Early mornings have been hidden here by Loch Eil in the last few days. Walking out into the garden is to walk into the midst of a cloud. Intangible feather-white air is dense enough to hold within it the loch, the hills, the houses on the north shore. The road is evidenced only by the spectral whoosh of a car engine rolling across the haze. A single gull call pierces through from the water, unseen, below. Around the house, the only shapes that emerge from the mist are the dark bulks of the closest trees. All others are vanished.

These water particles, extracted from the air by overnight cooling of land, shroud the world around us – but in doing so they reveal another world that is veiled from human eyes in the clarity of day.

Water droplets cling to silk thread, slung imperceptibly and industriously across the vertical and horizontal and all the angles in between. Spiders’ webs. Everywhere you look. In the rushes and long grass, in the heather and fern, across the kids’ swing-frame, in the wire fence, and in a tall shepherd’s crook of a pale blade of grass, another civilisation is constructed around ours.

I read that there are almost three million spiders for each one human being, globally. Where the impact of almost 8 billion people is starkly evident on the entire surface of this planet, an estimated 21 quadrillion spiders live largely undetected, carrying out their invisible service of capturing and consuming billions of other insects.

For a brief moment, the fog that hides all else gives substance to their insubstantial structures.

Soon though, the sun’s warmth begins to reach through and the mist starts to dissipate, lingering only above the treetops and in the wee corrie tucked into the hill. Bright splashes of rowan red emerge from the trees, and gold-green specklings of birch. The web cities cling on, ghostly, vanishing slowly to the naked eye as the world around them intensifies into blue, green, and the beginnings of bronze.

By mid-day, the sun is high, the cloud now just tendrils that leave the faintest shadow on the hilltops. Wind sweeps in from the west, coming in through our open windows like a cat and knocking over a lamp. Going to right it, I look out again to the web in the heather by the house that I’d photographed that morning.

From a distance it is no longer visible – perhaps gone altogether – but as I peer closer, I see that it is still there, wavering in the wind. Its weaver, a common sheetweb spider, or money spider, clings on underneath. 

First published in Lochaber Times September 2024. Republished here with permission.

Nine of us have gathered in the open grass of the hotel garden; grand white building on one side, leafy woodland on the other, with a sweeping field beyond dissected by a path that leads down to the loch. The sound of traffic going over the Ballachulish bridge is softened by distance, and all is otherwise still. We are staring at our feet.

Crouching down and reaching into the grass, Lucy advises us, “Your lawn will never be the same again.”

Lucy Cooke, also known as The Wild Cooke, runs workshops to share her foraging skills, passing on knowledge that once would have been common but has long been lost to so many. 

We start with white clover, most of us tentatively nosing the round cluster of petals, catching its sweet, honeyed scent, before we watch Lucy confidently pop one in her mouth and follow suit with our own nibbles. My senses (and having a sure teacher) tell me that this is good. My mind must make a conscious effort though to awaken itself to these instincts. Self-heal, daisy, yarrow, ribwort and broadleaf plantain follow: we’re asked if we can detect the mushroom undertones of the plantain, and initially I can’t. It’s on the second pass that my tastebuds detect a faint earthy hint beneath the astringent green. Can green be a flavour? I find myself falling back on it in my notebook, again and again in the absence of other words to describe these new-old flavours.

As we meander slowly, Lucy talks about how the Western diet now includes barely any bitter foods, and how frequent foraging can change and refine our palates. In just a few short hours we’re introduced to a landscape full of texture, the swathe of green around the woodland becomes ling and bell heather, wild raspberries, blaeberries, elder, chanterelles, nettles, and vetch; the salt marsh becomes orache, scurvy grass, sea aster, samphire, sea campion, sea arrow, sorrel, and silverweed. The names alone are poetry. Picked out and placed on our tongues, the woods and shoreline become alive with a possibility we knew must be there but had no knowledge with which to access. This well-known foraging phenomenon, of getting the eye in, of being able to see the edge of things – of noticing – is called lifting the green veil.

Sure enough, in the days that follow, the tangle of random growth in the banks and ditches around my house starts to define. I harvest clover, and now have a jar of dried flowerheads on the shelf beside the Tetley for tea. When I gather salad from the polytunnel I pick both spinach and leaves off the fat hen I was previously weeding out. And on the road by the shore, on verges I’ve walked past time and time again, for the first time I see the pale shine of silverweed where before there was only green.

https://www.thewildcooke.com/

First published in Lochaber Times July 2024. Republished here with permission.

A friend I’ve never met might be coming to visit next week. It would be her first time visiting our house, and she told me about a dream she’d had, months ago, in which I showed her and her family around my garden. We know each other only through Instagram. In the same way that the images we post on social media don’t always give the full picture, I am worried that the garden she dreamt of was more beautiful than the one I have – that my garden will disappoint.

While I see other gardeners taking part in No-Mow May, letting their lawns bloom wild for spring pollinators, we ended up cutting our grass in anticipation of our son’s birthday party. I have never planted flowers, my excuse being that our regular deer – a group of red stags and a family of roe deer – would eat them. The polytunnel is still bare, only recently vacated by hens whose house went into the tunnel for avian flu lockdown and didn’t come out for a year; instead of the tomatoes, pea shoots, beetroot, courgettes, strawberries, or butternut squash that we’ve grown in previous years, there is only bracken uncurling through otherwise empty soil. It looks like I don’t care.

I keep thinking though of the opening lines of a Karine Polwart song, Take Its Own Time: ‘you ceased to mow the lawn 10 years ago, you just wanted to see how your garden would grow.’ The main sentiment is that the gardener no longer tries to shape their garden, just lets it seed itself and watches to see what will grow. I may not have done much to cultivate beauty or diversity around our house, yet it is there.

My friend could see the tiny dog violets that have escaped the lawnmower, the daisies growing in rubble that will one day be a patio, and it won’t be long until self-heal flourishes on the earth mounded up by the back drain. Growing through the fence by the empty polytunnel, a crab apple tree holds clusters of gorgeous dusky flowers. I can point to the stone ruins that I soon won’t be able to reach without stepping on bluebells, the place where wild orchids will emerge from the bent grass, or the ditch that will fill with water forget-me-nots. Beyond the side-gate, there are celandines growing in the field, and wood anemones cluster under self-seeded oak and birch. She will have to watch her step where forests of new blaeberry shoots are thriving, and I can pick handfuls of appley wood sorrel for her wee one. Maybe not a garden, but most definitely a dream.

First published in Lochaber Times 10th May 2023

For all that they are bare, the trees still hold some colour at this time of year. The bright green of oak lichen can glow neon, catching and reflecting what little winter light there is. And, where woodland has regenerated naturally, the oaks are surrounded by the deep red-purple of mad-haired birch.

Up close, the hue of the birch’s outermost branches dulls to brown. It is stark against the pale bark, which peels in papery curls around horizontal scores and fissures.

George Monbiot, in the seminal 2013 ‘rewilding’ book, Feral, speculates that those fissures might have evolved because birch trees once shared the landscape with elephants.

Birch grew before the last ice age, and Mr Monbiot thinks it is not unfeasible that elephants roamed amongst them. The dark splits tearing their silvered surface could have been an evolutionary mechanism to prevent browsing elephants from stripping the tree completely. I’m not sure how playful Monbiot intended the theory to be, but, walking with the dog through woodland on the croft, I am delighted at the thought of an elephant grazing the canopy around me. Sounds ridiculous, right?

But it’s an extreme example of shifting baseline syndrome. Every generation has their own perception of what constitutes a healthy ecosystem, based on their lifetimes’ experience. The result is that ecosystems can change drastically over aeons, with humans protecting only their own small idea of a functioning ecosystem and the relationships within it.

Skip a few millennia from the elephants to just 50 years ago, when Catherine MacLennan of Port Appin was writing for The Herb Society of America about the wines she made from the trees around her home. She writes, ‘The time for tapping the Birch trees is when the leaf buds are swollen ready to open, usually early March’.

It seems to have been more common then for crofters to bore a hole in the trunk of a birch, gathering sap Mrs MacLennan describes as ‘clear and sparkling’. Where tapping in Canada became wide-spread and industrialised with maples, in Scotland it is now a cultural curiosity.

That said, my niece began the practice four years ago, after watching a video of a Swedish girl birch-tapping, and discovering that her great-uncle, a crofter, also used to make his own birch wine.

Cards on the table, I don’t think we’ll be getting an elephant on the croft (although wouldn’t it be marvellously bonkers?). But I might have a go at birch tapping. Some relationships with the birch may not have shifted too far into distant memory to be wholly forgotten.

First published in Lochaber Times 20th February 2023

On an average day, the most common bird I see here is the raven. They circle the skies with the gulls and I have counted scores of them winging across the loch at dusk to roost. But in Ayrshire and Glasgow, where I grew up, it was their pied cousins, the magpie, that most often caught my attention.

With their white breast and wing stripe, and velvety black head, back, and tail that shine iridescent blues and greens in the light, the magpie is instantly recognisable. Their long straight tail points neatly behind them whether in flight, or bobbing along the ground.

Back in Ayrshire for two weeks this summer, I resumed nodding ‘hello maggie’ at any single magpies hopping along the edge of the motorway. The greeting comes from the rhyme ‘One for Sorrow’. I guess the superstition is that you stave off sorrow by acknowledging the bird – you would imagine they’d need all the help they could get in that proximity to thousands of speeding cars – but I think the sorrow is the lonely magpie’s, so by saying hello you are extending your friendship.

Watching a pair dig about in a hanging basket in my friend’s garden, it occurred to me I now miss my wee daredevil pals.

For, though magpies are prevalent across the UK and Ireland, they are absent from the Highlands. Something about our mountainous region puts them off – maybe the lack of motorways? In truth, lack of habitat connectivity is a possible influence on magpie distribution. These scavengers thrive in proximity to urban populations, where they have greater opportunities to access food. We are the magpie’s friend in more than superstition.

High sandstone walls surround my friend’s garden, which is one of a row of gardens near the edge of a town. Large sycamore trees hang over each wall. All the time I was there I could hear magpies laughing from deep within the leaves.

To me, their chittering call sounds like mirth. However, according to one etymology website, the birds used to be known only as ‘pies’, and the ‘mag’ was a 16th century addition referring to the ‘idle chatter’ of women. I bristled at the implication – and yet I sat alone in my friend’s garden, as I was house-sitting for her while she was on holiday elsewhere. I had to admit that if she had been there, our cackles would most likely have joined the magpie’s.

One for sorrow, two for joy,

Three for a girl, four for a boy,

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told,

Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss,

Ten for a bird you must not miss.

First published in Lochaber Times 26th July 2022

Near our house is a birch woodland. From late May until June its green understory has been flush with the purple-blue hues of bluebells. Now though, the flowers are setting their seeds, retracting into little round cases full of next year’s growth.

In her poem Reliquary, Kathleen Jamie suggests that the casting of those seedpods is an act of hope:

The land we inhabit opens to reveal

the stain of ancient settlements,

plague pits where we’d lay

our fibre-optic cables

but witness these brittle August

bluebells casting seed,

like tiny hearts in caskets

tossed onto a battle ground.

I can’t decide if the battle ground in the poem is between humans and bluebells, or between humans and humans in our ever-changing and ongoing use of land. Maybe it’s both. Either way, every year the bluebells return here and, as the petals wane, Jamie’s words bob up out of my memory again. I think about balance.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about a study of Native American practices of harvesting sweetgrass. It showed that some species benefit from a symbiotic human/land relationship. The original research asked if it was better to harvest by pulling the plants up root and all, or to cut the plant, leaving the roots intact. The scientists left a separate area untouched by human hand, simply as a control to gauge the test sites against.

But it was that control plot that suffered. Unharvested dead vegetation quelled fresh growth. The areas in which harvesting techniques were tested all had a flourishing grass population. Technique aside, the key was to take no more than 50%. 

While the sweetgrass study focused on the success of an individual species – not on general land use – I recognise a little of the approach in the way we work with the croft.

The bluebells blossom in the dappled sunlight and shade of the trees. Birch were the pioneer species in ground that was left to seed itself. Occasionally, deer or sheep would pass by, the animals’ hooves digging divots into the earth. A biologist friend tells me that those hoofprints created little safe pockets for birch seeds to land and flourish.

You can see this happening again elsewhere on the croft. One tiny field had pigs in it two years ago, its dark soil churned up by their hungry snouts. And you cannot walk in it now without stepping on a miniature forest. Hundreds of ankle-height birch that – if left to grow – could create more woodland, thus more opportunity for bluebells to thrive. As it is, another pair of kune kune pigs will be in the enclosure soon. These grazing pigs relish the tree shoots growing amongst the summer grass.

The birchwood and bluebells by the house, though, remain untouched. Woodland here, pasture there: give and take, fifty/fifty. It’s working for us.

First published in Lochaber Times 20th June 2022

My kids asked the other day, “why do deer have white bums?”. I had a vague idea it was related to warning, or escaping from danger. I told them deer raise their tail when alarmed, letting the rest of the herd know that there is something to worry about – I did make a mental note to check my facts later.

The red deer seem close and fearless now. Not in the bold and belligerent manner they have during rutting season – more like they see us, but don’t care. Two in the field by the house nudge their way across the boggy ground towards better grazing: a stag with short black antler furred with regrowth, and a golden-backed hind. When I walk closer, they only lift their heads, briefly returning my look, and return to browsing.

However, they view our jumpy 4-month-old collie differently. The same pair were cruising slowly into the woodland near the top of the hill as I walked up behind them with the dog. When we reached the outer birch trees, the deer had moved out of sight. But the puppy stopped stock-still, nose pointed towards the space where they had been. Just as I asked her what else she saw (in the way we do with puppies and babies, not really expecting an answer), she yapped loudly, sending me out of my skin.

At the dog’s bark, the two deer appeared from behind a clump of hazel – except it wasn’t two at all. Their light rumps were revealed as they turned away from us, picking up speed as their heavy brown bodies bobbed lightly over the fence, then two more, then more again began to flow up the hill; a paper chain of pale hearts, disappearing into the trees.

In the Forward to Understanding Animal Behaviour (Whittles Publishing, 2019), Rory Putman says that he is writing for amateur naturalists like myself. Following the recommendation of a friend, I turned to the book to ask if Putman could shed any light on my very loose conclusions about the deer behaviour. Sure enough, he observes that many social mammals have developed calls or actions ‘which ‘warn’ other members of the group or feeding assemblage of potential danger and allow them to take some evasive action’. He talks about roe deer fluffing up ‘the hair of their white rump patch into an extremely obvious ‘powder-puff if they scent or see a predator’ then running off. Or the African springbok, ‘who flare their magnificent white rump patch and make a series of high leaps into the air, ‘pronking’ ostentatiously as they run.’

The roundish white rear-ends of red deer appear a little like easily tracked target; it seems contradictory that they evolved in defence. Putman suggests it is altruistic, one for the good of the herd: ‘…behaviour which advertises the presence of the predator to other must act, quite by reverse, to draw attention to yourself, while allowing others to escape.’

Standing at the bottom of the hill, I caught only glimpses of those pale rumps before they vanished completely. To the following herd, they may have been as bright as airport landing lights – this way to safety.

First published in Lochaber Times 27th May 2022

Driving north on the A82 this week, I rounded a bend near Letterfinlay and found myself catapulted into summer. While most of the trees round my home on the south shore of Loch Eil are just tentatively green, two horse chestnuts by the road above Loch Lochy stood resplendent. Hundreds of five-fingered leaves waved at me through the window of my speeding car, broad and open to the sun.

The order in which different tree species put out their leaves comes partly from their inner structure. Softwoods like birch, alder, and cherry can quickly mend any winter damage to the vessels that transport water from root to crown. Hardwoods however have fewer, large-diameter vessels that tear and rupture more easily; they take longer to repair and make ready for the rush of spring sap.

Horse chestnuts are a close-grained hardwood, so at first glance their early exuberance seemed out of place. In fact, it was very much of its own, specific place.

Whether hard or soft, each tree can also make a choice about when to go into leaf based on its immediate environment.

Individual microclimates have different amounts of light, heat, and humidity that tell the tree when it is time to grow. As a result, the oak, willow, birch, hazel, and alder on our north facing shore are slower to emerge than their south-facing cousins. The verdancy of those horse chestnuts on the hill above Loch Lochy suggested they live with an abundance of sunshine.

It was with that in mind I went to visit another horse chestnut much further downstream. This one grows in the shadow of Old Inverlochy Castle, where the River Lochy flows towards Loch Linnhe. I wanted to see if it had unfurled too.

Instead, its leaves were small. They curled in on themselves away from a biting north-west wind. Occasionally, the air would lift them towards a blue sky, their edges vivid in the April sunlight – but I had to admit it was still too early to fully embrace the idea of summer.

In Scottish Place Names (Lomond Books, 2000), George Mackay says Letterfinlay means ‘Hill of the fair soldier’ (Leitir, meaning hillside, fionn meaning fair, and laoich meaning soldier’s). The Letterfinlay horse chestnuts then are the fair soldiers of summer: a vanguard announcing the light and warmth still to reach the rest of us.

First published in Lochaber Times 24th April 2022

In the gales that have torn through the country over the last couple of months, it is easy to see why trees drop their leaves. They time their growth and fall with the weather. Imagine thousands of tiny green sails catching those winds – there wouldn’t be many woods left standing. But, while most deciduous trees keep themselves battened down until Spring, the hazel is blooming.

Its catkins begin to appear in December and January, decorating woodlands through the late winter. Tiny green-gold flowers, a few millimetres wide and peaked like the beaks of baby birds, dangle in long rows from otherwise bare branches.  As the days slowly lengthen, the catkins ripen into opulent lemony curls. They seem delicate, like a light pale tinsel that could fall easily off their twigs.

While polytunnels are being shredded, paint is stripped off picnic tables, and branches thick and thin are being scattered to the ground, it seems unlikely that anything as slight as a catkin could remain fixed in place. However, their appearance is deceptive; they are built for the wind. Try as it might to pull the soft flowers from the woody stem, the tails simply dance along with the wind, and it cannot get a grip.

While most blossoms rely on insects to carry pollen between them, hazel trees depend on the movement of the air. Each tree has both male and female flowers but cannot pollinate itself. The long concertinas are the male flowers, each giving up puffs of pollen that will gust across to its neighbour. Waiting there, tucked in close to their branch, are the miniscule red fronds of the female flowers. They grow on tiny green buds that, if fertilised, will become hazelnuts.

I like the hazel’s relationship with the winter weather. Instead of hiding from it, or resisting it, they live on it.

In her now-famous book, The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd observes that the people of the Cairngorms take on characteristics of the landscape in which they live. I wonder about the attitude of people who live in Scotland towards the weather, and how it might echo a little of the hazel’s approach, where the ability to withstand winter storms is a behaviour learned through necessity.

Hazel trees were apparently one of the first species to colonise this landscape after the last ice age, and so humans and hazel have been sharing this particular corner of the world for several thousand years. Its pliable wood would have sheltered us, carried us as boat frames, tipped with flint and thrown for hunting, and, of course, its nuts would have been a welcome and easily stored protein.

Every year I search for the little red flowers with the potential for an autumn harvest; I’ll watch them swell over the summer, waiting for the moment they’re ripe, but – like every year – the deer will probably beat me to it. It’s all in the timing.

First published in Lochaber Times 11th March 2022