Shiva

Today is yellow where yesterday was green. The butter yellow of the aspen catches my eye. The trees are still vital, but here and there the green is stripped away, revealing the yellow underneath. There is no appreciable difference between the length of light yesterday and today. No difference in temperature that I can feel. Yet all the trees are showing a little yellow; some a lot. Maybe tomorrow the maples will be red.

The aspen leaf between my fingers trembles just as it did on the tree. The aspens, still in full leaf, though yellow, are seething in the wind, each leaf rattling on its stem, making a noise like the gentle soughing of waves onto a strand. The tall birches all droop away from the wind. Maples shed their leaves in their own yellow shadow - falling to windward in a grounded double-image of their upward limbs. Leaves drift down in parabolas to land against the paths, yellow on yellow.
The oaks stand against all this, neither much yellowing, swaying nor dropping leaves.

There's a hierarchy of trees which we have imposed. In a woodland there's none of that. I've written before of Shiva (I don't mean the Shiva the god, the destroyer, the bringer of change; though who knows? but Vandana Shiva the Indian physicist and environmental activist) going to the woods to learn of democracy.

What a weasel word democracy has become, though I malign weasels. Self government is what Shiva is really learning from the woods, not a hierarchical trickle down materialism delivered by self-seeking manipulators purporting to represent something they call the people.

In a wood, there's balance in the active presence of large numbers of interdependent species; none with greater significance than any other. Aspen leaves and oak leaves alike fall to the forest floor and are pulled down (even in this thin soil) by tribes of earthworms. The woodpecker holes shelter other, smaller birds too. The fungal infestation Ascocalyx abietina has no favourites among the pines it attacks.

Here at Saari, the tree surgeons are in.
Years ago I climbed trees with all the shackles, ropes and harnesses I could muster to give first aid to living broken boughs. It's not a foolproof method of getting up and especially down a tall tree. If you'd ever seen a twelve stone apprentice stuck dangling because of a faulty running knot - and with him two heavy rescuers also stuck for the same reason, and a ground crew in helpless laughter, you'd know the same.
But tree surgery has moved on. Here, there's a woman, a men and a cherry picker. And they are pruning the oaks. Only the oaks; of dead limbs.

The value we place on trees, the ranking, that imposed hierarchy, is nearly always financial. The timber will be valuable. So birch is worth less than oak because it's not much use except for firewood; oak is sought after by boat builders and cabinet makers. There's a small island of oaks south of here that was owned by a former Swedish king for building his naval fleets. People, commoners, were kept away from valuable assets (except to cut and haul the trees; ever met a king who did his own work?)

So on the cherry picker basket, thirty feet up, the surgeon is delicately cutting wood with a small chainsaw, as delicate as if with a scalpel. It's not only the oaks that have dead limbs, but the maples too. In a parkland situation like this (built landscape: to resemble savannah with browsing deer where sheep may safely graze for the extremely wealthy)these trees will never be felled for money. They are planting the next controlled and managed generation underneath them; these oaks have become valuable aesthetically (as a former display of wealth, but primarily now for the eye to gaze upon).

It's the aesthetics of the situation that demand the oaks be trimmed, more than the dangers of falling limbs. Maples pose no such threat and are left untrimmed. The tidy civic mind is at work: partial death is unsightly. And let us put the next generation of oaks where it'll be most appealing.
Gardening with trees has long been practiced; no different from where the roses go.

The woods, however provide something else. Vanadana Shiva may have held philosophical-political conversations with herself in woods. I go to the woods to experience that pleasure of controlled anarchy a woodland brings. Where the fox depends on the mouse, the mouse on the seed, the seed on the pollinating bee and wasp. Where the dead birch leans into the living pine and the bracket fungus slowly reverts to the horizontal as the tree slowly leans in death.

The delight of living, as the other Shiva knew full well, is the awareness of death.
There's no implication of disorder in anarchy; the order of woodlands is neither random nor chaotic, and never destructive. The order of woodlands is self-generative.
I go to the woods because they do not need me.