Bob Gilbert [Gilbert - Ghost Trees

Full of deep truths and improbable marvels, this beautifully observed book is a joyous hymn to the urban wild and a clarion call for better greener, wilder cities.

Patrick Barkham, natural history writer

More than ever now, as edgeland becomes a value to be fought over, we need the sanity and the calm informative voice of walkers like Bob Gilbert. This is more than an elegy, its an inspiration: open your eyes, see what is there and not what you are told is there.

Iain Sinclair, on The Green London Way

Ghost Trees

Nature and People
in a London Parish

Bob Gilbert

Published by Saraband,

Digital World Centre,

1 Lowry Plaza,

The Quays, Salford, M50 3UB

and

Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road,

Glasgow, G3 6HB

www.saraband.net

Copyright Bob Gilbert 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN: 9781912235278

ebook: 9781912235285

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the people of the parish of Poplar, and to their rector, Jane.

Yet even a place has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time A place will have been grasslands, then conifers, then beech and elm. It will have been half riverbed, it will have been scratched and plowed by ice. And then it will be cultivated, paved, sprayed, dammed, graded, built up. But each is only for a while, and that will be just another set of lines on the palimpsest. The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild.

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

Introduction

I had never planned to live in Poplar. I had, on a couple of occasions in my younger days, shared its Russian Vapour Baths with some minor local criminals and a taxi driver or two, but those baths were long since defunct and Poplar had become simply a place I passed through on my way elsewhere; to the Blackwall Tunnel perhaps, or out on the road to Southend. But in 2009 I moved with my family from north London to a new home in the East End. My wife had taken the decision to train as an Anglican priest, and the parish church of All Saints was to be her first posting. I was to accompany her, along with our children, the goldfish and a particularly outraged cat.

The move was not, however, without opportunity. For many years I had, as an amateur urban naturalist, been observing the wildlife of inner-city areas and documenting it in my writing, including a newspaper column that began as a five-week trial and was still running twenty years later. I had become the recorder of plants that grew in the cracks of pavements or that lived out their brief lives at the base of a lamp post. I was the curator of ferns that frequented the wall beneath a broken-down pipe, of birds that nested in gutter or garden bush, of spiders that span their untidy webs around the lights in a dingy underpass. I was friend to the weed and the woodlouse; the warden of moths and slime and mosses.

Perhaps I should give credit to the author Richard Adams, although in a roundabout sort of way, for the enthusiasm with which I had come to address this task. Browsing, many years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I had picked up a copy of one of his works. It wasnt one of the more familiar novels, Watership Down or The Plague Dogs or Shardik , but a more personal nature diary based on a year spent on the Isle of Man. The details are vague to me now, but I can remember placing it in the mental category of those idyllic rural reminiscences that make you wonder where your own life went so wrong; the ones where otters frolic on the front lawn of an isolated farmhouse or lifes major worry is the red deer causing havoc in the cabbage patch. What still stands out clearly, however, is the passage that I had opened at random; the author is forced to make a brief trip to London and, breaking off from his string of inspiring rural observations, comments, rather sourly, that he sees nothing but a few crocuses blooming in a dismal hotel garden. The envious in me turned to evangelical.

There was, I wanted to exclaim on behalf of city dwellers, so much more than that. I wanted to tell him of the black redstart I had seen feeding in front of a builders bulldozer, of the pheasant I had found foraging on an urban allotment, and of the skylarks I had heard singing in a landscape of chemical works and pylons. I would, in this imaginary but nonetheless animated conversation, continue with stories of dyers greenweed on an urban hillside, of the rare Jersey cudweed appearing on a busy docklands path, of the gatekeepers and brimstones and mint moths and Jersey tigers that had appeared in my own backyard. Should he still have been listening, I would have gone on to explain that this was not just about the unusual or the unexpected but the pleasure that could be drawn from observing the everyday: the comings and goings of sparrows and starlings, the exuberance of weeds on a waste site, or the first flowering of coltsfoot on a pile of building-site clay. It is observations like these that came to form the basis of this book; a book that, inspired by the natural history of an inner-city area, came eventually to focus on its trees and how their stories have helped shape both the place and its people.

It is perfectly possible, of course, that, on the basis of this one brief passage, I have completely misrepresented Richard Adams. And, since his death was announced whilst I was writing this book, I will, sadly, never have the opportunity to find out. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon to hear a certain amount of disdain for the city and its environment. I have even heard a well-known writer and environmental activist describe all cities as unnatural, as if human beings and their artefacts were not themselves a product of nature.

Much of recent nature writing, too, whilst producing wonderful expressions of wilderness, has turned its back on the urban experience. But there is wildness in the unexpected eruption of nature into the everyday like the kingfisher I saw this morning on the bank of an urban canal and it is these small joys that most of us must learn to treasure, and to take them wherever we can find them. The fact is, the city is now where most of us happen to be. Sometime in 2014 the world passed the point where more than half of its population lives in urban areas. In the UK, according to the Office of National Statistics, the figure is as high as 80%. For most of us, the city is our starting point. If we are to restore any connection with nature at all, it is in the cities that we need to begin.

It was not only Poplar that was new to me. Like the move to this part of London, becoming a vicars wife had never been part of a plan. Like almost everything else in my life, it seemed to have crept up on me whilst I thought I was busy elsewhere. I could not even claim to be an Anglican. I had been brought up in a household that was resolutely and fearfully fundamentalist and which regarded the high church as almost papist, and just as heretical. I had, after some inevitable years in the spiritual wilderness, become a Quaker and it was a long way from the simplicity and silence of Quakerism to the grand theatre of the high Anglican church. And here I was, partnered to a practising parish priest. There would, I assumed, be expectations of the role. They might not be of the tea-and-cucumber-sandwich variety, nor of a place on the flower arrangement rota those things being rather alien to Poplar but there would surely be an anticipation that I would be involved in the life of the church and its community. Or worse, that I would have to be a generally pleasant and amenable person.