Rice

Augustin Ehrensvärd was probably more abreast of current affairs than he was of scientific nomenclature. He will have had the news, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that there were experiments underway by settlers in New England. This I've already written about: the experiments were to grow rice in north America.

Ehrensvärd wrote to Linnaeus with his own plan for rice-growing on his Saari estate in Finland. Linnaeus replied with enthusiasm.

What Ehrensvärd perhaps did not know was that the New England settlers must have known of the Ojibwa people of the Great Lake district. One of the Ojibwas' food staples was wild rice, which they harvested from canoes with sticks, since it grew and still grows in the water there. They had surpluses which they traded. Their food, like most earlier peoples, was about more than satisfying hunger: it had and still has to do with community and tradition. Traded rice must have reached the settlers - though colonists or imperialists (or sometimes refugees) might describe them more accurately.

The rice the Ojibwa people harvest now as then grows naturally in both northern America and in China. Its botanic name is Zizania aquatica.
Cultivated rice is Oryza sativa. The two plants are distant relatives, but of distinct genus. Oryza sativa in the indica variety is grown submerged for part of its cycle.

Perhaps Ehrensvärd was unaware of the distinctions; the Swedish (Ehrensvärd's language) for rice is ris and would have conveyed none of the important differences between the two plants. The Ojibwa word is manoomin and would mean less to Ehrensvärd. It's possible the New Englanders tried to grow Zizania aquatica and that Ehrensvärd heard tell of "rice"-growing experiments there.

The seed most likely to have been available to Ehrensvärd was probably Oryza sativa.

The excitement that Linnaeus felt would have been based on scientific knowledge, rather than hearsay. It was Linnaeus, Carl von Linné, who in 1753, at least ten years before Ehrensvärd's letter, classified and named both plants according to his own binomial nomenclature.

Linnaeus would have corrected Ehrensvärd's misconceptions about "rice" if there were any. It might also account for the fact that there are no records of the rice-growing experiments at Saari, beyond that first letter.

Habituation

Tammimäki is more than an oakwood on a wee hill as its name implies. More than a once-upon-a-time island in Mynämäki in south west Finland: part then of a still existing archipelago. It creeps up on me in the dark, sleeping in bed. It gets into the bed and lies down beside me. It's a state of mind - inserted somewhere between wakefulness of the small hours and night dreams. But then again, it's also daylight reverie.

But for the moment it's night. I navigate my way into the wood, careful not to step on the slender illuminated yearlings and saplings that somehow here seem to have escaped Oak Change and the fungus which helped the crisis along the way. I feel rather than see the elder and ancient trees around me. It's a small wood, with 35 or 36 such trees, five hundred and four hundred years in age, the oldest generation. They're all broken-limbed, wind-torn, leafless now, moon lighting the fabric of old wooden bone systems.

If I were to feel that there is a measure of acceptance now, cutting both ways, it would not be any form of anthropomorphism: rather a simple acknowledgement of fact. Sentient creatures are precisely that.

It's taken a long time to reach this point. I've slipped in and out of the wood for weeks. I've gratefully accepted, according to season, the mushrooms, the berries, the seeds and acorns the woodland produces; not for me or the deer, but for its own systemic purposes, its own continuing sustenance and existence. In the same way my body produces blood, but it's not for the benefit of mosquitoes.

I walk steadily and slowly round an inner meandering path of my own devising, assuring myself that each tree is in its rightful place, that each erratic boulder is in the place it found itself at the tongue of the last gacier. I step carefully over the fallen trees and round the raspberry tangles; more than once. And more than once realising that this is more than a vagary.

It's a dream; not because I'm asleep, which I'm not (though I'm not awake) but because the oaks are there at all. I'm visited now by these trees, just as I have visited for these months. It's a reverie not of my making, but one determined by my constant walking, by continued absorption - a word I use deliberately - of the woods and its internal structures and relationships, of which I am now a temporary part.

Sooner, perhaps rather than later, I'll pass along elsewhere in a way the oaks cannot, but part of me, the woodland flaneur, will always linger now in that small wood at the edge of the mainland on the Baltic; just as the oaks' wood, presence, timespan, timescale, has become a state of mind for me. Habituation. True dwelling. And it's here now in this very world and all its suffering.

Kurki

Quite simply then, sitting on the porch in dark frost-crackling night. Venus is there and a hooked edge of the moon.

I have the very last of the Campbeltown malt in my glass; I’m still barefoot after the sauna.

My eyes are cleansed of the day’s grit – inner eye cleared of the grit of the day too. I’d set out to look for an oak forest towards Kustavi and found only a tunnel in the vuori – what Finns call a mountain – a high expanse of bedrock. I’d walked in through burst steel gates in perpendicular rockface onto an earth floor along a tunnel carved through rock. There was a cracked-open fusebox. I followed the tunnel until the dark became absolute. The weapons- and oil-bunkers at Faslane came to mind and I became nervous and retraced my steps.

Barefoot with good malt here in the night and I’m surprised by the voices of geese – I know the geese have gone south – before I realise it’s the bugling of cranes, who have a more restricted vocabulary than goose tribes. Bugling does it no justice: it’s musical: there’s a blare and a peal in it; a two note piping that echoes the day’s tunnel.

One crane is warbling, momentarily rousing the others to call before they all shut off for the night. And I’m back to the medieval of Taivassalo kirk; the back of my neck prickles and then beyond Taivassalo’s frescoes into the wild ancient mind where crane shrieks are omens.

Sibelius saw a crane flock two days before his death: “There they come, the birds of my youth."

Above and below Ainola, where Sibelius lived and died and above Saari and at the bay of Mietoisten the cranes fly and call still.

The archaic in our world is palpable in wetlands and woods; and is almost tangible in our wild minds.

Old men are boys again.