Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  It has taken no more than a fortnight for the entire mountainside to change colour. Near the ridge, the pale, frosty grey of hawthorn softens into mist or whitens into pockets of snow, flecked dark green by stubby pines or holly. Lower down, seams of blood-red maple and dogwood shoot through the strata of golden beech, pale yellow poplar, elm and hazel, and the violin-browns of chestnut and oak. With the shortening of the days, the mountain is displaying its geology through the minerals in its leaves. Each species flags its terrain in a subsiding flourish of its colours.

  The chameleon leaves are litmus to the chemical changes going on inside them. The tree senses a particular moment when the balance between day and night has altered. It appears to measure the hours and minutes with some precision, and shorter days trigger the development of a suicidal hormone in each leaf. It creeps down the leaf stem to the joint with the woody twig, where it stimulates the growth of a sphincter of brittle, hard tissue that gradually closes on itself, cutting off the supply of sap. Thus deprived of water, the chlorophyll in the leaf disintegrates. Chlorophyll makes leaves look green by absorbing the blue-and-red light of the sun and masking other pigments. As it breaks down, the leaf reveals the colours of its other underlying chemical constituents. Then it dries still more, the stem joint snaps, and it goes floating off to the woodland floor to settle in pools of yellow, orange or soft chestnut-browns matched by the Alberes cows in the glades. The leaves of different species contain distinctive pigments: the yellow carotenoids of willow, poplar or hazel; the red anthocyanins of maple or dogwood (the same pigment you encounter on the rosy side of the apple where it faced the sun); or the earthy tannins of oak leaves. The evaporation of the sap concentrates the leaf pigments so that they show up more vividly. The questing roots of one species will take up more molecules of phosphorus, magnesium, sodium or iron than another. The sap of one will be more acidic or alkaline, or contain more tannin, than another. This is the natural chemistry that paints the woodland colours.

  The process leading to leaf-fall is not affected by Indian summers or unusually cold weather. Photo-periodism is strictly about light and darkness, and the shortening of the days. The total surface area of leaves on a single mature deciduous tree is astonishing. The tower of the trunk and the cantilevered branches rise up and present as many leaves as possible to the sun, whose rising, circling and setting around the tree during the course of the day are answered in its essentially domed shape. Individual leaves have also evolved to present as much surface area as possible to the heavens, so a single big tree, with its foliage running into the hundreds of thousands, may easily amount to a half-acre of solar-collecting chlorophyll surface. The economy and cunning of the architecture is analogous to the means by which the labyrinthine alveoli of the human lungs extend their oxygen-absorbing surface to the area of a tennis court. Summer leaves are heavy with water. Their desiccation and fall in autumn lighten the load on the woods as a whole by many tons before the stresses of winter storms and snow. All across the Pyrenees, the broad-leaved trees are preparing themselves quite deliberately like this for the next stage in their lives.

  Wandering the mountain above Requescens feels like the beginning of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’: ‘The trees are in their autumn beauty,/The woodland paths are dry.’

  We collect sweet, fresh chestnuts, easing them from their hedgehog husks. Following a steep-sided holloway veined with the exposed roots of beech, holly, hazel, chestnut, maple, ash and oak, we drink from the woodland springs. As noon approaches, crickets begin singing hesitantly, and young lizards venture on to the sunny track. The curious thing is that we often encounter solitary trees: a single elder by the track, a spindle tree and its bright pink berries, a lone rope of traveller’s joy hoisted over a hazel bush. Why have they never spread elsewhere? Our only clue to this Noah’s Ark effect is that the whole mountainside here was once an aristocratic estate, and the trees, like the single horse chestnut outside the Cantina and its farmhouse, may have been planted as collector’s specimens.

  Back in the Cantina for a late lunch, Andrew and I demolish a large tureen of bean stew followed by a curious, tasty fruits secs pudding with almonds, cobnuts and walnuts soaked in a sweet muscatel wine decanted from a carafe like a little watering can. Outside, leaves waft down now and then from the plane tree by the lawn. The afternoon is cooling, and the cats have moved inside closer to the stove. The patron brings in more logs as we leave, and as we swing downhill to Cantalops, the cowbells in the woods fall silent.

  Wild Horses

  I have never seen so many people up trees as I did that afternoon in Lesbos. The entire population of the hill town of Aghia Paraskevi seemed to have climbed them, shinning up to every available perch in the branches of the long-suffering olives and pines along the dusty, crowded street to get a better view of the horse races. The town was alive with its horse festival, and nervy with the wild, unpredictable energy of the animals, as they clattered uphill over the cobbled streets towards the racetrack. Down every lane, in every yard, men were busy decking out their horses in ceremonial harness, all silver medallions, embroidery and brightly coloured braid. Groups of older women gathered on their front steps, or on rush-seated chairs in the street. In the shade of a spreading oriental plane and an ancient wisteria that roofed an entire street, extra tables and chairs spilled out of the bars and tavernas. All along the main street stalls sold baubles, sweets and toys, and balloon women strolled about. Each time a new horse was ridden or led up the street, the onlookers all retreated into the doorways, wary of the wild rearing and kicking.

  Half the townspeople, and most of the riders, had obviously been drinking pretty seriously. Even the horses, they said, were given ouzo to make them wilder and more fiercely competitive. All over Lesbos, where everyone is horse-mad, men save up all year for this event, and drink, they say, for three days and nights. I made my way to the starting grid, a professional-looking bright-yellow steel contraption with sprung starting gates that had been wheeled in specially. The racetrack was just another street, running between two stone walls. It was hard and dusty. At the finish, a half-mile dash up the hill, a big crowd had swarmed all over a lorry and an olive tree. Every tree along the course was alive with spectators, who also lined the stone walls and crowded the roof of every shed. Spectators actually shinned up the grid itself and nobody seemed to mind. Even quite portly middle-aged men had climbed the poplar tree beside it, and punters sat in every branch. Everyone was shouting, arguing, laughing. Bare-chested youths in bandanas, crew-cuts and sturdy workboots led up their horses with evident pride.

  A striking man in his forties with a mane of greased black hair, tight jeans, black shirt with white buttons open halfway down his chest, heeled cowboy boots and silver-buckled belt walked up a giant charcoal-grey stallion that seemed barely under control. The animal steamed with scarcely contained passion. Every few minutes it asserted its power with a snorting whinny, rearing straight up and lunging towards one of the mares. Black shirt checked him with a rope and a sharp blow with the crop, but the stallion would not be ruled and caused a huge, contagious commotion of rearing and whinnying horses. The crowd scattered before the battery of flailing hooves. More shouting, worse oaths. Everyone wanted black shirt to take himself and his horse away. Man and stallion, now united like a centaur, stood their ground furiously. Both flared their nostrils. Black shirt shouted and snorted, stamped his foot and gestured wildly. So did his horse. Circling and kicking, the stallion cleared a wide circle at the dusty crossroads. Everyone backed off. Man and horse then went into a kind of clinch, he resting his head against his steed’s neck, burying his face in the ample, silver mane. The crowd subsided into a respectful silence, then, with some dignity, the hot-headed pair walked quietly away.

  It was all a long way from an English point-to-point, or Newmarket races. The nearest comparison I could make was with some of the travellers’ gatherings: the Bungay May Horse Fair in Suffolk in the mid seventies, Appleby Fair or Stow-
on-the-Wold. It was more gypsy than C&W, but with a strong dash of something primeval, such as bull-running in Minoan Crete. Money was changing hands, for sure, but, whatever the betting system, its ways were as obscure as the organization of the races themselves. Men kept coming and going out of a shed halfway along the course, and here and there tight knots of others dug into their trouser pockets and flicked off notes from wads with fingers greased with the sweat of horses. Each race was a two-horse dash in clouds of dust along the dirt road, level at first, then uphill to the finish, the jockeys hanging on somehow. Ambulances stood by to rush those who took a tumble to hospital. They had a busy afternoon.

  The proceedings had begun with the entrance to Paraskevi of a procession carrying an icon of the Black Virgin from a shrine outside the town, said to be ancient and possibly Dionysian, to bless the horses. It was carried by a small boy, accompanied by the mayor, the priest, and a three-piece town band of trumpet, clarinet and gourd hand-drum. It seemed half the island sat down to dinner on the streets of Paraskevi that night. I dined with my friends Tony and Jane in the taverna of their friend Perikles. Thin, long-legged cats of many colours threaded between the chairs, and even a hedgehog appeared, busy on its rounds, almost bumping into the table leg before it turned and hurried away into the shadows.

  At least eleven million olive trees grow on Lesbos. They stretch in terraces high up into the mountains, and they reach down to the edge of the sea. Higher up, the stone-walled plots are built like individual fortresses for single trees, so their silver leaves wave in the breeze like flags. In a great frost, after a very mild spell had deceived the trees into coming into spring buds in January 1850, the temperature plummeted to –13°C. Nearly every tree on the island died back to the ground that night. The old ones fared best, sending up new shoots from the base the following year and gradually recovering. As emblems of longevity and historical continuity, olives on Lesbos play a role similar to that of oaks in Britain. They are the longest-lived of the cultivated plants, but it is often hard to count their annual rings. Many of the olives in the groves outside Molivos, where Tony and I took an evening stroll next day, looked extremely old. Some grew in the shape of an hourglass, hollowed years ago, their boughs spread out by the weight of their fruit. Others spiralled out of the ground like springs. The shallow furrows where a farmer had ploughed beneath the trees to kill off the weeds seemed to continue up the ridged tendons in the ankles of each trunk. We began under two olives outside the church at the top of the hill and threaded our way downhill among the groves along stone-walled donkey lanes. Dead hedges of olive prunings were woven along the tops of the walls, and self-sown figs grew from between the stones. We passed a half-built house full of hobbled goats. They struggled upstairs on to window balconies and gazed down at us intently, slit-eyes missing nothing. We offered them buddleia over the wall and they devoured it in seconds. Two dogs on chains came clanking out of a pair of oil-drum kennels.

  Tucked into the boughs or trunk of each olive tree was a roll of black netting the farmers would spread beneath it at harvest-time in October or November, to collect the fruit. The netting hardly showed up against the black, lizard-skin bark. Olives fruit well every other year, with only a moderate harvest in between. They may be laboriously hand-picked, or you can spread the net and wait for them to ripen and drop of their own accord. But the quality of the oil is better if the olives are harvested green, and for this the tree must be shaken hard, often with a long pole. There are even machines to do the job now, but fortunately they can be used only in the lowland groves. Since olives must be pressed within twenty-four hours of being harvested, every little town and many larger villages have a wooden olive press and an oil-making works, but most are now derelict, as the olives all go by lorry to modern pressing plants. Greece, and the islands in particular, benefited from the same dire frost of 1709 that killed the walnuts in France and Italy. It caused a sudden demand for olive oil in those countries, and the Greek olive farmers obligingly expanded their output to seize the new markets.

  I awoke early for an expedition with Heinz Horn, who has lived in Molivos for years. Heinz used to buy and sell carpets from Isfahan and lived in Kabul for a time during the sixties. When he was thirty-seven, he set out to walk from Istanbul to Damascus. When he reached the Syrian border, he experienced a breakdown and was taken to the hospital in Aleppo. There, he encountered a kind doctor who sent him to the hospital in Beirut; he had a wonderful time and stayed on for months in the city.

  Heinz had suggested we try to reach the deserted mountain village of Clavados, on the slopes of Horeftra, a 2,000-foot mountain immediately to the west of the Lepetymnos Mountains, up a very rough track above the village of Lafionas. Clavados was the scene, in 1912, of the last battle to liberate Lesbos from its 450-year domination by the Turks. It must have been a bloody affair, because no one has lived there since.

  Except for their roofs, the stone houses were, surprisingly, still intact, and parts of them had even been covered with tin and used as shelters for grazing sheep. Brambles ramped everywhere. Beside the track, we found a spring in the mountainside and the substantial remains of a stone-built hammam to one side of the spring-cave. Clear water trickled into a water trough full of tadpoles. Frogs sunbathing on a ledge plopped into the water.

  We made our way down a path, past a half-ruined farmhouse with the wooden front door and shutters still on their hinges. Someone had been repairing its stone walls. Further down the sheep track we entered an orchard of sharp-tasting, almost-ripe damsons. The trees were bent down with them, and, amid masses of blackberries, three walnut trees and several almonds had somehow survived. The shepherds still bring their flocks up here in spring, but it is too hot and parched in summer. At what must have been the village centre, the living remains of an enormous oriental plane stood. Its massive trunk was hollow and had broken off ten feet above the ground, perhaps as a result of a lightning bolt. It was charred inside and burnt out, yet fresh living boughs were again springing from a tree that must once have shaded the spring and the steam bath.

  In the middle of the island, at Karini, I had seen another of these great trees, also hollow, in which the noted naive artist Theophilus lived beside a series of superb springs and pools. Someone had opened a bar near by in his memory, and its owner proudly pointed out to me a pair of four-inch nails protruding from the inner wall of the tree. On these, I was assured, the great man would hang his clothes when he retired to bed. So capacious was the trunk that there was indeed just about room enough for a bed, and perhaps a small table and a couple of chairs to complete the Walden Pond effect.

  When we drove up the hills to Argenos that evening for a drink, and wandered up through the village, we found a square dominated by yet another huge oriental plane tree at its centre, much carved with lovers’ initials and much climbed. The tree seemed to dribble out of its branches like candlewax, and solidify into the spreading trunk and gorged roots. Over to one side was a sacred grove of pines and poplars surrounding a little shrine and a spring. The place had a pagan feeling. Goats and horses stood in a paddock beside it, sheep bells tinkled somewhere in the evening, and five old men sat in a row under the tree.

  What is it about these oriental planes, apart from their stature and great shade, that makes places so special? I know one in the Fellows’ Garden at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, that stands near the fellows’ bathing pond, the oldest swimming pool in the country, in use since at least 1690, with a lovely thatched Victorian changing hut built in 1855. The plane tree was planted in 1802 and is now immense. It is the backdrop of green you see in summer from the bus station, beyond the stone garden wall of the college. The Spanish/Mexican poet Luis Cernuda wrote a poem about it called simply ‘El Árbol’: ‘The Tree’. It is a very different tree from the London plane. It is like a flock of rooks flying home to roost across a windy evening sky. They tumble and dive, glide and soar, ecstatic in the sheer pleasure of flying, confident in their mastery, flinging themselves ab
out the sky in great arcs. This is what this oriental plane does with its branches. They dance in a wild, slow-motion orgy, defying gravity, swooping and soaring, reaching up high, then diving all the way to the ground to take roots as a new tree. So it is that this old mother tree with an apronful of children is forever growing down to the lawns and propagating young, so that when she eventually dies they will already have grown up and become a spinney. But by growing down, the tree is also buttressing itself, creating a support system for its ageing trunk. That trunk will eventually become hollow, just like the one Theophilus inhabited, and, because a cylinder is a lighter and more stable structure, all the stronger too.