The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

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2

       May

      First felling

      It has been raining for several days, but there is still not enough closed canopy aloft to provide any kind of shelter. The beech trunks are sodden, and now also distinctly green: rainfall has woken up tiny algae and liverworts living on the bark, and they are growing rapidly while they can. A large log near one of the paths has been rotting away for years, and what remains of its wood absorbs water like a sponge: maybe it was a standing cherry ten years ago. A bright-yellow lobe is growing out from one side of it, an excrescence both luminous and unnatural in its brilliance, like a glowing and irregular ox tongue. Every day it seems to add another inch or so, as if licking itself into further substance. The fungus is feeding on the wood: I know it as the fruiting body of the sulphur polypore (Laetiporus sulfureus).1 I have seen it on several trees, but it does have a common preference for wild cherry (Prunus avium). When it is further developed I know it will become more like a bracket, and on its underside hundreds of tiny pores will develop, marking the ends of tubes in which its spores are produced in their millions to waft away on the lightest breeze, randomly seeking out the perfect tree on which to germinate and prosper anew.

      This damp period favours natural succulence – living things that are full of juice. On another part of the log three or four bright-pink-coloured balls are the size of small children’s marbles. They too look unnatural, like dropped beads of coral that have no place in a beech wood in England in spring. Prodded with a finger, they burst like boils, spattering pink juice. My daughter hates them, despite my protestations that they have a weird beauty. They are the reproductive spheres of a plasmodial slime mould, Lycogala epidendrum.2 As its common name implies, it was once thought of as fungal, but it is not a mould of any kind, though the sliminess cannot be gainsaid. Today the balls are forming everywhere in groups on the woodpile near the barn, dozens of them. They thrive in the damp. For the earlier part of their life cycle they moved along and through the forest floor, like amoebae, in a subtle but bounded transparent body with thousands of nuclei, where they soaked up nutrients from decaying organic matter. If my daughter were to say they were creepy at this stage, that would be no less than the truth. They creep and they grow. When they have grown enough – and it is an interesting question just what it is that says, ‘Enough!’ – they change character more thoroughly than did Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde. They glide up to a higher piece of dead wood to turn into those pink balls. At this stage the transformation is incomplete, but in a week or two the balls will have turned brown and become much less conspicuous. A few weeks later they will have transformed into masses of umber-brown microscopical spores – dust, to the eye – and will then be blown to the four winds. On another piece of wet wood I discover a weft of tiny, white, delicate gelatinous fingers hanging down like stalactites: it is another ‘slimer’ (Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa). There’s a sudden vision of the wood as a mass of almost invisible cells sliding and questing through the dampness.

      The sun returns at last, and with it a gentle breeze. The weak solar rays pick out the fluttering foliage of freshly unfurled beech leaves in the softest shades of pale green – almost yellow in a certain light. On the ground lie hundreds of tiny brown bracts that had encased the nascent leaves over winter in thin, spiky buds. Now they are redundant. I examine a new beech leaf under a lens: it is fringed with white hairs more delicate than a baby’s eyelashes. It has not yet acquired anything of its summer rigidity; it is like tissue paper. On the low branches of the trees the leaves quiver gently, making tiers of light thrown into contrast against the unchanging dark of the holly. It is almost as if we were under water, and the leaves were being stirred by invisible currents. Where the sun sneaks through the forest to illuminate the cherry trees the polished surfaces of their bark shine almost silver.

      Cousin John is felling a beech tree that is leaning dangerously over the public footpath. Accidents in woods caused by falling branches are very rare – most people have the sense to stay out of the woods during tornados. But beeches sometimes shed a whole branch just for the hell of it: these are called ‘widow-makers’ (they never fall on girls). We cannot have that happen to a passing dog-walker. John starts with a saw on СКАЧАТЬ