It should have died. At the end of a line of common reeds, an ancient willow pollard was anchored at the stream side. Its trunk was as broad round its middle as 10 of me. Two summers before, an arsonist had set light to a flytipper’s heap at the tree’s base.
That should have been the flaming coup de grâce for a veteran that had long since gone into terminal decline. Decades earlier, it had opened its heart to the world, having shed the bark armour all the way round its circumference from five to nine o’clock, exposing its core.
The fire left a charred, blackened face. I leaned forward, expecting a sooty smell, for even Victorian fireplaces still reek of their last blaze. Instead, I inhaled a scent of intermingled peat and ginger.
Where the fire had not scorched its bleached centre, the wood was hard but brittle. Pieces had broken off. I picked up one the size of a golf ball and it weighed less than nothing.
The tree’s last big show of growth had produced three thick trunks sprouting from its crown. The tree’s final cut had reduced one to an empty fisheye socket, until even its rim rotted away, and tufts of grass filled the crevices. Ivy had snaked up the back of the tree to join it, green on green.
The other two trunks had been lopped off to stumps a metre high, presenting a V-sign to the sky. Out of their gnarly sides a dozen thick sprays of twigs had spurted forth. They were greenish yellow, shiny and slippery like nylon washing-line. My wife grasped at a bundle of stems, running her basket-weaving fingers down their length, feeling for springy suppleness. “You could work these,” she said.
February had woken the youthful sprigs. One spray showed the merest bumps of buds. On the lowest spray, two precocious twigs, partly touching each other, had already unfurled their lanceolate leaves. Each slender leaf was no longer or wider than a matchstick. Such tiny expressions of vitality.
This “dead” hulk was still sending out fingers of life, the thin chlorophyll-packed flaps that said: no, not yet. That old tree might still outlive us all.
• Derek Niemann is one of several country diarists who have contributed to Red Sixty Seven, a book about Britain’s most vulnerable birds, published by the British Trust for Ornithology on 14 February
