Walking Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford estate this afternoon with ranger Philip Munro. Wild flowers and grasses in profusion. Blogpost to follow soon. . .
Wildflower meadow and nature corridor, Wivenhoe Park, University of Essex
OED definitions:
Wildlife: “The native fauna and flora of a particular region.”
Wildlife Park: “n. a park in which wild animals [and plants?*] are kept and displayed to the public in conditions as close as possible to their natural ones.” *My insertion.
Wildlifer: “n. a person interested in the study and conservation of wild plants and animals.”
My university recently seeded the wildflower meadow shown above, where there used to be a patch of worn grass. The diversity of plants, insects, animals and birds are such that this contribution to the campus’s wildlife corridors hums with life, putting me in mind of some of the literature that I read with students. This post looks at various extracts from works studied on my Literature and the Environmental Imagination MA module and my undergraduate seminar, Transatlantic Romanticisms. I couldn’t resist sharing them.
Margaret Fuller begins Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844) at Niagara Falls, defining the genre in which she writes through a metaphor of literary rambling: “such foot-notes as may be made on the pages of my life during this summer’s wanderings.” Those wanderings take her to Goat Island, on the U.S. side of the falls. . .
The beautiful wood on Goat Island is full of flowers; many of the fairest love to do homage here. The Wake Robin and May Apple are in bloom now; the former, white, pink, green, purple, copying the rainbow of the fall, and fit to make a garland for its presiding deity when he walks the land, for they are of imperial size, and shaped like stones for a diadem. Of the May Apple, I did not raise one green tent without finding a flower beneath.
Margaret Fuller, “Niagara, June 10, 1843”, Summer on the Lakes in 1843.
Fuller’s observation on two wildflower species disorientates lovers of spectacle, confounding more conventional expectations about the visual dominance of the Falls. The flowers are exquisite in their smallness, simplicity and profusion; the roar of the water is where the cascade’s real sublimity is found. Websites now encourage visitors to “get in touch with nature on Goat Island” and to “take a hike,” while the park seems to hybridise that most nineteenth-century of optical spectacles, the phantasmagoria, with something like Rem Koolhaas’s giddy account in Delirious New York of Coney Island as an “incubator” for the architectural mutation of Central Park: “just beyond its waterfall vistas, Niagara is filled with . . . fantastic attractions” (Niagara State Park homepage).
Eighteen years after Fuller published Summer on the Lakes, the wake robin (Trillium grandiflorum) to which she refers provided the title for fly-fishing naturalist John Burroughs‘ collection of essays Wake-Robin (1871). Burroughs’s book, like Fuller’s, is full of sound and an exquisite awareness of flower power – a lyrical biogeography of the Hudson River valley that records a year in upstate New-York through the birds and the bees, and the plants among which they live. He explains that he chose the title Wake-Robin because of the coincidence of the plant’s flowering and the springtime return of “all the birds” (meaning the migratory species, including American Robins):
The dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow, the dogtooth violet when to expect the wood-thrush, and when I have found the wake-robin in bloom I know the season is fairly inaugurated.
“The Return of the Birds,” John Burroughs, Wake-Robin (1871)
Burroughs’s use in Wake-Robin of the bio-almanac genre resonates down a further seven-and-a-half decades to another appropriation of that form, this time explicitly acknowledged by Aldo Leopold. Leopold’s posthumously published A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949) foregrounds the natural history of Wisconsin – specifically the Sauk (Sand) County area near Baraboo – as a case study in support of the need for an extension of our understanding of community and ethics to a land ethic. In his essay for July, under a subheading “Prairie Birthday,” a phenological study of a commonplace wildflower, the cutleaf Silphium (Silphium laciniatum), reinforces his point as effectively as the better-known passage documenting the fate of the last passenger pigeons, in the February conceit of a sawyer reading history through the rings of a tree cut for firewood. The Silphium is a plant that it would be too easy to miss:
It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840s. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.
This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.
Aldo Leopold, “July,” A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949).
The cutleaf Silphium or turpentine plant isn’t an endangered species, but Leopold’s point is our neglect of the commonplace. The Silphium lives tenuously, in its corner of an unremarkable cemetery. Leopold’s “Land Ethic” essay (which begins with a literary reference to Homer’s Odyssey) comes later in the book, extending what might be understood by “community” and communal responsibility to an entire ecology. It is inclusive and politically resonant: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Another leap of imagination takes me to William Blake’s Book of Thel, where the heroine is introduced to the beauty of communal sympathy through conversations with a lily, a cloud, a worm, and a clod of clay.
But let’s return to Summer on the Lakes. Carl Linnaeus catalogued the May Apple (Podophyllum peltatum) in his Species Plantarum (1753). I love the way that wildflowers tease our compulsion to classify, impelling us by association into allusive, comparative meanders – the May Apple, used in naturopathic medicine and made into delicious jelly, is also called Indian Apple, Hog’s Apple, Devil’s Apple, American Mandrake, Racoonberry, Ground Lemon and Umbrella Plant. It isn’t an apple, a lemon or a mandrake. The umbrellas are the leaves that shade each, single flower. (I’m reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” where a “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” satirises the arbitrariness of systems of taxonomy and proposes alternative categories: “Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a living brood fish, an oblong one.”) Most of the May Apple plant is toxic, but then the relationship between beauty, death, and life sits precariously in this book by a woman who would herself die in a shipwreck just five years later, aged 40. Employing forensic botany to read the future narrative of manifest destiny, she wrote:
Everywhere the rattlesnake-weed grows in profusion. The antidote survives the bane. Soon the coarser plantain, the “white man’s footstep,” shall take its place.
We saw also the compass plant, and the western tea plant. Of some of the brightest flowers an Indian girl afterwards told me the medicinal virtues. I doubt not those students of the soil knew a use to every fair emblem, on which we could only look to admire its hues and shape.
After noon we were ferried by a girl, (unfortunately not of the most picturesque appearance) across the Kishwaukie, the most graceful stream, and on whose bosom rested many full-blown water-lilies, twice as large as any of ours. I was told that, en revanche, they were scentless, but I still regret that I could not get at one of them to try.
Rattlesnake-weed could refer to any of several plant species. I think Margaret Fuller was referring to Hieracium venosum, the rattlesnake hawkweed or veiny hawkweed, another small, unshowy plant which has yellow flowers above a delicate basal rosette of blood-red veined leaves. The coarser plantain (“coarser” functions like a pejorative Homeric epithet), or “white man’s footstep,” was brought into North America from Britain and Europe with seed corn. Another plant with naturopathic properties, it was classified by Linnaeus as Plantago media. The plantain is now included in wildflower seed mix. There are some growing in my University’s wildflower meadows and corridors. The compass plant or western tea plant, also mentioned in the above passage, might be a fitting plant with which to end this discussion of literary texts, because its Latin name is Silphium laciniatum and it is also known as the cutleaf Silphium. Fuller, it seems, looks ahead to Aldo Leopold and the case for a land ethic.
So, how might a university campus that was once a landscaped, nineteenth-century park be managed according to Leopoldian ethics? The wildflower meadow with which I began connects to a network of more established wildlife corridors that extend beyond the University’s boundaries, encouraging a spread of life forms and a wider ecological community. Small in scale, it is a change in land use for the better. A threadbare, old mown grass monoculture that wasn’t doing well was removed, the soil rotavated, and the mix of flowers and grasses sown. There’s a high level of control involved in that process. What would have grown if the soil had just been left to its own devices can only be a matter of informed speculation. Travels in the U.S. western states and in Australia remind me how quickly a fire-razed forest springs from bare earth into new life.
An interesting exercise would be a species count of the wildflower meadow now compared with another next year – I’m sure that someone is working on just such a data set. I’ll bet that plants will appear that weren’t part of the planting plan and didn’t come from the mix. The richness of the mix will increase. In an earlier post, City of Trees: Boise, Idaho and an Urban Natural Experience, I wrote about two cork oaks on campus that date back to the Napoleonic wars, biogeographically connecting Essex with Iberian Europe.
John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park (1816), painted a couple of years after the cork oaks were planted, draws attention to a history seen through trees as well as to a sociology of the landscaped great house and its grounds (see EH. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation and Essex Alumnus John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape). In the distance of the wildflower meadow photograph, over the brow of a hill that dips down to the centre of campus, you can make out a silver building. The Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall, named after one of our former Vice Chancellors, faces the lake and grounds shown in Constable’s painting, as if it looks out from the top right of the canvas.
Two hundred years ago, Percy Shelley compared the metaphysical qualities of poetry with the material substance of a flower, through a mix of metaphor and simile that demonstrates the complementarity and mutual interdependence of the humanities and sciences:
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge. . . . It is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption.
(A Defence of Poetry)
What Shelley writes only works when science and art combine to make one another – along with critique – comprehensible.
Note: A Short Report for the RSPB, written by Rachel Bragg, Carly Wood, Jo Barton and Jules Pretty and published by the University of Essex’s School of Biological Sciences and Sustainability Institute, looks at the value to children of connectedness to nature and green exercise. The authors explain that the scientific Connection to Nature Scale, or CNS (devised by Mayer and Frantz) “is based on the principle of the ‘Land Ethic’ by Leopold, and defines connection to nature as ‘an individual’s affective, experiential connection to nature.’ ” Green Exercise is an area of specialist research at Essex. It’s nicely affective that the wildflower meadow in the photo is next to the University’s Trim Trail outdoor exercise loop.
Holding back the tide: stone and wooden sea defences at East Lane, Suffolk.
A friend visiting from California had been reading W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, so we went for a day visiting places on the Suffolk coast. The sculpted nature of that stony, windswept, eroded land margin has never seemed clearer. Washed by the North Sea, the shape of the land is constantly changing. I’d visited Orfordness with some students last October to find that twelve feet of the shingle spit on which I was standing had been lost to the sea since I’d stood in not-quite-the-same-place a year before. A few miles to the north at Aldeburgh, sixteen streets have been lost to the sea since in 1805 George Crabbe published The Borough. Verse sociology of a fishing town, that long epistolary poem inspired Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. Crabbe Street today stands hard against the stony beach where Grimes’s fate is played out. Slaughden Quay, home to the poor of The Borough, is empty except for the shingle, a yacht club, and a Martello Tower – about which I’ll say more in due course.
We began our day at Bawdsey, a curious place where radar was developed on the local Manor Estate and where families take children for bucket-and-spade days out on one of the few sandy beaches in the area.
You can’t just wander here where your mood takes you. A small boy asks his parents whether the jetty is protected by barbed wire. It isn’t, but the question is telling. Outward bound shades into out of bounds, in the least disturbing of a series of signs that we’d see.
My colleague wonders if I know the origins in the U.S. of barbed wire as a means of keeping people as well as animals out of – or inside – designated areas: patented in Ohio in 1867, it was designed for livestock farmers. We thought of Sebald’s meditation on the Holocaust, with people corralled like cattle and bodies piled like hauls of fish. Beyond the imagery of wire, his digression in The Rings of Saturn on long-lost herring markets makes a once-familiar east coast sight strange in disturbing ways. I remember the fish market from my own childhood.
The next signs on the radar – quite literally – elide invitation and prohibition. Did the AA exercise irony when hanging their notice, or does the satire arise out of accidental circumstances?
Green lanes lead past buildings that officially grant time travel permits to a World War II England on the edge of many things. I took my son to one such open day when he was a child, along with my parents who were East Anglian war children. Nostalgia for food rationing and for counting bombers returning home across the North Sea casts a shadow on ideas about happiness in the age we’re now living. In Britten’s Peter Grimes, sometimes staged using a Second World War setting, the fisherman-protagonist sings in his precariously out-of-line voice, “Look, the whole sea’s boiling.” My parents have often recalled what has become a local commonplace – talk of an anti-invasion weapon developed along the coast from here, named “Sea-on-Fire,” and imagined as the hybrid of an oil spillage and a large-scale maritime flame-thrower. Sea-on-Fire brings together a deliberately-caused environmental disaster and flame to produce a nasty weapon. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn takes that rumor into printed, literary gothic, using documentation and echoing the hearsay: locals swear that charred bodies were washed ashore. East Anglia hosts thousands of World War II and Cold War tourists every year.
Is this landscape best understood through psychogeography, pastoral, gothic, sci-fi, or the photographic essay? Simply having to ask that question on such a journey points to the inherent slipperiness of genre. I stand where looking over one shoulder presents a view of a farm, fields, and hedgerows full of spring promise.
Suffolk Pastoral
Turning, it’s possible that I already stand too close to something else. A sign on a derelict building warns of microwave radiation above the level of three metres. Barbed wire, rusty and broken, establishes a running conceit that compounds the atmosphere of desolation.
Suffolk Gothic meets B-movie Sci-fi? “Naturally this gave rise to all manner of speculation about an invisible web of death rays.” (W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, Transl. Michael Hulse).
We journeyed on to East Lane, where sea defences and a shingle beach separate an almost impossibly green, late-May farmland from the North Sea. A few fishermen and women brave the wind. As a teenager I spent nights fishing here with my father, brother, hurricane lamps and flasks of soup. Today, a couple of hundred yards from a ruined WW II building graffitoed “Adios, Radios,” a pair of swans nest, their footprints impressed in mud alongside those of coots. My companion and I talk about the wonder of 850,000- to 950,000-year-old human footprints found in mud last year northward along the coast at Happisburgh. Those imprints of people passing were quickly erased by the sea that briefly made them visible. Happisburgh, like the rest of the East Anglian coastal margins, faces rapid erosion.
Orfordness has received so much attention that I’m not going to say much about it here. (I’ve written elsewhere about the Ozymandian hubris attaching to our inscription of military might on that shingle spit alongside a more organically accreting natural history.) But my friend is keen to see the buildings that Sebald likened to pagodas, where the triggers and mechanisms of atomic bombs were tested. I point out a building where a further kind of surveillance, under the horizon radar, was developed. We don’t visit the site because birds are nesting in the fragile environment, and we’re glad that the National Trust wardens and staff are caring for plant and animal life. From the other end of the ness (not a true spit, because of the shingle causeway) the exclusion notice seems more benign and welcome. But the Cobra Mist building, radar masts and pagodas are just about visible in the distance.
I’m hoping by now that the the title of this post doesn’t need explanation. However, more conventional forms of sculpture at Snape and Aldeburgh can’t pass without comment. Large-scale installations by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Maggi Hambling and Anthony Gormley all draw attention to the synchronic relationship of human and non-human sculpting. Music and soundscapes add to the textures of our involvement with this enigmatic, waterland environment. Since 1976, the components “Ancestor 1,’ “Ancestor II,” and “Parent I” of Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man have stood adjacent to the reedbeds behind Snape Maltings concert hall, where the Aldeburgh Music Festival founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears takes place each June. Other pieces from The Family of Man series are installed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the U.K.’s nearest approximation to Storm King, the latter close to the Hudson River and not far from West Point Military Academy in upstate New York.
Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man: “Ancestors I” and “II,” and “Parent I” are more lastingly visible footprints in the East Anglian landscape than those of Happisburgh Man. How do we measure time against the unseen?
The strange proximities of military and artistic installations around Aldeburgh, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Storm King ask for thought. I remember, from decades ago, the strangely beautiful ariel balletics of a decomissioned Avro Vulcan bomber practicing for airshows and think of Henry David Thoreau’s description of a Merlin in Walden:
It sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it.
I’m writing this blogpost two days after the RAF announced that the last Vulcan, a quick-response, long-range, nuclear-capable bomber not deployed until the 1982 Falklands War, will no longer fly after 2015. The museum at Orfordness has a bomb that was once loaded onto such a plane. I’m told that Vulcans could be airborne with just two minutes notice, well within the four-minute warning that we used to be told would advise us of a nuclear attack from the USSR.
The Hepworth bronze modernist sculptures at Snape are invitingly tactile, as is Suffolk-born sculptor Maggi Hambling‘s steel Scallop on Aldeburgh beach, just north of the town. Dedicated to Benjamin Britten, Scallop has cut through its steel an inscription from Peter Grimes: “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.”
The context of those words bears reflecting upon, coming at point in the opera where the marginalised fisherman realises that his dreams of a normal family life will never be realised:
I’ve seen in stars the life that we might share:
Fruit in the garden, children by the shore,
A fair white doorstep, and a woman’s care.
But dreaming builds what dreaming can disown.
Dead fingers stretch themselves to tear it down.
I hear those voices that will not be drowned.
To the south of Aldeburgh, on top of a Martello Tower built between 1802 and 1812 to repel invasion from Napoleonic forces, stands an Iron Man. Windswept and defiant above the beach, looking northward toward Hambling’s Scallop, his expression changes according to the play over his features of light and shadow from Suffolk’s coastal skies. This could be the Angel of the East, not just echoing its creator Anthony Gormley’s better-known Angel of the North, but responding to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in which “Jeder Engel ist schrecklich,” – “Every angel is terrible” (see original German and an English Translation by A. S. Kline, with photographs).
Aldeburgh’s 2015 Anthony Gormley sculpture is one of five figures that comprise the installation Land. The other four figures are in Argyll and Bute, Devon, Warwickshire and Dorset. Each was commissioned to be a response to the landscape in which it is located. In his essay for the Landmark Trust, Gormley explains that he was motivated by places like this, “where the vertical nature of the sculpture can act against the relatively constant horizon of the sea.” My colleague and I decide that the sculpture’s rusted iron body establishes a nice visual rhyme with the barbed wire we saw earlier on our journey. Likewise, a look back at upturned fishing boats on Bawdsey beach adds a visual gloss to Maggi Hambling’s iron shell, in which one of the three parts resembles an overturned boat almost as much as it does a scallop. Peter Grimes lives in an upside-down fishing boat, on the edge of a crumbling cliff.
Boats on Bawdsey beach.
Scallop, seen from a different angle.
The last location on our day journey was Dunwich Heath, where erosion of the cliffs by wind and sea can be seen taking place around you and to the north, while the reactors of Sizewell Nuclear Power Station stand on the near horizon beyond the RSPB’s Minsmere Bird Reserve to the south. By this point clouds had filled the sky, casting a gloomy semi-mist on the beach as we looked into the distance. We thought about the fog that rolls in along this coast and that features in Peter Grimes. As with Orfordness, since Sebald gave his account a lot has been written about the medieval city-port of Dunwich that was lost to the waves. Local rumour has it that in stormy weather it’s still possible to hear the bells of churches ringing in their submerged steeples. Preceding Sebald, H. P. Lovecraft translated the place and its mood to Massachusetts in his 1929 short story The Dunwich Horror. Another genre is added to my earlier list. The semi-mist starts to thicken and it feels almost as if we’re standing in the landscape of a solar eclipse. Eclipses were once thought to be harbingers of apocalypse, and here we were on the beach of a coast where nature almost met armageddon.
I’d like to have continued to Covehithe, where the land has been abandoned to reclamation by the sea in the interest of protecting places with denser human populations or with power plants.
Minsmere from Dunwich, with gorse in flower and Sizewell in the distance.
Minsmere Reserve “scrape.”
This post might have been titled “Signs of the Times” or “Suffolk Pastoral,” each of which would have provided intertextual references to well-known literature (Thomas Carlyle’s essay and Philip Roth’s novel). I chose “Sculptured Coast” because of the synchronic relationship between the changes brought about by humans and by nature, linked together and made more accessible to thought through works of art. What does that tell us about the need for science and the humanities to move forward together? Returning home, the conversation turned from East Anglia to the American West and the kind of animal encounters while out walking that you’ll not experience in Suffolk. Should you follow instructions and face up to a seven-foot-long cougar by making yourself look large? My colleague recalled a friend who simply ran. Does bear spray work? Aren’t disaffected people more dangerous than either mountain lions or bears? We typically think of danger in terms of the non-human or the dehumanised. That is not to say that animate dangers don’t exist. But as a last thought in this piece, I’ll stay with the threat and allure of the sea. The 1953 East Anglian floods took lives and devastated farmland. The experiments at Orfordness could have destroyed the world as we know it. We were uneasy about the microwave radiation referred to on the dilapidated sign next to much more recent “Warning,” “Dangerous Site,” and “Keep Out” notices. All of the time, the sea was pounding piled rocks, washing against the wooden groynes, grinding the shingle. The beach fishers at East Lane sat on the stones, their synthetic lines connecting them to an element that predates and is likely long to survive us.
Titanomachia . . . in response to “Urban Dreamcatchers,” from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective.
While commuting around London’s North Circular, I’ve noticed an accelerated downward mobility in gasworks buildings. Two near Tottenham Hale are currently staggering earthward. Those Titans of our fossil fuelled anthropocene bring to mind John Keats’s Hyperion poems. I feel sure the towers’ strut-and-girder “carved features wrinkle as they fall.”
I worked for a while in Salford, where Ewan McColl wrote and set his Romantic ballad “Dirty Old Town.” There’s a resonance to McColl’s bleak urban pastoral. The incongruous imagery of crofts and gasworks set in a Landscape with Chimneys (the title of the play for which the song was written) was intended to fill an awkward gap while scenery was changed.
.
Picking up the signals –
spectral transmissions
from the agora of public dreaming
.
Now playing: Charlemagne Palestine + Tony Conrad – An Aural Symbiotic Mystery
Grasses and wildflowers on the Scottish / English border. Photo from my recent visit to Scotland.
Blogpost to follow . . . .
White pine in the rain. Boise, April 2014.
‘A large tree on the west side of a residential home can save up to $48 per year in electricity and natural gas use.’
‘Urban trees remove 581 tons of air pollutants annually.’
‘Trees intercept stormwater, reducing runoff and absorbing pollutants that would otherwise enter rivers and lakes.’
‘Through photosynthesis, trees absorb atmospheric carbon and use it for new growth (stems, branches, roots and leaves), acting as a natural carbon sink.’
Treasure Valley Urban Tree Canopy Assessment (2013).
Since my last post I’ve spent a while in Scotland working on my literature and trees project. However, a leap of imagination takes me from the thirteenth-century Borders poet Thomas of Erceldoune and the fabled Eildon Tree near Melrose to Boise, Idaho in April 2014. Boise is a city of trees: it takes pleasure in acknowledging itself as such, having established the Boise Tree Ordinance as part of its Municipal Code in 1952 and employing a City Forester. I commented on its name – from the French boisé meaning woods – in my earlier piece on Hot Springs, Atomic Cities and Craters of the Moon. Driving down from the stone and late snow of the surrounding mountains into the river valley the greenness of the city is almost overwhelming. It’s easy to understand why the many stories about the origin of the name in a region of high desert all involve the importance of the Boise River and the black cottonwoods that trace along its banks. I’ll go with the oldest story, in which French Canadian fur trappers who moved into the area around the 1820s referred to the river valley as ‘La rivière boisée,’ more than forty years before the city was founded as a military post in 1863. The idea of an Idaho Riviera is a nice touch.
Idaho Riviera – a city of trees.
The purpose of my visit to Boise was to give a lecture at Boise State University (Getting to the Roots of the Matter: Trees and the Environmental Imagination in 19th Century Literature) and talks at other institutions including the College of Idaho and the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning. There’s a tangible frisson of interest in environmental matters that is part of Boise’s culture. As I needed to return to the U.K. at the end of the week there wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked to explore the city and its surroundings. However, it’s surprising what can be achieved in a few days. I’m deeply indebted to Samantha, Rochelle and Christine for their wonderful hospitality and for the time they spent showing me around.
Understanding Boise’s significance as a city of trees means looking locally and further afield. There are some fascinating stories, some of which are full of hope because they relate physically and symbolically to the triumph of nature over human devastation and waste: trees as war memorials, and as emblems of hope. Others concern direct or indirect environmental destruction. I’ll look first at trees as symbols of commemoration and hope. In doing so, I’m mindful of the complex relationship between native and introduced species.
Trees travel in various ways. Most of Boise’s tree species came to the city like many of its human inhabitants, as migrants. The city’s Forester, Brian Jorgenson, has been quoted as saying ‘the vast, vast majority of what’s in the valley is planted. What you look at when you look over the City of Trees is human-made.’ The main indigenous hardwoods are black cottonwood, alders and serviceberry or wild-pear (see Zach Hagadone, ‘Tree Hugger,’ Boise Weekly, 2010, for an overview of the City’s urban forestry, quotes from Jorgenson, and a list of the most common native and introduced species). Over the last 123 years the grounds of the State Capitol have been planted with several ‘Presidential Trees’ and other commemorative trees: a red water oak planted by President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 (the year after Idaho became a state), a rock maple planted in 1903 by Theodore Roosevelt, an Ohio buckeye from 1911 planted by Howard Taft, and a sunset maple given by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1985 in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Idaho Federated Women’s Clubs are also represented. Several of these trees have died of natural causes – the Roosevelt maple was blown down in a windstorm in 2006 – or were cut down because too old to transplant when the Capitol was recently renovated. Tenders were invited from craftsmen offering to work the wood into commemorative items. Local master violin maker Frank Daniels made three violins from the Benjamin Harrison oak, donating one to the State Historical Society.
One tree that is missing from the Capitol’s present list is perhaps the most interesting. For in the appropriately named Grove Street, at the centre of Boise’s lively Basque Block, thrives an oak tree that was sent to the city as a gesture of friendship in 1980 from its twin town of Guernica in northern Spain. The tree was one of three saplings gifted to Boise after being grown from an historic oak in Guernica known as ‘The Tree of Guernica.’ One of the saplings planted at the Capitol was immediately vandalised and the second, planted in its place, did not survive. The Grove Street ‘Tree of Guernica’ that was the third sapling is a particularly poignant instance of a tree as war memorial, for back in Spain its parent was historically significant as a centuries old location for civic meetings and had survived the 1937 Nazi carpet bombing and the Spanish Civil War. By way of a reciprocal gesture from Boise, a sapling produced by the Grove Street tree was sent back to Geurnica to replace the tree there that died in 2004.
Boise’s Basque community began in the 1880s, so it dates back to Idaho’s foundation. Early migrants came to the area and worked as shepherds for Scottish and French livestock farmers, rather than in the silver mining industry that had first attracted them. Others followed, and there was another wave of migration due to the Spanish Civil War. Boise now has the largest Basque community in the U.S.A., standing at 15,000 in 2013. The Basque Block has restaurants, bars, a Basque Museum and Cultural Centre and residential buildings. I can recommend Bar Gernika on the corner of Grove Street, where we enjoyed a delicious lamb stew and Idaho beer.
Boise State University is doing a lot to make the city’s Basque culture better known. For more information I recommend Becoming Basque: Ethic Heritage of Boise’s Grove Street, edited by John Bieta, John Ysursa and Dave Lachiondo (Boise State UP, 2014).
The Tree of Guernica shares some common ground in its role as a living war memorial with two trees on my own university campus. The General Rebow Cork Oaks (Quercus suber) at Essex were brought back in 1814 from the Peninsular Campaign in the Napoleonic Wars. Retuning from Spain and Portugal, General Francis Rebow planted the trees in his boots (the kind now known as ‘Wellington boots’ after Rebow’s fellow officer, the Duke of Wellington). For more comment about these trees and other living sites of memory see my earlier post, ‘Chokecherry Wine and Conferencing.’ Also, for more details of the tree walk on my university’s campus at Wivenhoe Park see Christopher Howard’s Tree Walk.
General Rebow Cork Oaks, Wivenhoe Park, University of Essex.
Returning to Idaho, people were keen to talk with me about the western white pine (Pinus Monticola pinaceae), which was once Idaho’s dominant tree species and is now under threat. In 1935 the western white pine was designated Idaho’s official state tree. By contrast, the potato was only declared the official state vegetable in 2002. So what happened to the western white pine to make it a cause for concern? (I’d talked in my lecture about Henry David Thoreau’s account of the devastation of the eastern white pine in The Maine Woods, and his stunning account of ‘tree fall’ at night. While listening for moose, Thoreau had heard ‘a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it . . . as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness.’)
Photograph of Loggers. Idaho State Historical Museum.
Forest scientists ask that everyone, from the home gardener to the forest manager, help revive western white pine by planting it everywhere, even in non-forest environments such as our neighbourhood streets, parks and back yards.
White Pine in the American West: a Vanishing Species – Can We Save It?
Leon F. Neuenschwander, James W. Byler, Alan E. Harvey, Geral I. McDonald, Denis S. Ortiz, Harold L. Osborne, Gerry C, Snyder and Arthur Zack.(U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of Idaho, 1999).
The Idaho Forest Products Commission states on its website that there are more than twenty tree species growing in Idaho’s forests. Of the ten softwoods, eight are commercially important. Amongst those eight is the western white pine. The other species named by the IFPC as commercially valuable are the lodgepole pine, western hemlock, western larch, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, western red cedar and the grand fir. Just as the eastern white pine forests of New England and south-eastern Canada were decimated during the first half of the nineteenth-century, so the western white pine in Idaho suffered from westward euro-American migration. However, the problem for the western white pine was not only large scale logging but a more insidious kind of incidental damage. The evidence of ‘clear cut and slash’ from logging is unmissable. When large trees are cut down they leave a visible gap. But the indirect causes of decline such as the suppression of the forest fires and the introduction of blister rust are not so instantly recognisble. The western white pine’s evolution through natural selection is a factor that threatens its fate. Similar to the Australian eucalypts, it’s a tree that developed not just as a survivor of, but as a depender upon, cycles of fire and regrowth. Like the eucalypts, its own resin contributes to the fires on which it depends. As a capitalizer on the razing of competitor species, the white pine needs the shade-free space that fires create to germinate and grow. But European-American settlement and westward expansion brought a policy of suppressing fire. In crowded woodlands and dense shade the western white pine can’t propagate. Added to that change in environmental conditions, a batch of commercially grown western white pine saplings exported to Vancouver from France in 1910 brought to the American North-West a disease that had already devastated attempts to grow eastern white pine successfully in Europe: blister rust, a fungal disease that originated in Siberia and against which the North-American pines had no resistance. To make matters worse, blister rust also infects the currant bushes that colonize the burnt clearings where new white pines would grow. Mountain pine beetle has compounded the problem of disease, spreading blue stain fungus (lodgepole and ponderosa pines have also been badly affected by pine beetle). There are parallels with the current epidemic of ash dieback fungus (Chalara fraxinea) that is killing large numbers of British ash trees following the import of infected nursery ash trees from the Netherlands. Tree pandemics are as devastating as those that affect us. Ash dieback was first diagnosed in Britain in 2012. The U.K. estimates that it has around 80 million ash trees and the worst predictions concern trees in the south east where I live. Recent government statistics predict 75% of ash trees in Kent and Sussex and half of those in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk will be infected by 2018.
Native grasses at the Morrison Knudsen Nature Center.
A visit to the Morrison Knudsen Nature Center gives visitors to Boise a chance to see native wildflowers, trees, birds and fish. The stream walkway with a window cut into the bank of the river is a fabulous idea. Walking the route in the rain, we saw some beautiful cutthroat trout (Idaho’s state fish since 1990) as well as the larger rainbow trout that have taken over their habitat and interbred to form a hybrid species.
Cutthroat trout at the Morrison Knudsen Nature Center.
Other fish in the river include Chinook and Steelhead Salmon. The section of native grasses and wildflowers is designed to encourage the planting of indigenous species in domestic gardens, in the interest of working with a water-poor environment rather than against it. At only 4.6 acres,the MKNC isn’t large. However, it does a lot with what it has. Dave, our guide, made the afternoon very special. Here’s his YouTube video promoting the Center: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYr6wcRhwmI
‘You climb up on the Foothills and it’s a forest. It’s an urban forest.’
Brian Jorgenson, cited in Boise Weekly 2010.
We spent our last afternoon in Boise walking – still in a gentle rain – in the low foothills immediately above the city with our host Samantha Harvey, of Boise State University and author of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (Edinburgh UP, 2013). From there you can not only see to full effect the canopy of trees across the city but also get a glimpse of their value to ecological diversity in a city that promotes community forestry and seems really to care about sustainability. In an hour or so, we saw two red-tailed hawks and an osprey. That was a nice recompense for not going hiking in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, where there were too many vulnerable plants to be crushed underfoot given the weather conditions. The rain was soft and welcome. We’d travelled across and down into Idaho’s high desert from an even drier and higher Wyoming. Like most western cities, Boise needs water. I remembered the two women praying for rain at the Carey coffeehouse and didn’t complain.
Foothills above Boise with arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata). The hills were covered in this flower, which is also widely planted in gardens around the city. See Idaho Native Plant Society for native plants of the Boise area.
So ended a week’s urban-natural experience. I can’t thank my hosts in Boise enough for their kindness and hospitality. They made my visit possible and ensured that every minute was special. Is there a connection between tree canopies and umbrellas of human kindness? There’s a thought. Scientific work is only now moving beyond a very basic understanding of communications between plants to enquire into what we might call sympathy. I’m indebted to Boise State University and the College of Idaho, both of which are doing excellent work in bringing together the humanities and sciences. The Treasure Valley Food Cooperative not only contributed financially to the Idea of Nature Interdisciplinary Lecture Series, but also brings small food growers in the region together to market their produce. And Boise has fabulous farmers’ markets. I’ll end this post with big thanks to friends Jim and Paige McKusick and Debbie (D. J.) Lee, who joined us for the week, to Christine for her generosity, company, lunch, and a magnificent dinner, and to Rochelle’s husband Don for his company, cooking, and some conversations about sagebrush that we need to take further. I’m hoping to return to Idaho next year.
Photograph: Priscila Buschinelli and Art Exchange.
This is another brief post. I couldn’t resist writing something because I’m excited about the bio-art exhibition that is is about to open on my University’s campus. Plants are taking over the Art Exchange. Given the proximity of the wildflower meadows and the cork oaks that function as quiet war memorials (see my recent lecture in Boise, Idaho titled Getting to the Roots of the Matter: Trees and the Envirnnemtal Imagination in 19th Century Literature), I like the foregrounding of an ongoing enquiry into what constitutes ‘ecology’ and ‘environment.’ I wouldn’t be the first to strip those words down to their etymological origins, so I won’t do that here; for a compelling account, see Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature (Harvard, 2007). Well, the exhibit is Jevan Watkins Jones: Occupied with Plants. I’m glad that we’ve taken this interdisciplinary initiative. It says a lot about why I work where I do and what makes the everyday interesting. Jevan is an artist who has been working with our Biological Sciences department. The Wild Writing MA that I direct is also a collaboration with Bio Sciences. There’s a preview of the exhibition on Thursday evening, so I’ll write more soon. (Meanwhile, the wildflower meadows seem to be working as corridors for insects, animals and birds.)
A quick post while I write my next piece – wildflowers yesterday at my university, the University of Essex. Wild writing . . .
‘Our heated sidewalks and dressing room floors keep your toes toasty warm, even on the coldest of nights.’ (www.lavahotsprings.com).
‘Welcome to the sagebrush steppe’ (information board, roadside rest area near Atomic City).
‘We’re praying for rain. There was hardly any snow this year and the reservoirs are low.’ (women in a roadside cafe, Carey)
How to begin is the question. Crossing the Wyoming border into Idaho between Cokeville Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and Montpelier starts an extraordinary exploration of a landscape defined on the one hand by man’s capacity for self-destruction and on the other by a demonstration of the damage that nature can wreak. Nature wins. At least, so far. . .
Mountains and pastoral rangelands roll on either side of the Portneuf River valley, with its motel-studded, bijou spa towns of Soda Springs and Lava Hot Springs. Soda Springs has a geyser and naturally carbonated water, while Lava Hot Springs attracts bathers and pipes geothermally heated water into homes. Shoshone and Bannock Native Americans used these springs for centuries, before the ‘hot tubs’ were discovered by fur trappers and mountain men (working for the American Pacific Fur Company and the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies), then by pioneers and settlers. French-Canadian fur trappers named the river some time before 1821. The road follows part of the old Oregon and California trails, and is a goldmine of historical interest. Farmsteads and honeymoon hotels wear a comforting Sunday best of homeliness and hopefulness.
On the other hand, all these places obscure their own past: they were carved out of the sagebrush steppe and high desert that closes in on every side. The land is irrigated and its soil has been artificially enriched, while the Portneuf River, a tributary of the Snake, has been described as a ‘heavily used and anthropogenically altered system,’ in which nitrate discharges from cattle ranching along with other forms of use by the local populations ‘have produced a unique set of chemical characteristics associated with both the biological processes and the interactions with the local geology’ (Wikipedia, ‘The Pontneuf River’). The vast Snake River Basin stretches westward as far as the eye can see from Pocatello (population 54,777 in 2012), the third largest city in Idaho after Boise and Idaho Falls. But as we drive out beyond the smaller western town of Blackfoot into what seems a plain of desolation, other power sources are just over the horizon.
One of the first things you notice while driving through the sixty miles of arid, mile-high plain dominated by sagebrush and bunch-grass between Blackfoot and Arco (US-20W) is that the landscape is increasingly strewn with boulders of varying sizes, long ago hurled through the air by volcanoes. Cinder-black, these rocks are curiously warm to touch even on a cold April day: they bask in the radiation of the sun. Desiccated plants somehow flourish in the parched soil. Straight and flat, US-20W stretches into the distance flanked by the rhyolite lava dome of Big Southern Butte (300,000 years old and rising approx. 2500 ft.) to the left, and the smaller Middle and East Buttes to the right. Unsurprisingly, these massive structures remain important landmarks on this flat stretch of the eastern Snake River Plain. The route retraces the old covered wagon trail of Goodale’s Cutoff, a diversion from the Oregon Trail. In 1862 Tim Goodale led 338 wagons and almost 2000 people through here. Relations between Shoshone and the wagon trains had deteriorated along the regular, more southerly route and he promised a safer passage. A mountain man and long-time trader familiar with Native Americans and their trails, Goodale reopened a passage that had been tried ten years earlier by John Jeffrey and was already known as Jeffrey’s Cutoff. I imagine navigating without roads or maps, in wood-and-canvas wagons, and I’m reminded of Kelly Reichardt’s film of isolation and desperation in the eastern high desert of Oregon, Meek’s Cutoff (2010). Reichardt’s screenplay dramatises mountain man Stephen Meek’s attempt to lead a small group of pioneers by a shorter route than usual to the Willamette Valley. The conventions of regular wagon-train westerns are there: encounters with Indians, running out of water and finding only saline lakes, endless arid plains, sickness miles from anywhere, and a dysfunctional gender gap that tries to put women back in the wagons at the first hint of danger. But those commonplaces are confounded by an extended theme of communication breakdown. In his disastrous attempt to retain authority, Meek can only tell tall tales of fighting bears and Indians to a small boy (the one person he can hold spellbound). A lone Native American whom they find speaks a language that none of the group can understand, and nor can he comprehend them. For lack of interlocutors, he converses with the moon. Wary compassion on the part of one of the women comprises his only meaningful, non-violent opportunity for intercultural human exchange. A grey-green landscape dominates the film, withholding any features that can be translated into cartography by a human imagination. Furthermore, this third film in Reichardt’s Oregon trilogy uses cinematography and sound to convey the problem of trying to converse in the relentless, strong wind of a particular American west. Meek’s Cutoff may be set in Oregon, but it could easily be a story about where I’m standing. Back in our present world of comfortable car travel, Butte County Chamber of Commerce’s website has a History of Arco that provides an informative account of the traffic through and settlement of this part of Idaho.
After a while, a road sign marks a junction to the extraordinarily named Atomic City. With a population of 29 in the 2010 census (that’s an increase on the 25 entered in 2000), this tiny community a few hundred yards off the main highway has a bar, a store and a stock car racing stadium. But as the sign on US-20W warns, there’s no gas for sale. Deserted buildings lend the town a movie-set atmosphere. Tumbleweed blows along the street. The only sound is the wind. Atomic City changed its name from Midway (indicating its position between Blackfoot and Arco) when Butte County became the site for the National Reactor Testing Station. More than fifty different kinds of nuclear reactor were built in a nine-hundred-square-mile area, to develop atomic energy and a nuclear naval capacity. Atomic City never matched the size of Arco, a few miles along the road and the first town in the world to be lit by atomic power. But its dogged persistence in surviving matches that of the plants and animals of the prairie.
Back on the highway, larger signs announce the Idaho National Laboratories industrial and research complexes, the Department of Energy STAR Voluntary Protection Program (‘Visitors: all injuries are viewed as preventable’) and the Atomic Museum. I wanted to visit the museum, which is housed in the decommissioned reactor EBR1 that lit Arco. Unfortunately, it is closed at this time of the year. It’s now also a National Historic Landmark. Visitors have compared it with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for interest. Instead, we settled for a picnic at a rest area overlooking the dry bed of the Lost River . . . a water source which has disappeared, as its name implies.
Information boards around the rest area display a basic narrative of the potential for massive destruction as well as cheap power that is all around, while warning about the damage that can be done by introducing non-native plants and animals to what is a fragile and beautiful ecosystem. I like the final emphasis on the delicacy and value of life, and try to convince myself that it implies enough concern for the environment that we share to indicate a sense of hope. Arco, a few miles further along the road, with a population of 995 in 2010, still greets visitors with an advertisement for Pickle’s Place, ‘Home of the Atomic Burger.’ Well, we’d had lunch. . .
My mind skips to cinema again, but this time to Richard Lester’s Superman II (1980) in which arch-villain Lex Luther’s Kryptonian sidekicks turn up in the fictional small Idaho town of East Houston to wreak havoc with their heat-ray vision. A boy who leaps onto a horse to ride for help is killed by one of the intruders, without having the opportunity to ‘grow into a man.’ Aliens? Maybe that’s going too far . . . or could the controversial scene in a feel-good family movie and TV series allude to a more real and present danger? In 1961 the U.S.’s only known deaths directly attributable to a reactor accident took place in this area near Arco. A steam explosion at NRTS Reactor SL-1 initiated a partial core meltdown, and three operatives died. Books have been written about the incident, films have been made, official papers published, and there’s a video on YouTube.
Enough of atomic power and superheroes. Most people who travel this route also visit the 1,100 square-mile Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. Craters of the Moon is a spectacular demonstration of the violence that nature itself can wreak and another affirmation of the triumph of life. The entire area is a black-soiled, burned lava field resulting from a volcanic eruption 2000 years ago. In 1901 Israel Russell, of the U.S. Geological Survey, described the main formations as ‘cinder buttes,’ capturing their charred appearance. I’m interested in periodical journalism. Robert W. Limbert’s 1924 article for National Geographic that led to the creation of this National Monument is worth reading, courtesy of the Park Service website. The wind here was even stronger than on the atomic plain. There was no possibility of walking any meaningful distance. Again, the site is replete with a history that is more than geological and that puts in question the use of the term ‘wilderness’ on an information board (it’s a wild place, granted). Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, a member of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and later a trapper working for the American Fur Company, nearly died near here in 1831. Tim Goodale and his wagon train passed nearby. Shoshone are among the people who have moved through the area across centuries. The deeper ecology is particularly interesting, for plant, animal and bird life is diverse and flourishing. Antelope bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata) grows on the bare black earth while limber pine (Pinus flexilis) and juniper are the dominant trees. Islands of localized vegetation, called Kipukas, are home to some rare species. I saw a yellow-bellied marmot – a sub-species unique to Craters of the Moon – and a ground squirrel, possibly also of the kind found only locally. Spatter cones, lava tubes and cinder buttes give the place its name. One is called ‘Inferno Cone,’ perhaps alluding to Dante’s poem. The information sheets claim that Big Cinder Butte, at 700 feet above the plain, is one of the largest purely basaltic cinder cones in the world. We peer into spatter cones, while listening to the wind.
I am minded to consider whether we are arrogant to presume that we have the ultimate power to destroy or save this planet on which we live our precarious existence. Here, in an environment that evokes the burring marle from Milton’s Paradise Lost, life goes on . . . although it’s no place for humans.
The drive on to Boise takes us along river valleys and more plains, with pasturage on either side of the highway. Two women in a roadside coffee house in Carey say they are praying for rain, that there was little snow for the third winter running, and that the reservoirs are seriously low. Their calling for rain in what is a desert of the American West participates in a rite that stretches across cultures to origins in much earlier Native American societies. This is Hemingway country, too. I’m told that E.H. fished these streams lined with tall cottonwoods and vivid, sprouting willows. He eventually shot himself at his home built of cinder blocks designed to look like wood, in nearby Ketchum.
We see sandhill cranes in tilled fields, and wind up and then down through mountain passes until Boise comes into view, around a corner and just a couple of miles in front of us. It is like an oasis. A city of trees, as its name (from the French boisé) implies. Basque shepherds have settled here, relatively recently. The rain finally falls steadily, from a lead-gray sky. I’ll write about Boise hospitality, the Guernica Tree, red-tailed hawks, ospreys, and cutthroat trout in my next post.
A video recording of my lecture in Interdisciplinary Explorations: The Idea of Nature Public Lecture Series at Boise State University, Idaho is now available at Boise Scholarworks. Thanks to the sponsors for their generosity in making the series possible, to my colleagues at Boise State University and the College of Idaho for the warmth of their welcome last week, and to everyone who came to hear my talk.
Susan Oliver, writing from . . . 