It was indeed a windy day, but as soon as I got to the back of the garden, I could hear Bobbit.
I was able to get quite close to catch the sound, but didn't want to push my luck so I stepped back. When he went to take cover in the hedge, I realised just how gusty it was, with the old lilac scraping against the fence.
Out walking, the sound of the trees, the sound of waves and clattering wood, was so present that I recorded that too and made this little video
In the wood, I climbed onto the fallen trunk of a huge old ash and sat there...
This was a place where I had often seen hares, muntjacs, pheasants... no sign today. I thought of how horses are flighty in the wind and the theory that it is harder for them to make out the sound of approaching predators.
As for the trees, I was checking up on three Sentinel Trees for my Woodland Trust volunteering. One, an ash, has lost a branch. That tree is dying back. The other two ashes seem stable. One of the oaks is flourishing, the other two are stable. And I wondered what had led this old ash, the one I sat on, to fall. How long had it been on the ground?
One of the oaks has always seemed sickly and I stood with the tree briefly... sensing from it a rather cheerful stoicism.
Ah.... yes, I am reading a book called The Embodied Mind by Thomas Verny. He talks about how certain glial cells, the white matter in the brain which were thought to be just like a kind of bubble wrap around the important grey matter, transmit information not by electrical impulses by modifications in calcium levels. That rang a bell... I checked it out, yes, that is also how plant roots transmit information.
We are really not so very different.
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