Kentmere Trees: how life takes hold

25/3/2018

Flying rowan 24 March

'I was born in the tube miss, I was a miracle baby.' He showed me the newspaper article of his mother's ectopic pregnancy. A precarious way for life to take hold.
The Kentmere flying rowan looked bewitching: a silhouette against a backdrop of sunlit cloud. Cloud: signifying earth and heaven. Orographic cloud: where the realm of air meets mountain top. A flogron, a flying rowan is most powerful magic. This Kentmere rowan is as remarkable as the boy's miraculous birth: born in the tube.

Roots neither in earth nor heaven, suspended between realms, that's the flogron. The tree emerges out of the cleft in a boulder, a fissure caused by ice freezing and expanding and splitting the rock open. An insignificant root peeps out from the base of the cleft. But within it, toward the top of the boulder, what looks like trunk appears. As it emerges above the cleft there's a knotty ball of growth that defies a naming of parts. So how was this tree made? Suppose a bird ate rowan berries, then defecated- a seed lodging at the base of the cleft in the rock, taking root, and slowly rising up through the cleft seeking the light. Or is it possible that the seed fell in mosses and lichens at the top of the cleft, took root and sent a second root probing down through the darkness? Trees do realign themselves sometimes, if they are toppled and a trunk sends up new trunks into the vertical- for instance. Anyway, here's a sequence of flying rowan images for you to puzzle out.

To the west of the River Kent there's a stone wall with senescent ash-pollard. Pollarding prolongs the life of the tree so many ash pollards are ancient. This one clings to life by a thread, or two. What struck me when first I found it was its hospitality. A holly has taken root in its poll which sprouts a thick mass of ferns. Black velvety ash buds of the original tree thrust out around them. The trunk is hollowed out to a mere shell and within it hangs suspended a chunk of bark threaded with a mass of root-like fibres. Whose roots are these? Can't tell where the trunk ends and the root begins, or where it began because it seems to have shifted. It seems to defy gravity, leaning its weight into the wall, fusing into it. It stands, or seems to stand on a hollow triangle of moss-covered root. As if the seedling took root in the wall and the juncture of root-ball and trunk is half way up. The ash hold seems so tenuous I mean to look out for it each year to see how long it endures.