From the Forest

by Sara Maitland

  But there is a real threat to Caledonian pine forests; the danger is not from commercial exploitation, but from deer.

  The issue is simple: red deer are on the increase and they destroy woodland. They reduce the ground coverage and the range and variety of flowering plants, and in particular they devour young trees, their favourite forage. Pine woods regenerated well when they were grazed by cattle in the eighteenth century, but less well after the red deer population started to expand in the mid-nineteenth. Throughout the forests of Braemar the shortage of younger trees, from about 1850, is conspicuous. There are too many deer to allow for natural regeneration without human intervention.

  It is extremely difficult to find a strategy which is effective and will assure this kind of forest a long future. Fencing areas for regeneration works in the sense that young pine seedlings are indeed establishing themselves in the experimental enclosures in Ballochbuie and at Mar Lodge across the valley. Unlike oak change, there is no suggestion that Scots pine has altered or weakened its germination capacities: simply, the very young and tender trees are being nibbled off by too many deer. But deer fences need gates and tracks through the forest to allow for their maintenance; they need to be constantly monitored and repaired. In addition, fences stop the movement of all animals, not just deer. This creates problems, as for example with two species of bird that are unique to pine forest terrain – capercailzie and blackcock, both rare, both blundering night travellers, and both ground nesters. They have shown an alarming tendency to crash into deer fences and break their necks. Both are endangered species and need the regeneration of the pine forests to survive. We tend to think of ‘forests’ or ‘woodlands’ as places for trees, with everything else being somehow secondary, but it is whole habitats, not individual trees or even species, that we need to conserve. On what possible grounds, and by what means, can we choose between blackcock and deer – other than that the needs of the blackcock are more pressing at the present moment?

  The obvious answer is to shoot the deer, and then eat them, as was the custom in woodlands for centuries. Some historians believe that systematic poaching was how deer populations were managed in earlier times13 – and certainly the fairy stories treat the hunting-and-eating of deer as entirely normal, even when, as in ‘Brother and Sister’, the deer in question is a small boy under enchantment. (He brought this on himself to some extent by a failure of self-discipline: he drank from a stream although he was warned it would turn him into a fawn.) But we have put deer on our ‘good animal’ list and there is a powerful tendency to wax lyrically sentimental about the animal. People become deeply agitated about any proposed culling.

  One response to the deer problem has been to suggest reintroducing wolves. Because there were once wolves throughout the UK, the British government is obliged by EU regulations to give consideration to this project, and the discussion has rumbled on for years now. But if the purpose of reintroducing the wolves is solely to manage the deer, it would seem more honest and less risky to kill the deer directly. Reintroductions do not have a very good reputation – starting with rabbits and moving through grey squirrels and mink in the animal world and taking in rhododendrons and some other deliberately imported plants, those that have been successful have also thrown up considerable ‘collateral damage’.14

  Wolves are the stuff of fairy stories – the name and shape of the terror of the wild. There were lynx and bear in Scotland, as well as wolves, as indeed there still are in the vaster forests of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic states. A vicious and ultimately victorious fight against the wolves of Britain was fought through the Middle Ages: unlike the loss of most species, the extirpation of wolves was deliberate, planned and triumphant. Wolves induced terror in the British psyche and had to be destroyed. Wolves are the psychological embodiment of what the fairy stories knew and what we want to forget, or at least ignore: nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, and nowhere more so than in the terrible forests.

  In the abstract I like the idea of wolves, but walking in the steep glens of Ballochbuie, where grim pine trees lower from inaccessible pinnacles, where ruined steadings and broken walls bear witness to the tragedy of the Clearances, and where the forests meander slowly across the landscape, I find a strange interior relief in not having to keep even an inner eye or ear out for them.

  They feel, as I walk here, like one fear too many. I had come to tackle my sense of terror through another phenomenon of the forests – much smaller, more commonplace and absolutely real – which can also give me the same strange shiver of fear as the dream of wolves and as the fairy stories themselves, a sense of being in the presence of something eerie: fungi.

  So after I had walked through the spooky creaking woods of Ballochbuie, I crossed through the little town of Braemar and up a side glen to Mar Lodge, a rather bizarre grandiose house built in its present form in the 1890s as a ‘holiday home’ for Princess Louise, the Princess Royal, Queen Victoria’s daughter who was married to the Earl of Fife. It now belongs to the National Trust for Scotland. I went to walk in the forests there with Liz Holden, who lives in a farmhouse at Mar Lodge.

  I have promised Liz Holden that I will not write her into this book as a witch – though I will say that her oat biscuits would make a more tempting little house for me than any gingerbread would. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine anyone less witchy in terms of almost all the stereotypes, but she is engaged on deeply uncanny fairy-story work. Liz Holden did her first degree in anthropology, but claims she was ‘hijacked by fungi’ after seeing a red cage fungus (Clathrus rubra) in a Devon garden.15 And over the last twenty years she has become an expert in fungi, a ‘mycological consultant’ – not an academic, but a field naturalist (and now, I am glad to say, a lecturer and teacher).

  After the biscuits in her farmhouse, below the forest and looking out across the flat, glacier-carved glen, we went for a fungus walk. The Mar Lodge estate is crisscrossed by little tracks and roads, and we set off initially in the car. Later we left it and walked in a looping meander through the ancient pine woods. They were conspicuous for their variety: there were areas that have been deer-fenced to encourage regeneration; places denuded of trees altogether; clumps of birch and rowan; swathes of very rough ground with long, ragged grasses and thick bracken, now golden tan. There were also patches of dreamlike pine forest, with the trees running up almost vertical braes above fast burns flowing pure and clean and laughing over stones, swirling into small still pools, embedded in moss and ferns; and from the rises above the burns, sudden long views over the wide valley floor would open out. Autumn was in full golden force, with rowan and birch both turning bright yellow.

  And everywhere there were fungi. Holden talked and taught and pointed and saw. By the time we returned to the car I had not learned to see fungi – but I had learned how much I did not see, how much I miss every day and what a loss that is to me.

  Fungi are of course by no means confined to Highland pine forests, or indeed to forests at all. We all have contact with them without qualms on an almost daily basis: the rising of bread, blue veins in cheese, penicillin, wine and mushroom soup are all dependent on fungi. They flourish everywhere, from damp cellars to open grass fields. We tend to notice them most in the warm damp weather of late summer and autumn, but in fact they are around at all times of the year in various forms and quantities.

  I am not sure why they feel so strange, except for the simple fact that they are strange; and their strangeness feels close to the uncanny in the fairy stories. When you come upon fungi in the woods they have a magical otherworldly appearance, enhanced by the improbable variety of forms and colours: fungi like jelly, like coral, like brains, like tongues flickering out of alder cones, and even, with the weird earthstars (Geastraceae), like aliens from space. But this cannot be the whole story, because there is just as much variety and strangeness in flowering plants, although they never arouse this dark unease.

  Perhaps their spooky strangeness grew when, as
children, we were warned against them, and rightly: several British toadstools are fatally toxic and many others are very bad for you indeed. At the same time, many of them are not merely edible but delicious – free food, if you get it right. But like the good and bad characters encountered in the forests in the stories, it is singularly difficult to know which are which. This possibility of disastrous error is part of the sinister atmosphere that surrounds them: Gyromitra esculenta (the false morel), for instance, is deadly poisonous, but in appearance and fruiting season it has ‘wickedly’ copied the true morels, a famous culinary treat.

  Or perhaps it is because, like the magic in the stories, fungi seem to appear without warning and then disappear equally suddenly. They pop up, fully formed and beautiful, where you did not anticipate it, and disappear as suddenly, as though by magic. Additionally, they sometimes appear in formations that seem ‘designed’ rather than natural, as though a conceptual artist has been out in the night arranging them in ‘fairy rings’, patterns so precise as to appear engineered rather than spontaneous.

  And for me, even since my walk with Liz Holden and my purchase of not one but two recommended guides, I can never identify them with confidence. I cannot pin them down, cannot say what I have seen, cannot crack their secret code.16 They remain darkly mysterious.

  And the more I learn, the stranger it all seems. Fungi used to be classified and treated as plants, although rather odd ones – but mosses and ferns and horsetails are ‘odd’ too and they remain comfortably ‘plants’. In 1969 fungi were hived off and given a scientific ‘kingdom’ all of their own.17 One major difference between fungi and plants is structural – where plants use cellulose to provide form and stiffness, fungi use chitin, the same tough substance as the exoskeleton of insects is made from. Moreover, fungi do not manufacture their food by photosynthesis.

  The visible toadstool is in fact only the fruit of its fungus (just as an apple is to a tree, producing and dispersing the seed – or spore in the case of fungi). The bulk of the fungus is normally hidden underground and is called the mycelium. It is made up of fine hair like threads called hyphae, and it is these that you sometimes see as a web of white strands under broken bark on a dead piece of wood. A mycelium may be tiny, forming an organism too small to see, or it may be massive – perhaps comprising the largest living things in the world.

  Fungi have three vital functions in forests. First, there is the symbiotic partnership mycorrhiza have with individual trees, as I discussed in the first chapter. Second, once the tree is dead, or even diseased, the relationship changes and the fungi become aggressors, crucial in breaking down and recycling dead organic matter – without fungi, we would be living in a vast woodpile, stacked up yards deep over much of the surface of the world. And third, they are there in the ancient woodlands to remind us how beautiful and uncanny the forests are.

  There are surprisingly few direct references to toadstools (for good or bad) in the fairy stories, although I for one am certain that if you wanted to poison half an apple to rid yourself of a stepdaughter, a small slice of Amanita muscaria – fly algaric – might work very well. It causes delirium and coma, a good possibility for Snow White’s apparent death.18 Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the forest, the sense that strange things, both beautiful and dangerous, can happen at any moment and without warning, is mirrored in the life of the forest fungi. Fungi constantly remind us that there are other forms of life than the obvious ones; there is the human and the wild and the ‘something else’ – magic or mushroom.

  It is on this connection between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that Liz Holden has been working. In 2003 she published Recommended English Names for Fungi in the UK, sponsored by the British Mycological Society, English Nature, Plantlife and Scottish Natural Heritage. The Latin or scientific names are – as the reader may have noticed – not easily manageable for most amateurs, and because fungi are so often elusive it is hard to keep track of them. Holden took on the job of creating English names for British fungi. Obviously no one can make these compulsory, but most modern field guides to mushrooms and toadstools are now using her list.

  As Richard Mabey so richly illustrates in Flora Britannica, many British wild flowers have local informal names, in addition to their ‘proper’ scientific Latin ones.19 Because it is so much easier both to see and to care about something you have a personal name for (particularly if the name ‘matches’ the plant in terms of its shape, behaviour or other actual feature – snowdrop rather than Gallanthus; bluebell rather than Hyancinthoides), wild flowers tend to attract attention, affection and care. But when it comes to fungi, unfortunately ‘there is a paucity of vernacular “folk names” even in Welsh and Gaelic from which to draw inspiration’.20 Earlier I spoke about the tragic loss of words describing nature and the folk stories in the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary; Holden’s project moves in the opposite direction, providing new names to reclaim something of the old tradition. Among the sources for inspiration that she used, she included:Folklore and legend e.g. elfcup, elfin, dryad, fairy, fairy ring, Goliath, Medusa, St. George, King Alfred, Knights, Shields, Cavaliers and Roundheads have all found a place in this nomenclature. Word play and humour have been included wherever possible. Names such as Crowned Tooth, White Knight, Funeral Bell, The Flirt, Strathy Strangler, Dogend, and Nettle Rash hopefully reflect this.

  The names should be ‘distinctive and lively in order to engage public interest. They . . . should avoid too many negative associations . . . care should be taken not to introduce names for poisonous species that could infer edibility.’

  Holden’s work, with adults and primary school children, taking people out to walk in forests where they can learn to see and not be frightened, naming, telling, showing these magical life forms, seems to me the sort of conservation project both the woods and the fairy stories need. For all the uncanny horror of the wild places, there is the balancing – the naming and seeing and telling of stories (as dark as death caps, as scary as witches butter, as jokey as crowned tooth) about the forests, so that people can go there with their eyes open and see the deep magic and not feel too much of the uncanny terror.

  Rapunzel

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess.

  Her beauty was without question – it would have flamed before the whole world if I had let it, and every time I climbed up the tower it flamed for me, blazing more brightly than the morning. And whatever they may say, it was not just that extraordinary hair – that was a mere embellishment, an extravagance of ornamentation where none was needed. She was beautiful in her deep bones and graceful as a beech tree. There’s an old saying in these woods: ‘every beetle is a butterfly to its mother’. But I was not her mother and when I speak of her beauty, I speak of what undid me. I would deny it if I could, but she was beautiful.

  ‘Princess’ I admit is more subjective. She was always a princess to me, although out there in the more judgemental and foolish world she was a daughter of the underclass, her father a petty thief without imagination or flair, and her mother a selfish, self-indulgent, vulgar trollop. Of course I should not say such things, but I am too old and sad for caution or kindness. They sold me their child for a handful of salad greens because that woman wanted them now and would not wait. If they had had normal neighbourly good manners he could have knocked on my door and asked for a bunch of rapunzel and I would have given it to him for free. He tried to steal it and he got caught and he sold his unborn child to protect his own scurvy skin. And in that tawdry bargain she became mine – my beautiful princess; for, as Solomon taught us, any mother who would freely put her child at risk is not the real mother. I was her real mother and she was my true princess.

  I did not even plan it. I went, as neighbours do, to see the new child. I even took the silver coin to slip under the baby’s pillow, to welcome her and help her family, as we do in these woods. I had not planned for my heart to leap out of my mouth and gobble the baby up. I fell in love there, for ever – a
thing I have never done before. Nor since.

  I picked up the child, as you do, and muttered some admiring words, as you do. Her skin was so soft against my cheek, like windflowers, cool and delicate. But I think, or at least I believe, I was joking when I said, ‘Of course, she’s mine. You promised her to me. Remember?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ they both squealed. ‘Yes, take her; yes, of course.’

  They say I am a witch and that they were afraid. But I am not a witch. I am a woman with different desires.

  Even then I was shocked, and I have become more shocked since, but I wanted her so much and they wanted her so little. I laid her against my shoulder, warm and sweet. I said, ‘You need not fear about her well-being, for I shall take care of her like a mother.’ And then she was mine.

  I took care of her like a mother. Or like I think a mother should; we women all have our own ideas about that. I could not nurse her of course – there were no spells for that back then – but I was tender to her in every other way I could imagine. I taught her to read so that she could be free in her heart and mind; I stuffed her pillow with Sweet Woodruff, Lady’s Bedstraw, so that she slept to scents of fresh-mown hay and almonds, sweeter and less useful than silver coins; I took her to play in the beech woods, because her hair was the colour of beech mast, and I taught her the names of all the flowers and the birds.

  I brushed her hair. When she was small I brushed her hair every day, morning and evening. Later, as it grew longer and thicker, I was obliged to surrender to it, there was not time in a day to brush it twice; before the end there was not time in the week to brush it twice.

  In my dreams I am still brushing her hair, brushing and braiding and binding her hair – her lovely, tendrilling, conker-coloured, wanton hair. Brushing and braiding and binding. It was the colour of beech leaves in autumn; there were reds and golds in it like Slender St John’s Wort in high summer and deep gilt like Bog Asphodel on the moors. It twined like honeysuckle around my fingers, my hands, my arms, my heart. Brushing and braiding and binding her hair. Singing as I ran the brush through it:Rapunzel, Rapunzel