The jackdaw colony by the Ash Brook is in disarray. Agitated birds circle the field making a chacking ruckus. Something is amiss. I scan what should be a familiar treeline, horrified. I don’t want to look down, but I can’t help myself. Beneath an inconceivable rift in the sky, a family friend lies prostrate.
Even before her fall, the lopsided lady of the brook had seen better days. Her splintered trunk leaned heavily and she had been pruned by lightning – twice. Only one healthy limb survived, branching into life like a phoenix rising above the surrounding ashes.
Our old friend was a black poplar, the last of her kind along this chalk stream. Poplars are dioecious, meaning they bear female and male flowers on separate plants, and the Flora of Hertfordshire guide makes special mention of this veteran, identifying her as a female hybrid. According to local legend, she had passed her 250th year, but it can be difficult to tell with black poplars, so I’d rather not speculate on the indelicate matter of her considerable age.
I walk over and lay my hand on her fractured torso. I’ve often imagined ascending it using the bracket fungi that protruded from her furrowed trunk like footholds on a climbing wall. Most likely artist’s bracket (Ganoderma applanatum), this fungus lives on deadwood and colonises living trees, causing extensive decay. Having resisted assault from within and without for so many decades, I can’t believe her time is finally up.
But black poplars have a canny survival mechanism. Unlike many trees, they are renowned for taking root and regenerating from fallen branches. Several years ago, the poplar shed a hefty bough across the brook. Sitting on the impromptu wooden bridge one autumn afternoon with my kids, dangling our feet above the water, we gazed into the remaining canopy that was so high it made us dizzy.
“Do fairies live in the branches?” my (then) six-year-old daughter asked. I pointed out the fresh growth sprouting from the bridge beneath us. A discarded limb risen from the dead. Surely, I tell myself now as I told her then, we can believe anything of a tree that possesses such magical powers.
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