Bud burst

Today was the day the trees came into leaf. Not the oak – although there are few of them around – but the hawthorn, the alder, the birch, and even the late-leafing ash. On the canal, geese, and a couple of mallards – lonesome males. The geese were not barking at each other, as they usually do, but miaowing; maybe a miaow is more comforting to unhatched chicks.

Alder, birch, apple

Storm Atiya has stripped the last of the leaves from the trees and I notice things I haven’t noticed before – but that’s the point of a walk, to notice things. Opposite the old lock-keeper’s cottage a line of trees separates the towpath from the railway line; I’d always thought the trees were alders, but now I see that they’re a mix of alder, birch, and apple, the birch trunks not silver, but a pale sunrise gold. I wish I’d brought my camera; the bare trunks with their subtle metallic hues are unexpectedly beautiful.

I can understand why, in times gone by, people thought of apples as having magical properties, for there is something wonderful about the sight of perfectly round red-gold fruits hanging from bare branches. As a girl I was told that if you peel an apple in one go and throw the peel over your shoulder, it will land in the shape of your future husband’s initials, but as I wasn’t very good at peeling apples I never found out if this were true. I don’t think anyone is going to peel today’s apples, they look drab and not at all appetising. I wonder how they came to be growing high up on a railway embankment; were the apple trees planted at the same time as the alder and birch or did they grow from discarded apple cores?

Poem: Clearing the valley

When I was a child I spent my summer holidays with an elderly and much-loved aunt and uncle. It was they who introduced me to this valley. Sixty years on, the valley is busier and more densely populated, but the air is clearer, the stone cottages have been sand-blasted clean of a century of industrial soot, and the trees are coming back.

Some people say the trees are the wrong kind of trees, not native to the valley, and it's true that you’ll seldom see an oak or an ash, but you will find whitethorn, birch and alder, pioneer species perhaps, or maybe small enough to have escaped the axe, for it was the deciduous hardwoods that were hacked down to provide scaffolding for the construction of the railway; their absence is in itself part of the valley’s history.

Clearing the valley

the thorn trees

they let alone –

not that they were

superstitious,

only that the trees

cried out when cut,

and they couldn’t stand

to hear a woman curse

© Sheila Wild - Equinox