trees

Holly harvest

| kirsteenbellblog

I am advancing through the woods with a pair of sharp kitchen scissors in hand, my heading set by a gleam of green. It’s early, the sun is only just edging around the Ben in the east. Light filters weakly through wet air, softening the edges of birch and oak around me – but not the sharp points of the holly tree I am here to see.

The ground underneath is littered with leaves blown from the oaks further up the bank, mouldering shades of burgundy and brown, and a pair of yellowing ribwort leaves missed by the deer, by the winter, protected maybe by the lower holly branches.

This single holly tree sits brightly by a group of pale birch. It is tall, half my height again, but still a sapling. The crown leaves have not yet forgotten their need to be spiky. Nearby, the trunk of a young rowan has been fractured by the shouldering weight of stags: its broken branches demonstrate how far the holly needs to grow before it is out of the deer’s browsing reach.

Holly is common in the understory of oakwoods, even a tiny one like this. When faced with the emptiness of dark gnarled wood, you can see why its shine and colour are so closely associated with Christmas and yuletide. Evergreen and crimson, it is a burst of brightness as we approach the depths of winter. The smooth verdant surface of the leaves invites touch – were it not for those points that snag and scratch. And fruit that ripens in winter is a gift, though it needs a frost to sweeten the bitter berries for the birds that will eat and disperse its seeds.

It is too young to be prolific in fruit yet, this wee tree that could live for 300 years if left alone. Will these woods even be here then? At first, I spot only one berry, and, having just been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, I pause before snipping the branch. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about the Honourable Harvest, the agreement between people and land in which you take only what you need: ‘Never take the first. Never take the last. … Leave some for others’.

I take a photo of the one red berry instead. However, the longer I stand there, getting my eye in, waiting for the morning light to curl around the tree’s tips, more red starts to pop out. Eventually I spy a branch with a cluster of three little berries. I step in closer, scissors ready. This scant trio are less than half of what the tree still holds, and they are exactly what I need.

Storming of the woods

| kirsteenbellblog

These trees are normally quiet. We might hear the occasional blackbird song, or finches, or the alarm calls of tits and wrens, or the steady voice of ravens from above, the odd carrion crow. But this morning I walk up the hill to a raucous melee. I’m not even close to the woods before I hear a roiling mass of squeaks and curls, chortles and chips, a soundtrack sped up then run backwards and layered over itself again and again. So loud and persistent is the noise that it even swells briefly over the metallic hammering of a rockbreaker from the nearby landfill. If dictionaries had audio descriptions, clustered around the word ‘cacophony’ would be the calls of winter thrushes on the hunt for fruit.

I’ve been away for almost a fortnight and thought I might have missed this storming of the woods. We get only a fraction of the thousands of fieldfare and redwing that migrate to the north of Scotland from their breeding grounds in Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and western Russia. They come every year though, a burst of life when the Highland hills are giving up their green.

When I left for my trip in the last week of October, the rowans were still heavy with berries. Now they are finally bare.

The birds come for our autumn fruit and milder winters. Flocks flutter in like leaves lifted from branches by wind, breezing through this small belt of woodland in a brief, noisy, gathering, before moving on, leaving the rowan exhausted of their fruit. A few dried berries are left dotted on the branches here and there, and a scattering in amongst the leaf litter looks like the debris at the end of a party.

I always thought our visitors were fieldfare, but my newly downloaded Merlin Bird ID app tells me it hears redwings too. I sit by the scope in the garden, waiting for some to stray into the trees by the house so I can watch them more closely. They throng to and fro across the leafless birch, and the oaks still crinkling with brown leaves, searching for any rowan that they might have missed on the last pass. These, I am sure, are fieldfare: grey-blue blurs in the air, their undersides flashing white in the low morning sun. Then I spot two wee ones in the trailing upper branches of a silver birch – they stay long enough for me to train the glass on their perches, and even before I have increased the magnification I can see the rust glow on the side of their breast, the distinct creamy-white line above their eye. Little redwings, in amongst the fieldfare. Birds of a not-quite-the-same-feather flocking together, both drawn to the Highlands’ rowan red bounty.

Autumn colours

Yellow and bronze oak leaves, still with green chlorophyll in their midribs and veins.
| kirsteenbellblog
Yellow and bronze oak leaves, still with green chlorophyll in their midribs and veins.

The green hills are singeing into copper and bronze. All around us trees are drifting too into the autumn spectrum. From the yellow birch to the still green oak, with rowan, alder and hazel at varying stages between, the trees and bracken are calling back their chlorophyll.

Chlorophyll is the green pigment that allows the tree to absorb light needed for photosynthesis.  It is green to the human eye because the tree absorbs red and blue light but reflects the green.  Autumn leaves may be a sign of decay, of the trees shedding what is no longer needed, but it is when the trees are at their most energetic that we see most of their waste – green is the colour of light that the tree throws back.

Each tree reaches a point though where they have stored enough sugar under their bark and in their roots, where they cannot store any more.  Or, if they haven’t reached that point, they are forced anyway to withdraw their liquids deep within to protect themselves from the threat of coming frosts.  Unless you are a pine tree of course, then you effectively have anti-freeze in your needles and a thick layer of wax that allows you to keep your greenery all year round.  Deciduous trees however begin to prepare for their winter rest. Their chlorophyl is broken down; the carotene and anthocyanin pigments that remain in the leaves now have their chance to shine.  The sycamores near us are the first to leaf in the spring, and so seem to be of the first to turn; their five-pointed leaves appear like golden stars in a deep green sky. 

The Woodland Trust suggest that the depth of the yellows, oranges, and reds we see each year depends on weather conditions. Cold and dry weather that stays above freezing affects the pigment, giving the leaves a redder hue, as does longer spells of Autumn sunshine.  There is another theory that the vibrancy of the leaves shouts a warning.  The brighter the colour the stronger the tree – the stronger the caution to insects.  These tiny creatures may find a sheltered home for the colder months, but when spring comes this glowing tree will be capable of defence, so they’d better find another, paler, weaker, home.

Warning issued, energy reserves pulled back into the trunk and roots, the tree will seal off its branches. Leaves will be released and fall to the ground under their own weight or in the first wind.   From hereon in the wind will whistle through bare wood; without their leafy sail to catch the air the trees will be safer from storm damage, the colours of spring stored safe within. 

First published in the Lochaber Times, Issue 8536, Thursday 5 November 2020.