Burnett - The grassling: a geological memoir

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer of English and Kenyan heritage. She was born in Devon and her work is inspired by the landscape in which she was raised. She is the author of Swims, a Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year, and her poetry has been highly commended in the Forward Prize.

The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal of the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them could not grow, and without plants no animals could survive.

Yet if our agriculture-based life depends on the soil, it is equally true that soil depends on life, its very origins and the maintenance of its true nature being intimately related to living plants and animals.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Plant bioacoustics is a newly emerged field of plant communication. Plants produce sound waves in the lower end of the audio range as well as an overabundance of ultrasonic sounds. By capturing the signals emitted by plants under different environmental conditions, I am exploring the ecological significance of these sounds to communication among plants and between plants and other organisms.

Monica Gagliano, Plant Communication

What a strange noise the leaves of the trees make, he said. Its as if they were talking to one another telling secrets.

Wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha, whispered the trees.

They are telling secrets, said Beth. And do you know, Rick if the trees have any message for us, we can hear it by pressing our left ears to the trunks of the trees! Then we really hear what they say.

Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree, Book 2

On the shortest day, the light never ends. Conifers buffer deep gusts of air, animals cry. The sky stings of a metal or an ore; iron wool rolled flat from moon to field. No stars. Clouds ripple the darkening grey. It must be darker because colours are, but the feeling is still of light. The body and the air. Coming back to the place you know: particular trees, the same grass, the ground you have known all your life this is in the air. This is in the cloud. This is what the eyes follow, long after there is anything to see. Ice immerses skin, hair, nail. There is no touching in this tundra, nothing can bear to. This could be a place without speech. Where no lips part. Were it not for the traces of cries in the sodden air, in the slow beat of tarpaulin over hay, gathering moonlight in the black of its flaps. No animals. Except in echoes. Hundreds of years could pass like this. With this wind, ice and blank air, hollowed of pulse and paw. Not the longest night, but the slowest light. Stars begin. Pools of moon bathe the leaves. The ice takes any beating heart.

The light is phenomenal. Clear, pristine, unfiltered. Ghosts dance in the tarpaulin. I sleep in and out of the moon. The day is always here. It is just behind the night. Clouds are urgent, the speech of the wind is feathered but strong and when the light doesnt call it is wind. Battering against me, Wake, wake, open! Come apart and open. Tonight is not for sleeping. It is for loosening the parts of yourself you forget in the daytime. It is for remembering that you are a force that goes on in spite of yourself. That you do not stop when you sleep. That you are not at rest when there is fury and sound in you, stretching the day clean out of its hours. And finally, when light and ice have passed beyond human tolerance, when it cannot be borne, when you are nearly lost and you almost accept it, there is morning.

Geese exit trees. Ducks fly over, not stopping. Willows stand lean: pure limb. It is then that I miss the vegetables. What would it take to dig this ground again? Muscles I dont have, sinew I dont own and the time to be here. Standing in the middle of the plot, thinking platitudes about change and how the soil shows this more than anything, I see it. A single rose bending over the ground; its light lemon is the sun of a hundred mornings and I still see the packet my father used as a marker under the stubs of dead branches, Gloire de Dijon, a climbing rose.

Nearby, the great beech, whose fall I saw last September, has joined a lattice of underlying branches, flattened to form a human nest. It calls out to be climbed. An aphid moves along ivy under my hands, which are tools now, propelling me. Everything slips. Rain gathers in upturned leaves; smooth bark has no traction. I reach the nest in seconds. A moments pause as I assess whether or not the branch that forms its spine can hold me. It could splinter and so could my legs, my shoulders.

When he fell, it was not from anything as stupid as climbing trees. Yet I want to risk it. To sit on the spine and fall back, head in branch; to look up, cradled by wood. But the branches themselves seem to speak, to coax me back. We cannot bear you. We cannot help you. And I know they are right. I edge backwards down the trunk: so easy to climb, treacherous to descend. Feet find no hold; jumper rucks up and bark on belly is cold, as leaves are, to the skin. I have no choice but to relax: tension bears a weight that unsteadies. Muscles retract enough to make subtle negotiations of buttock over hip, the swing of both legs over, until only pelvis touches wood. I jump and land. Sound leaps.

Wood cracks as its split apart for logs. The thump of it falls into barrow; the shuffle and slide of things being put into their proper place. Over it all a light tseep tseep as little birds fall in from wherever they have been. And as the day drains, the sounds of the world close. Engines end; dogs quiet; squirrels purrs edge under fur. Insects slow their clicks. Staggered hoots and deep lowing. More than the day is ending. Evening fire dulled to pastel, dusting over hedges. Moon-gasp. Electric orb fringed by firs. That great moon going on. A perfect round, pulsing to the bat flicker, trickle river. That great continuing. Glow.

Tonight the light from the cottage on the hill is the last to go, as the rain beats against the windows. Pulled and pummelled, I wake somewhere in the storm; where, somehow, there is singing. In the wide blast of rain, a twinkle of sound chimes its resistance. In the short respites from the wind, sudden darts as chaffinch, blackbird, bullfinch get where they need to go, like people running for cover in the rain. The eightieth year after my father was born is a strong one: bullish, stamping its way through the calendar. It is a night full of fight and I hope some of it reaches him; that he breathes in deeply and is charged. I cant tell if the rain has stopped or is just part of me now, but it falls like a blessing and I sleep.

In the morning, rain coats as thick as a pelt, as I stay out completing my fieldwork: my inventory of the night, and the deer, and the time since I was last here. The word acreage denotes arable land, though is not necessarily measured in acres. But here, where the field is an acre in size, the word encompasses the field. An acre of age, where prints of all description are held in the ground: the heavy hoof of deer; lighter treads of badger and rabbit. They press the soil with little animal touches. Some soil is dispersed, caught in the ridges of hooves, in clumps of fur only to re-settle a little further off. Some is nourished, with manure from their tactile bodies. And the bodies, in turn, feed from the soil, picking plants whose roots stretch across the first few inches. And so this has gone on for centuries, this lifting and falling of the earth by the lifting and falling of paws. So this gentle ploughing continues. As I look into this patch of ground, I wonder how long it has been there, where it came from, when and where it will go. Lately, I have been questioning many things I used to take for granted; that I used to think would always be there.