I am also drawn into this ‘polyphonic engagement’ with the world. Grazing animals are the ultimate foragers, and we humans have much to learn from the simple way they eat, ruminate and give their clean waste back to the earth.

I study the moss eaten by the deer and discover it is called reindeer moss, cladonia rangiferina. In fact a lichen (a combination of fungus and alga - the fungus directing life and the alga giving it form) this so-called moss grows on stone and forms a primary food for all deer during winter wherever it grows. Most moss and lichens can be eaten, but need a certain amount of processing to eliminate their acidity (they digest rock, after all).

I spoke to Finnish chef Sami Talberg about how he processes moss and lichens, and he suggested blanching in vinegar and then soaking in a few changes of water, before drying. I did this, adding a final step of soaking the moss in honey water before dehydrating, resulting in a delicately sweet moss crunch that tastes of both ancient time and the promise of spring. Rich in carbohydrate, moss and lichen are foods that could support human life, but because of habitat loss and its very slow growth, we should be sparing in our use of cladonia rangiferina and save plenty for the deer that rely on it.

As our group stood amongst the snow yesterday morning sharing this bag of crunchy, honeyed moss, the sun shining as the delicate deer tracks melted before our eyes, I felt a sense of taking part in a story that was filled with hope. The earth asks for attention and our responsive joy is a sacred offering. To refocus our gaze on the delicate tracks of animals, the always-changing weather, and the food offered by the ground, is to move from a toughened human narrative towards a tale that is offering us another way.

Trusting the ground

Plant Listening began with the simple aim of fostering reconnection through the practices of foraging and tracking. These two ancient ways of seeing and being, take us into the heart of life and remind us of the wealth we are freely offered by the world. In today’s thrusting and juddering financial system it’s easy to forget this simple economy - one in which the earth gives us all we need.

Shortly after establishing our base in Galloway I met a military veteran at the side of the road who is cycling around the UK raising awareness about PTSD. Since leaving the army Alan, or Tiny as he’s known, has lived on the streets for over 20 years and written many poems about his experiences. It struck me as interesting that after sleeping rough through the harsh cold of many winters - not always knowing if he would wake up - that what he writes about isn’t the hardship (of which there’s plenty) but the gift of seeing the stars and waking up to the sight and sound of the birds in the trees.

(You can watch Tiny reading one of his poems here.)

As the cold digs in here on the Galloway hill, I often think how brave the beings are who remain outside all through the winter months. It’s easy to project a sense of fear at the coming hardship of relentless cold. But when I wake up and open the door of the cottage, I’m greeted by the sight of the birds who’ve survived the night and now fly in joyous swoops that speak of something beyond mere survival. And yet these small creatures live on a knife-edge through winters like these, each day having to eat enough to see them through the cold of the night.

Yesterday morning I saw three roe deer standing at the edge of some trees amidst the crisp frost. Bloody hell, I thought, they must be so cold! As I formed the words one of the deer began to run. Soon the other two joined and I watched mesmerised as they played, running in long loops, cutting back and forth, touching each other and then darting away. My research into deer-stalking up here in Scotland has shown me how brutal long winters can be for the animals here, but looking at the deer and the birds, and thinking of Tiny, reminded me that beyond a mere struggle for survival, there is also just joy at being alive too.

Plant Listening has always wanted to operate from this place of trust, made evident to us through observing a fecund, generous world. It’s our aim that the work we do reflects both the generosity of what we’re given by the earth and the trust of the creatures who receive it. With this in mind we have decided to take a leap in the way we work this coming year and make our events financially accessible to all. From here on we will offer all our teaching and facilitation for free rather than a set ticket price. Donations are welcome, in line with whatever you can afford, but our walks and workshops will be free and retreat prices kept to the bare minimum, covering only the basics such as accommodation, food and firewood.

Running a programme of events costs money, of course, but as we’ve decided not to be an organisation built on growth, instead simply taking the little we need to keep going, we hope to open the door ever-wider to these healing experiences as we try and remember to gambol through the cold and find a bird-like faith in the world.

I will walk for you

This month Plant Listening was touched to be invited to take part in some walks for Day of Access - a series of events that aim to give people whose lives are constrained by illness, creative access to wild spaces. Beyond physical exercise and distance covered, they understand how walks can be acts of solidarity, helping people feel less isolated and recover a sense of belonging.

The first event was a ‘Proxy Walk’ - a walk on behalf of someone who can no longer access a landscape or place they love. While this idea is not a new one - poets, activists and artists have been walking on behalf of those incarcerated, bed-bound or simply unable to access the outside world, for some time - it does feel radical. To walk for someone else gives you access to each other’s experience in a very tangible way. A foot-led empathy and a shared knowing of the world through memory and felt experience.

For Plant Listening’s proxy walk, we were invited by artist and poet Alec Finlay (who dreamed up the project) to ascend St Fillan’s Hill in Perthshire, a beloved mound he once climbed before physical illness meant he was unable to do so again.

(You can listen to Alec and I discussing his life and work during a conversation recorded this summer in Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens, here.)

Alec writes, ‘I chose St Fillan’s because it's a walk I could once do – though with some pain afterwards. It's a wee hillock among big mountains, positioned where the old kingdom of the Picts and Gaels once collided. Tamara knew the region from the work she does with stalkers, but she'd never been up this wee hill – a pre-requisite for a proxy walk is that the walker has no previous knowledge of a place, so their impressions are fresh.’

It was beautiful, tender and sad to climb as Alec watched from a shady knoll at its foot. As he sat and wrote his memories of how the ascent had once looked and felt, I walked and noted what was growing and living, gathering some plants (yarrow, wood sage, plantain and lady’s bedstraw) for a tea that we could share, along with our stories, when I returned.

You can read the full poem Alec wrote that combines our reflections of the walk here, or simply stay with these words given to me by him when I rejoined him at the foot of the hill…

going up where I can’t

has made her

as small as the swifts

that halo the hill

Respecting Earth

As we whirl through autumn we’ve been watching the changes from the shelter of the trees. One of the best practices I’ve found that helps me find peace in this fast-changing world is taking time to sleep or simply rest outside. Being held by the ground gives a broader sense of home and, without a roof or walls, life flows in.

We are surrounded by living beings that breathe, grow, make love and die in a wild array of movement and form. We miss so much when we get stuck inside. Right now the Galloway skies speak of the coming cold and the clouds are dotted with geese arriving for winter.

I lived for a while in Russia and was struck by the tradition of placing babies outside while they sleep in the day. Wrapped up against the cold and held snug in a pram the children rest with the wind playing over their small faces, soothed by the susurration of leaves and the scents of the season. It seems wise to allow a newly arrived child to rest amidst this always-conversing world. How alien a sealed room is to our attuned bodies and keen senses.

I recently read about the root of the word respect - re-speculate - to look again. Seeing the world with the eyes of a child is to experience it with new appreciation. It’s why I try not to talk about the names of the plants we meet on our walks, instead focusing on how they appear to us in that moment. Our naming and categorising of things - so important in our tight scientific understanding - is loosened for a moment and the world encountered afresh.

A silver birch, betula pendula, becomes a fissured skin of arrested volcanic flow. The lichen covering its skin, usnea, a tangle of slender form, soft and wet. Instead of knowing it with our mind, we can taste it, touch it, rest our tired heads against it. The golden leaves above drift down and cover the ground and us with the wealth of another passing year. How rich the world becomes when we rest and look, and look again.