Living memory

Katrina Porteous on a tree she’s known since she was a girl

There is an oak tree, Quercus Robur, which I have known for nearly my whole life. It stands in my late parents’ garden, higher than their house, an ancient, bifurcated grey trunk, split from the base, its crazy mass of zigzag branches underpinning a glorious round green crown. Now bound in dark ivy and sunk waist-deep in an overgrown beech hedge, the tree seethes with life. There are networks and circuits within it that I will never know, and plenty that I do, for it is home to multitudes, from the blackbirds that sing from it, spring after spring, to shining emerald beetles, mysterious, papery moths, thread-legged spiders, the tiny ethereal bats that flit round it at dusk; and the raucous jackdaws and magpies which strut in its shade, dibbling the mossy lawn beneath it for leatherjackets, or to bury acorns. Branching under the earth, its roots’ secret roadways, wide as its crown, transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, invisibly connecting countless more species in a hidden mycorrhizal network that leaves its signature in fairy-rings of fungi over the lawn.

I do not know how old the tree is. At a guess, at least a couple of hundred years. The house and those around it were built in the late 1950s and early 60s, and when we moved there nearly 60 years ago, a neighbour, then in her 90s, regaled us with childhood stories about playing in the little burn at the bottom of our garden, then a field. The oak tree, marking the field boundary, was already fully mature. Looking back at those stories now I measure the scale of memory in that tree. The tiny village our neighbour knew, and the world to which it connected, where news was delivered through green lanes by horse and cart, are no longer recognisable; but the tree stands where it always did, its fractal branches holding the ‘living memory’, passed on from neighbour to child, now spanning the best part of a century and a half.