Two Oaks – Dunglass April 3, 2007
Posted by Giles in : Essays , add a commentTwo oaks grow in opposition and complement, like parent and child. One old, the other with only four or five years’ of ringed growth. The older started and continued its life on the shelving sandstone sediments, perhaps unfurling its first shoots from the acorn at the same time as the masons arrived to lay the foundation stones for the nearby collegiate church.
Two oaks growing in proximity and distance, separated by time and the river’s constant flow. They grow on either side of a gentle valley, the older looking east, the younger west.
The older grips the precarious ledge, worn by the water’s erosive power through millennia. Its roots are like the clutching fingers of a desperate hand, searching for stability. A rock-climber, a survivor. It’s as if the massive form of this tenacious quercus has been liquid, the dendritic mass oozing over the stone and then somehow solidifying just before spilling over the edge. There’s no exact point where root stops and trunk begins. Source and existence having merged.
In the clearing across the river, the younger’s circumstance and growth are less complex, as if its start in life were more promising. Its sapling trunk is relatively straight; its roots tap the darker, softer soil. There is, as yet, only a mere hint of difficulty.
The older’s life is seen as a story in its limbs, branches, trunk. Malnourished, bent by a relentless sea wind, twisted this way and that. Even if its DNA were ‘perfect’ its growing place proved a challenge. It cannot now be challenged or altered. It is in its place. As much part of this locus as all the other components which form the uniqueness of this place.
Perhaps its putative offspring will have an easier course. Perhaps the wind will be kinder, less persistent and biting. Perhaps the soil will prove more nourishing; and flood and river will not pull at its roots.
Here, there’s already symbiosis. Oak galls attest to the birthing place of wasps uniquely adapted to this particular ecological niche.
The parent supports more life. A whole ecosystem of mosses, lichens, boring insects, beetles, birds, bacteria, epiphytes…It’s a blessing and a burden of age. It has found and created its place, despite its difficulties and imperfections.
Its roots now bind the sediments, stabilising and complete, as all the while the younger’s taproot searches the soil.