Burnham Beeches

It's funny, as I have read of Burnham Beeches in books but always thought it was further south. It's a large wood and overseen by the Corporation of London - and it is ancient. The remnant of the forests stretching over southern Britain. There have probably been trees here since the end of the last ice age.

You can walk around all of it - with some parts easily accessible.

What is really amazing is the number of ancient trees. Oaks and beeches. Many of them pollards. the Druid Oak, two photos of which end this slide show, is believed to be more than 800 years old.

I was awe struck by them - and I feature this beech as my brother Gary was talking to me while I looked at it. I called it "Gary"!

This is another magnificent beech.

In one part of the wood, I found what I believed to be "mother trees" - huge oaks rising through the canopy.

And all around their trunks, hosts of baby oaks. In our woods, I'm thinking of the Reserve, but actually, in any other wood I have been to, the acorns only seem to germinate OUTSIDE the wood - on field edges. I think it's the soil here. Proper soil. With all the microflora and microfauna and fungal connections. So the acornlings can thrive despite the shade and the dry conditions. They have the right conditions to be fed by the mother trees. It's certainly not for a lack of herbivores and acorn eaters - plenty of muntjac and squirrels here.

I stood inside the stool of a mature beech - four stems rising above me.

And peered out at the oak mother tree.

The rangers have cows and Exmoor ponies in the woodland. I didn't see any ponies, but the cows were lovely.

It was a magical place.

And there were ants everywhere! I have never seen so many. Toiling up and down the trees and across the leaf litter and moss. Again, there are nowhere near as many in the Reserve. This too, I guess, is a sign of the health of the ecosystem.

As for communications... just two messages: "It's alright to be hollow" and "Look at the ants."

Which seemed to suggest a kind of keep going however shit you feel inside mentality.

On the subject of communication... I found this somewhere - sadly, I can no longer remember where...

"For me," wrote the German poet and novelist Herman Hesse, "trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone....In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. "

"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening," Hesse continues. "If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

I THINK it was from Rooted by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.