In my wild urban garden

At the height of summer, Gerry Maguire Thompson is looking back across the year as he works on his forthcoming book Wilding the Urban Garden. In an exclusive extract for Elsewhere, he takes us back to the very beginning, and January in the garden…

Jan 1st 

A cold, bright day. I love watching the diverse life in this wilded garden in the city. It’s remarkable how many species are attracted here, mostly brought about by just getting out of nature’s way. 

Jan 2nd 

Mild weather today. A large bumble bee is visiting the flowers of Mahonia Japonica for nectar. At this time of year it’s got to be a queen – the only one who survives through the winter – needing nourishment to get through the cold months.

I’m sitting in the garden, just quietly observing; it becomes a kind of meditation. For a while it may seem like nothing is going on; but really there is never nothing happening. There’ll be an animal or a bird or an insect doing something, or a new plant that you hadn’t noticed before. And there’ll be sound; the longer you listen the more layers of sound you realise there are. The intricate web of nature is always there and is always amazing in its workings.

Observing this challenges me in how I evaluate what is significant and  worthy of attention. I realise more and more that the everyday and the mundane are in fact extraordinary: the amazingness of the commonplace. The seemingly prosaic or unglamorous species like the sparrow or earthworm or dandelion can reveal itself as charismatic when we give it our full attention. It makes you question the whole concept of what is conventionally charismatic or appealing

Sensing all this, for  this moment of time I suddenly feel that transcendent momentary sense: that nothing could be changed to make anything any better. This is the Tao of wildlife gardening.

Jan 5th 

The sparrows are out in force today, with fine weather after a day or two of rain. I never tire of watching them in the garden. There’s a large and growing flock who seem to never leave the place. All their needs are met here: food, protection, nest-sites, safe roosting – and lots of opportunities to bicker at one another. There is  immense joy to be found in this connexion with the inhabitants of our little wildlife haven and the intimate insights into their lives.

Jan 6th 

A woodmouse (Apodemus Sylvaticus: ‘one who goes abroad among the sylvan glades’) has been popping into the conservatory on the odd sunny day when we have the doors open to the outside, looking for something to eat. 

This little creature tends to look in each day for a couple of days, and is surprisingly undaunted by  our presence. It’s quite happy to move around our feet, picking up whatever bits fall from our plate, as long as we don’t move suddenly.

Jan 7th 

In the late afternoon I notice numbers of redwing gathering in the big ash tree just outside our garden gate; as the sun goes down more and more of them gather until there are well over a hundred. 

Jan 8th 

The redwings are still gathered in the ash tree in large  numbers, now  covering its whole canopy.

Jan 9th 

I look out first thing in the morning to check on the redwings: they’ve  gone. And so has every berry that was on every holly tree in the garden. They probably departed in the middle of the night.

Jan 12th 

The resident male blackbird is stabbing at windfall fruit from the apple tree that have remained intact on the ground into the winter. He’s starting to look glossy and his beak is turning a brighter colour: preparing to defend this very desirable territory, I imagine. 

Jan 14th 

The blackbird is now systematically eating ivy berries all day long; the visiting redwings didn’t take these. 

Jan 16th 

I’ve been watching the sparrows feeding today. It’s mysterious. They often leave a full feeder for hours, while at other times they pounce on it as soon as you put it out. I suppose it could be about the availability of other food sources, but at this time of year there isn’t an excess of other food around.

Jan 18th 

Taking the dog  out for bed-time walk and toiletries last night, I spotted a fox across the road. This one I recognised: a big old dog fox with a woolly face that makes him look like a bear. I’ve seen him around here for a long time, and I know where he lives – under an unused shed at the nearby allotments. He’s wary of people and dogs, which is probably how he got to be big and old. Tonight, as usual, he keeps his distance, then moves away.

Jan 20th 

Two bluetits are forming a promising relationship, hopping round one another on the apple tree when the sparrows are not in evidence – they seem to keep away from those slightly bigger and more assertive birds.

Jan 22nd 

I’m watching the sparrows as they finally settle down to roost in the holly tree as darkness falls. All has gone quiet. Then I notice one bird hop down to the lowest branch of the tree, do a poo, and hop back up to where it was before. Seems like this is sparrow etiquette: you just don’t poo on someone else’s head while they’re asleep. We’ve all been there.

Jan 23rd 

It’s particularly dark this evening, completely overcast. Taking the dog for her night-time outing we encounter a different fox – a lot younger and sleeker than Big Old Bear Fox – and a lot less wary of people and dogs. Has this one taken over the territory?

Jan 25th 

I’m delighted to hear  – from the dog-walking fraternity, who spot more wildlife than everyone else in this neighbourhood – that Big Old Bear Fox is still  around. Maybe he’s been pushed into an adjacent territory – or maybe he’s being tolerated by New Young Fox– maybe as a relative? Maybe even as proposed father to offspring?

Jan 26th 

Big Old Bear Fox and New Young Fox have been seen – together. So now I’m hoping they’re a couple. Sentimentally. I’d be delighted for Big Old Bear Fox to become a father once more…probably for the last time.

Jan 27th 

This evening I heard the first twilight mating-plus-territorial song of the year from the resident male blackbird: it’s beautiful and uplifting as ever. I know this bird is  probably saying, “This is my territory so don’t even think about coming into my space or you’ll seriously regret it” but I never fail to feel joy from listening to it, especially just before dawn and again at dusk. Who knows, perhaps the bird feels joy too: the joy of telling others to **** off? That’s a sentiment I too sometimes experience.

Jan 29th 

Big freeze. Now the ground is covered in hoar frost. Looking out my upstairs window at dawn, I see a dead fox in our next door neighbour’s garden, lying frozen and covered in white frost crystals. The neighbours let me into their garden. I’m pretty sure this is New Young Fox. She clearly didn’t die of hunger, because she’s in otherwise pristine condition. Incredibly beautiful and heartachingly sad.

Jan 31st 

Sun shining warmly today.  First male song-thrush of the year starts singing on the highest tip of the highest holly tree in the garden. Perching on the highest viewpoint in the vicinity – as thrushes are wont to do – and singing your heart out for a long time is a high-risk strategy, and numbers of thrushes are taken this way every year by sparrow-hawks or other birds of prey.

The sparrows are having their first splash of the year in the birdbath, always a joy to watch. They’re so exuberant and noisy that I can’t believe they’re not having a terrific time. My beloved sparrows continue to bring joy, so full of vitality and effervescent chattiness are they in any weather and any time of day. I love listening to them; they sound cheerful and optimistic to me, though I’m also perfectly aware that they’re mostly bitching, arguing, fighting and complaining to one another. I don’t care; cheerfulness, optimism and full-of-life-ness are still the effects their chatter has on me. Anthromorphique, moi? Certainement.

As January draws to close I’m reminded once again of the immense benefits urban wild gardening can bring: to the individual, to the local wildlife, to the cityscape, and indeed to the planet.

***

You can get free advance extracts from Gerry’s book “Wilding the Urban Garden” by signing up at urbanwildgarden.com
The book also has a Facebook page, at facebook.com/UrbanWildGarden 

Home Scar

By Rosie Sherwood:

Limpets can be found affixed to rocks on beaches up and down the country. When covered by the sea each limpet moves around in search of food, returning to their favourite spot when the tide goes out. Eventually, they wear away a patch of rock that fits the shape of their shells. This patch keeps the limpet alive: letting in oxygen while trapping seawater to keep the limpet from drying out. It is known as a home scar.

BIGBURY, DEVON (2020)

For over a year we’ve been bound more tightly to our homes than ever before. Covid-19 has kept us indoors. We’ve gone to work and to school in our homes. When we’ve left the confines of our walls we haven’t strayed far from the front door. Family and friends have been off limit; restaurants and shops closed; sporting stadiums and galleries empty. Through all this, home has been our one constant. 

When I first heard the phrase home scar, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside. My homes are etched into the very fibre of my being. Like the limpet, my home scars are my foundation, my safety net. They are the places from which I grew, perfectly fitted to allow in all I needed, and to keep me safe.

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

I grew up in London, living in the same house for the first 24 years of my life: No. 20 Laurier Rd. Two floors, 6 rooms, a garden. I was almost born in this building, who I am was born in this building. In my mind I can walk through this place with ease, a lifetime of personal history all visible at once. The stairs carpeted and uncarpeted. The room in which I had my first kiss. This room a bedroom, then a living room, then a different bedroom. The small kitchen in which I learnt to cook. Walls where doors used to be, doors where walls used to be. Games of fancy dress played across every room. Through it all the bannister at the top of the stairs is held together with blue wire and red string. 

We moved out years ago, but I still have the key. 

It is not only the buildings in which we live that create our home scars. The streets that surround them and all they contain are also part of our homes. I could take you to them now – I could walk you to George’s Shop, the local grocers with its delicious Cypriot poppy seed bread and loving owner, though the shop isn’t there anymore; I could walk you to Camden Market, though my Camden Market is long gone, transformed into a sanitised tourist trap; I could walk you across The Heath to the Hollow Tree, to my valley, to where I stayed out all night with friends. 

No. 20 Laurier Road, its orbiting streets and pockets of ancient woodland framed my early development, my teenage self, and the start of adulthood. It lies at the core of who I am, a perfectly fitted home scar. When we left, I didn’t leave entirely.

LODDISWELL WOOD, DEVON (2020)

From Laurier Rd my mother relocated to Devon and to No. 5 Veales Rd, Kingsbridge. In the 10 years she lived there I have come and gone, to Australia and back, to London and back. I was drawn in, pulled by the sea. A new home scar developed, carved by double fronted bay windows and an elegant porch, by my sister’s hen party and my mother’s 50th, by the family kitchen perfectly designed for every kind of cooking, by Christmases and birthdays, by woods and rivers and beaches, by a thousand everyday actions and the creation of art. I did not expect this place to impact me the way it did, for it to form a home scar. 

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

Last March, with the pandemic taking grip of the country, and an inevitable lockdown looming, I boarded a train from Paddington Station loaded down with fears, suitcases, bags and a backpack. I was meant to be spending six months in London doing a Fellowship in the foundry at Chelsea College of Art, but the college had closed it doors. I decided I would rather ride out the pandemic in Devon. Paddington Station was virtually empty and there was no one in my train carriage. I felt like I was fleeing from something, running from the danger posed by the densely populated city I had called home for the better part of my life. The eerie emptiness and silence felt like something out of a post-apocalyptic story. But when I stepped through the front door at Veales Rd I felt safe.  

PUBLIC FOOTPATH (2020)

In the months that followed I walked the public footpaths and lanes that span out from the front door. I fell more deeply in love with the land around Kingsbridge, with the estuary and the coastline. And I fell more deeply in love with the house itself. Like much of the nation, I baked, I read, I found ways to stay entertained and connected from the sofa. I became embedded within the walls and footpaths of home. New routines cut paths through the house, new walks took me to familiar destinations I had only driven to before, the steps and breaths taken becoming part of my body. Time was the only thing I had in abundance, so I used it to explore, deepening my home scar.

This March, after just over a decade, we moved out of Veales Rd and out of Devon. In the final weeks, I walked through the house gently touching the walls, memorising their contours and corners. I followed well-loved public footpaths capturing them with my camera. I said farewell to views and fallen trees I had come to treasure: the estuary bed that somehow captures heat from even the cold February sun; the blackened branches of trees that drop low over the water at high tide; lime kilns nestled seamlessly into the land around the water’s edge; the far-reaching views of gently curving hills and patchwork fields; the red earth turned over by a plough; the dappled light on the river slipping through the trees of Loddiswell Woods. I marked this home scar, tracing its edges.

RIVER AVON (2020)

KINGSBRIDGE ESTUARY (2020)

OUTSIDE WEST CHARLETON (2020)

I am lucky. To me home means something warm and safe and full of potential. Lockdown was painful, sad, and complicated, but it was contained by the refuge of my home. For many across the country, and across the world, home means something else entirely, it isn’t a refuge, it isn’t safe. For some it doesn’t exist at all; it’s been lost or taken away, all that remains an object, or a memory, or a hope. Covid-19 has thrown these stark realities into sharp relief. There are those for whom job losses or furlough made rent or mortgages impossible to pay, the future of their homes uncertain. For others being in lockdown within the walls of their home was a danger, emotionally and physically. 

Home should be a human right. Every person deserves a home scar shaped by happy memories, deserves the haven of walls and roof, of streets and land they know within their bones. No home scar should be misshapen or lost to abuse and violence, to bombs and wars, to evictions, job loss and disease. And yet so many are, too many people are left to walk through the world without a home, and without the knowledge of safety it brings. 

I have been blessed with two home scars so well defined that they keep me anchored within the world. As lockdown eases, as we step out of our homes ready to face a changed world, I am reminded that we need these perfectly fitted spaces into which we slot, the spaces from which we grew, and to which we can return, safe. We need them and we deserve them. Perhaps at this precipice of a new normal, this moment with such potential for change, we could come together to take the first steps in ensuring no one has to grow up or live without a home scar.

ESTUARY SKY (2020)

***

Rosie Sherwood is an artist, writer, curator and scholar. Her interdisciplinary practise incorporates photography, sculpture, book art and text. Sherwood founded As Yet Untitled in 2012, specialising in limited edition book art and events. From 2017-2020 she was Creative Director of turn the page Artists Book Fair and Symposium. In 2018 Sherwood was a finalist in the National Sculpture Prize, for which her sculpture, Akin, was installed at Broomhill Sculpture Gardens. Sherwood has been published on a range of subjects and has work in national and international collections including Tate, The British Library and the National Libraries of Victoria and Queensland, Australia.

Sherwood’s current creative research, An Ever Moving Now, is an exploration of wildness, rewilding, and our relationship with nature. The project addresses experiences and sensations of being embedded in nature, and connects these to the broader concepts of environmental conservation. To create the work, Sherwood moves between immersive, multi-day hikes, to developing ideas in her studio, an interplay that enables conversation between the work and the land. To date the project has been supported by numerous sponsors and organisations including the Marine Institute at Plymouth University.

Before Covid-19 Sherwood had begun a Fellowship at the Chelsea College of Art Foundry. This position will resume when it is safe to do so.

Bearing Witness

Barney Sidler and Zeev Borger

By Paul Scraton:

On a soft summer evening in Weimar we walk through the traffic-free streets of the historic city centre, this monument to German culture with its theatres and museums, palaces and music schools, town of humanism and the Enlightenment. In the square where Goethe and Schiller stand in front of the theatre they look down upon a typical summer scene, as young people gather at their feet to drink beer while football matches are screened to the terraces of cafes and restaurants as, in the beer garden over in the corner, a live concert is about to start.

Throughout the city there are signs that it is awakening from the pandemic. There are posters for concerts and plays, puppet shows and readings, exhibitions and fairs. Bach and Liszt. Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm. Gropius and Kandinsky. Outside Goethe’s old illustration studio, paintings hang beneath the windows of an art school while across the way music drifts out from the rehearsal rooms of the university.

This is Weimar? What does the name Weimar mean to you? A small town in Germany made great through art and words and music. A place that gave us the Bauhaus and named the democratic republic that would emerge from the devastation of the First World War battlefields. And yet, north of the centre, as we walk up towards the railway station from the New Museum, a collection of faces remind us of the other side of Weimar’s story. That this is a town that played host to some of the heights of German culture and also, up there on the hillside, some of its deepest depths. 

Because Weimar is also Buchenwald, the concentration camp on the Ettersberg that was opened in 1937 by the Nazis and would claim the lives of more than 56,000 who were held there. The bus that takes you from the town to the camp follows what became known as the ‘Blood Road’ even while the camp was in existence. If you want to walk, there is another route, a ten-kilometre trail that starts at the railway station and follows the route of the Buchenwald Railway, along which many of the inmates were taken to the camp.

Petro Mischtschuk

The stories of Buchenwald are part of the story of Weimar, and are tied to the city via the Blood Road and the old railway tracks. Within the city itself we discover stories of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Liszt and Strauss and Wieland and Hummel and all the other greats who lived and worked here. They have their museums and their exhibits, and they give their names to streets, schools and squares. And since 2019 they have had some company, joined along Weimar’s streets by the faces of some other, less well-known names.

Pavel Tichomirow
Andrej Moisejenko
Chaim Bukszpan
Vasile Nußbaum
Heinrich Rotmensch
Naftali Fürst
Alina Dabrowska
Petro Mischtschuk
Ottomar Rothmann
Gilberto Salmoni
Barney Sidler
Boris Romantschenko
Zeev Borger
Alojzy Maciak
Aleksandr Bytschok
Magda Brown
Eva Fahidi-Pusztai
Günter Pappenheim
Josef Falkash
Raymond Renaud
Tadeusz Kowalski
Zbigniew Pec

These men and women are just some of the more than a quarter of a million people who passed through Buchenwald or its subcamps. They were photographed by the Weimar artist Thomas Müller for Die Zeugen (The Witnesses), an exhibition that can be found in the north of Weimar between the New Museum and the station. The aim of this exhibition is relatively clear to all who emerge from the station on their walk down into town. It is to make this part of history visible and, in the words of the exhibition organisers, to ‘invite the people of Weimar and their guests to consciously pause for a minute.’

The twenty-two faces that make up the exhibition are of twenty-two survivors of the camps. They were brought to Buchenwald from Poland, Hungary, France, Ukraine, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belarus and elsewhere in Germany. They were held for being Jewish or as political prisoners or for forced labour. By the time Müller took their pictures, they were old. In the meantime, since the exhibition was opened in April 2019, at least one of their number has passed away.

Alojzy Maciak

These are people who have been to Weimar. They were taken to the hillside where Goethe once walked, held in a camp that had been cleared from the forest. They are the witnesses to what was done in the name of Germany within sight of this symbol of German culture. And with these photographs, the town recognises them as it does its other sons and daughters. In Weimar, there are many different stories to be told and all shall have their say. All need to be heard.

On a soft summer evening we walk through Weimar. Twenty-two faces. Most are still with us to bear witness, to tell us what happened behind those gates and the barbed wire fences. Looking at them now, it is sad to think that we do not have much time left. All too soon there will be no one left to remember, at the very time nationalism is on the rise across the continent and the history of what happened in places like Buchenwald is beginning to be rewritten. In this atmosphere, as we slowly lose those who can tell us what happened in the camps, it is up to the rest of us to continue the work of remembering. Of how we got from Weimar to Buchenwald, from one end of the Blood Road to the other. The names of the victims and what was done to them, and those who survived to give us their testimony. We need to keep listening and we need to keep speaking their truth.  

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

Koşuk of the Konik, a poem by Alistair Noon

The koniks don’t neigh but skitter and dodge
across the reclaimed sewage park,
their part of the sand’s post-glacial splodge
our ancestors mapped as the Brandenburg Mark,

a wire-ringed paddock we've left these guys,
who stand aloof as the ninja flies
land on their feet, their black disguise
nothing for horses’ eyes to mark.

Although their skins are tones of grey,
one’s chromosomes came out all bay,
but muted shades will still convey
mutated grace as well as Franz Marc.

Rainclouds resemble their sagging paunches:
a signal out of their genome launches
pale lightning down their well-honed haunches
to give the koniks their common birthmark.

They look as if they’ve just concurred,
one homely and harmonious herd
unbothered by the fall of a merd
to earth that reels of steel wire mark,

quite unlike Rilke's bar-gazing panther,
or keepers shut in with a Leopard panzer:
they seem to be more of a coelcanth, a
pebble let go at the tidal mark.

The paddock does without a padlock:
the konik needs no clothes or clock,
just grass and a trough. The fence is a shock,
a neural scar its defining mark.

This world is small, so why think big?
Under its solemn black legal wig,
the equine head will study a twig
and leave a meticulous dental mark.

***

Alistair Noon's poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. Concert at a Railway Station (2018), his translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was reviewed in the TLS. ‘Translocal Underground’, a short film about him by filmmaker Paul Cooke, appeared in 2018. He's lived in Berlin since the early 90s.

A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

The Ruins

By Ben Tufnell:

Traveling north, the vast skies, marshes and glittering lakes of Corrientes province slowly give way to endless forest. There are winding red rivers and rule-straight logging roads and, as the horizon disappears, it becomes almost impossible to orient oneself. What towns there are resemble ribbons festooned along the edges of the highways.

Here, it is said, deep in the forest, the author Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) slowly lost his mind. Here, you are a long way from Buenos Aires or Montevideo and everything is tenuous. Life is fragile. Quiroga loved the jungle but understood that his presence there was at best contingent. In brilliant stories such as ‘Drifting’ (1912) and ‘The Dead Man’ (1920) he wrote of a constant and unceasing conflict between man and nature. He wrote of suffering, of life right at the edge of things. After his first wife committed suicide by taking poison and his second wife left him, Quiroga reportedly filled his empty swimming pool with snakes. I imagine him sitting on the veranda of the wooden house he has built with his own hands, in the middle of the forest, contemplating that febrile spectacle, a boiling, writhing mass of serpents.

Quiroga later committed suicide himself. Both his children killed themselves. These facts are like scenes from his own fiction. The river runs as red as blood, there are bird-eating spiders in the trees and there are hundreds of snakes in the swimming pool. 

Travelling north, the air grows hotter and more humid. We took Ruta 12 north from Posadas to one of the most spectacular places in South America, the Iguazu Falls. The Rio Parana and the Rio Iguazu and the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all converge here. The jungle here is improbably dense, excessively verdant, the air heavy with moisture and filled with the fluttering of masses of huge and kaleidoscopically coloured butterflies. Capuchin monkeys laugh hysterically in the forest canopy. The falls themselves are vast, overwhelmingly so. The roar of the waters is deafening.

This is Misiones province. In the seventeenth century it was one of the strongholds of the Jesuit faith in South America. At their peak the Jesuits had twelve major missions scattered across the region, each with populations in the thousands. They were eventually expelled from Argentina in 1767 and, hidden by the jungle, their cities succumbed, as all things must, to decay. Now, the very idea of the missions seems not only foolhardy but inherently doomed. The landscape ensured that the project was shadowed with failure from the very moment of its first imagining.

The biggest ruins are at San Ignacio, a few hours south of Iguazu, and they are justly famous, a must-see for any visitor to the region. Well-cleared and restored, one can wander through what must once have been a considerable town. There are the remains of many houses. There are information panels about life in the mission. And one can wander through the nave of the huge red sandstone church, now open to the sky, and admire the fig, olive, orange and lemon trees that continue to flourish amidst the crumbling stones.

But while the ruins of San Ignacio are the biggest and best maintained, a few miles south, down a red dirt track leading into the forest, we discovered a site that, although much smaller, was, in many ways, more affecting, and which seemed somehow to better illuminate the conflict between man and nature which so preoccupied Quiroga. 

The Santa Luisa Mission was founded in 1633 and, alongside the Jesuit brothers, was home to some two thousand Guarani Indians. Deserted in the eighteenth century it was soon overrun by the jungle and forgotten. 

This is a place in flux, where the principle of entropy is made visible. The site had been cleared, mostly, not long before our visit, and there is even a small (and empty) visitor centre, but the jungle was already reasserting itself. One of the first things we saw were the roots of a tree curling through the stones of an ancient wall and breaking it apart in imperceptible slow motion.

The site has been cleared, revealing its profound dereliction, but nothing has been reconstructed. A few fragile walls have been secured with wooden scaffolds but nothing more. And because of this it is extraordinarily evocative. The main square and the broken spine of the church are mostly clear of forest but everywhere else is doubtful. In comparison, San Ignacio seems too tidy. Santa Luisa,  a ruined city in the middle of the jungle, could be a setting for a tale by Lovecraft or Borges (and of course the blind librarian was much in my mind during my travels in his country). Creepers cover every surface, gripping and pulling. There is incredible heat and humidity and a very strange kind of stillness. The forest was quiet, as if waiting.

Away from the main square everything is overgrown, is being overgrown. Santa Luisa is a place simultaneously taken from the jungle and being reclaimed by the jungle. The cracks widen. Huge flowers bloom, briefly. Things are drifting back into the entropic zone. It is impossible to tell where the old Jesuit mission ends and the jungle begins. I didn’t – couldn’t – go far enough into the undergrowth to determine that precise border. Thick spider’s webs were stretched between the trees and I turned back when I noticed the husks of some huge and grotesque looking insects, as big as my hands, clinging to the underside of a branch that barred my passage.

The old cemetery is the eeriest part of the site.  The locals continued to use it until the 1960s and it is dense with graves, tombs, and even grand crypts, all now  derelict. Dragon’s Teeth forces up through the graves. The once ornate tombs are broken open. The beautiful ironwork and stone carvings are now embellished with gripping tendrils of the very foliage they were meant to imitate. A steady humming of insects fills the air. Wasps nest in crypts filled with impenetrable shadows and dusted webs. Broken coffins are glimpsed through the wrought gates of the big family mausoleums, the heavy wooden doors long since rotted away. Flowers, creepers, vines cover every wall. Even in the bright sunlight, it is an unnerving spectacle. An old skull, missing its jawbone, dislodged by the ongoing collapse, had rolled from one decrepit sanctuary and lay in my path. 

I wondered what it must have been like for the priests, their pale European skin blistered by the unceasing glare of the sun. How did they cope with the always encroaching darkness of the forest, the spiders and snakes concealed within every shadow, the overwhelming heat and humidity? How did they keep faith when His work seemed to be constantly undoing their best efforts?

It was clear to me that if the caretakers stopped maintaining the square and the broken church, it would be only moments before the jungle completely enclosed and obliterated the site, breaking down the ruins and pulling them back into the red earth.

We were not there long. We looked around together and then I wandered off to the edge of the site, where it was difficult to tell if I was still in the site. When I looked back I saw that C had crossed the square and was making her way back down the track towards the car. She passed out of sight and I was alone. There was silence. Or rather there wasn’t silence, for the forest is always busy, but there was a focussing. I became overwhelmed by my thoughts; I was aware of simultaneous registers of time (a sensation not unlike a fissure opening at what Robert Smithson once called ‘the cracking limits of the brain’). Undoubtedly, I was affected by the heat, the long drive, the ruination, the tropical Gothic of the cemetery, the pool of snakes, the blood red river, the huge waterfalls and the vast whirlpool that lies at their base. Standing there, a few minutes seemed to stretch like hours, years. I felt I could almost see the forest creeping forward, tightening its grip on the shattered brickwork, bright flowers like fresh wounds blooming and fading.

I saw that I was looking down into an open tomb. The sunlight at my back was so bright and the contrast with the inky darkness inside so extreme that there was an astonishing contrast, so that the shadows within that grim enclosure seemed to be solid. And I had the idea that I was looking through a point, a punctum, in its surface. I thought then of the Aleph, described by Carlos Argentino in Borges’s account as ‘the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending…’ For it seemed to me I could then see before me the unfolding of this place over time, from primordial swamp, filled with ferns, mosses and small crawling things, to the gradual encroachment of the forest and the eventual arrival of the missionaries (I saw their terrified passage deep into the unknown interior of dessicated deserts, fugal marshes and evil forests) and even the birth and death of the lizards, insects and trees, all those things that were here and now. 

The Aleph was not an opening. Carlos Argentino himself described it as ‘a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance.’ He attempted the impossible task of writing down what he saw:

‘At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.’ 

This mysterious object was located in the basement of an old house in Garay Street in Buenos Aires, now long vanished. We had been there, of course, and to Borges’s house too, hoping to discover some vague trace but finding, inevitably, nothing.

But now, in the jungle amidst the ruins, staring into that dark tomb, I had, just for the most fleeting moment, a glimpse of the Aleph (or of a kind of Aleph, for Borges himself said that he thought the one in Buenos Aires was a false one, and that there might be many). It was gone as soon as it was present. And then the darkness was only darkness again. I walked slowly onwards, wading through a warm viscous liquid: time itself. I saw human activity, the jungle, each assimilating the other again and again, not erasing the past but absorbing it. Endless and infinite cycles.

Something large moved in the forest. I had the weird notion that if I saw what it was, my reason would give way, would crack; for I fully expected a great and ancient lizard to come lumbering out of the undergrowth. Shuddering, I quickly made my way back through the trees to the main square, where the full sun had now attained an infernal intensity. Huge birds (or were they pterodactyls?) flapped wearily into the sky from the tops of some of the trees. I passed through the crumbling gateway and down the dirt track, past the empty information centre and back to the car, where C was waiting. Behind me the whole site shimmered in the heat, like a reflection in oil, unsteady. Already I was wondering if I had dreamt it.

I started the car in silence, drove us back along the track onto Ruta 12, and we headed north.

***

Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on art forms that engage with landscape and the environment. His most recent book is In Land: Writings About Land Art And Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019).

The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here. 

A Walk in the Mind

Photo by Rosie Dolan

By Heather Laird:

Third wave. My sister sends me a photo. 'Guess where?'. A muddy track. Two deep patterned lines made by tractor tyres. Straight initially and then a gentle bend. A slope down to the left and a low bank to the right. Twilight with orange light stark against black trees, one gloriously full, the others stunted or mere saplings. Light reflecting from a puddle. A nowhere, anywhere, for most. But not for me.

By the drain in the front yard and on towards the iron gate. In wellies of course. Past where the well once was on the right. My mother fetched water here when she first married into this Roscommon farm. Even when pregnant. The first of eight born nine months after the wedding. Reluctant to tell my father’s mother, the matriarch. There was no problem with dates, but perhaps a bit quick. Should one get the hang of it so soon? Eight children in quick succession in a house that my father grew up in as an only child. A sister’s too early birth brought on by a cow’s kick to my grandmother’s stomach. Not baptised but someone once told me that my grandfather and a neighbour buried her at night in a cardboard box in a local graveyard. Through the gate and on towards the stone drinking trough. Hours of fun while young watching the brother closest to me in age watch pond skaters walk on water. No, “watching” is too passive. There were experiments too, and I a willing assistant. A speck of dirt gently dropped on a skater, gradually increasing the weight to gauge the point at which its water-repellent feet would penetrate the surface, the point at which it would sink under its burden. Within sight of where the photo was taken and now I’m there. Pause briefly and breath. Wrong time of the year for primroses but the edge of the bank will burst with them in Spring. Then follow the track, but walk on the grass between the lines. Around the bend and out of the photo. 

Standing now where the same brother and I fell with the bales when the trailer tipped over. Remember exhilaration rather than pain so our landing must have been soft. Grab hold of a bale and ride it down if the load goes, we had been told. But if it had tipped the other way, it might have been different, over a hedge and down a hill, further to go. Up to the new hayshed. Heard a dog bark here once, from deep in the bales. Must have fallen through one of the gaps we were always warned about. Ran home sobbing. Farms are unsentimental places so was surprised that my father came back with me so quickly, pulling bale after bale away, curses more frequent with each one. So far down. I had time to make plans. What I would call the dog. Our future life together. Once released, we barely saw her. A flash of tawny-coloured hair and she was gone. From here, on out to the bog field. The edge of the farm. The thick brown black water in the drain. I think another brother fell in here once. One of the older ones I hardly knew growing up. 

Take another route back. Is this the spot where my father and eldest brother startled a hare and then crouched down in the grass to see if she would return, panting, “from whence at first she flew”? Or maybe it’s just where I saw a hare, much later. Cross wet fields, picking my steps to avoid the worst of the mud, until I come to the small hill topped with the fairy fort. Take in the view. My home town. The Shannon. Down the slope that is now planted with trees, through a gap and along a narrow path with a high bank to the right. We had a swing here once. Not a to and fro one. Circular. A stick tied in the middle by a rope to the branch of a tree on the bank. There was a knack to it. Putting too much weight on one side of the stick sent the other side up in the air. Once on, you reversed back up the bank as far as you could go and pushed off at an angle so that you swung out over the drop to the left of the path and back in to the other side of the tree. A horse. That’s what I pretended. Taking all the jumps. Winning the race. Go on Champion! You can do it, Beauty! 

Down a steep path to the back yard past where the dung hill was on the left. The old milking parlour is still here but now used for storage. An empty space where the creamery cans were kept. Cow manure, cheno unction and milk. The smells of childhood and home. And of my father’s jumpers. Once when travelling in Bavaria in my early twenties, I climbed over a fence into a field to sniff a cow pat. I was performing of course, doing mad stuff for others to see, but it was real – my pull to it. The day of my father’s funeral, I snuck away from the busy farmhouse and stood alone for a while in this yard with my eyes tightly shut, mooring myself. “Out beyond the iron gate on the way up to the new hayshed,” I message my sister.

***

Heather Laird is a lecturer in English at University College Cork. She was raised on a farm in Co. Roscommon, Ireland. She is the author of a number of scholarly publications, including Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920 (2005) and Commemoration (2018). She is an editor of Síreacht: Longings for another Ireland, a series of short, topical and provocative texts that critique received wisdom and explore the potential of ideas commonly dismissed as utopian.

Rosie Dolan, née Laird, is a hotelier and part-time photographer based in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim, Ireland.