Bog Myrtle & Peat

The storm pushed down a crab apple tree on my boundary fence. No real harm was done, but the trunk was tilted to forty five degrees and the tip of the branches trailed into my neighbour’s silage field. It’s my tree and it would have bounced back from the derailment, but to leave it there without comment or amendment would signal to my neighbour that I didn’t care. And with the best and lightest will in the world, he might easily have taken the problem into his own hands – he might have cut the whole thing up and chucked it back for me to gather. So as a compromise, I went to tidy the slight mess and demonstrate that I had taken the tiny matter seriously. 

Perhaps this sounds like quite a fuss to make over a single tree, but I particularly love crab apple trees – and recent research has shown that Galloway is a powerful refuge for the pure native variety of this species. Crab apples are often genetically mudded with domesticated strains of apple trees, and almost all the crab apple trees you’ll see in the British countryside are some kind of hybrid variety. In Galloway, a DNA study has shown that we have an unusually high percentage of pure, indigenous trees – and the individual tree blown down in the storm provided one of the samples for this study. My tree (and others tested on land I rent) came back as pure as it’s possible for a crab apple tree to be, so it was disappointing to find that it had almost immediately fallen over.

Despite the genetic badge of honour conferred on “my” samples, it seems that purity is no guarantee of physical similarity. The three trees I had tested as part of this study are crazily different in appearance. One is squat and shrubby as a hawthorn with leaves like circular coins. It never seems to produce apples, but its neighbour does – although these are rarely bigger than thumbnails. The tree which blew over is tall and many-stemmed – it has a rich, characteristically “crabby” leaf shape and produces a wealth of appallingly sour fruit – but its bark and aspect resemble bitter chimneys of blackness like an irruption of slaebushes. Each one of these trees grows on very different soils in locations which bear no comparison – and perhaps that’s a clear example of genotypes and phenotypes.

I’ve never cut a crab apple tree before, and it was hard to break through the dense, stringy canopy of twigs to find the meat inside. I only wanted to take one central beam of timber to relieve the weight of the lean and spray some sawdust around – but this very old tree was tangled with a rigging of stems. After I had made some exploratory cuts, I tried to pull the brash away and found it was impossibly bound and interwoven with other stems. Some of the twigs were lithe and flexible as ropes – twenty feet long, and yet never more than half an inch thick. It was like trying to cut through a heap of fishing nets, until at last the limbs themselves were revealed in black bark and mats of lichen which frilled in every churn and shade of duckegg blue.

The saw struck wood and showered me with toffee-coloured shatterings; the innards were soapy and sagging with sap so that when I later tried used a chisel to carve a shape into a section of end-grain, the compression glistened like wet fabric. At an exhibition of woodcut prints by Albrecht Dürer in Manchester, I was impressed by the fact that most of his blocks were apple or pear wood. Elsewhere, I’ve seen box recommended for carving – but only because the grain is so tight and dense. The problem with box is that you never get much of it, and anything like a reasonably sized block needs to be made up by sticking several pieces together. Perhaps applewood is easier, so I kept the heart of this tree to let it dry for an experiment. 

I later walked the donkey down to see the wreckage. He could have helped to bring the timber home, but I haven’t found panniers for him yet and he really just came along for the banter. He’s an oddly curious beast, and while he hates to be left out, he’s also disgusted by any suggestion that I’m patronising him. I walked him up to the remains of the tree and was surprised to find that he ate a considerable amount of the bark, the twigs and the wood itself. I added these to the list of extraordinary and generally inedible things he’s eaten so far – a list which includes rushes, a section of seizel rope and the first fifteen pages of a novel by Pío Baroja. Baroja has become hard to find, so I was upset about that. 

I hope that this tree will adapt to its new life at a jaunty angle. Perhaps it’s still smarting from the saw, but time will hopefully reinforce a sense that a robust tidy-up is better than complete destruction. As an insurance policy, I will gather a bucket of crab apples in the autumn and extract the seed for germination.