In other words
Art, maps and language for woodland connection
Othering creates borders — as artist Jo Dacombe points out in a ClimateCultures post that I’ll return to in a minute. And our maps (mental or actual) and our language are two ways in which, even as we describe and value the natural world of which we are a part, we almost inadvertently ‘other’ it, set it apart in some way. How we use our mapping and wording helps us to order how we work with our imagination and its borders. Borders are porous, can be creative in their own right, but can easily become fossilised instead; if the borders of our imagination become fixed, restrictive, we risk becoming semi-detached from reality. Locked into one way of seeing the world and our relationship to it.
These are thoughts that occur to me, not for the first time, on re-reading two different contributions to the ClimateCultures blog. The first is freshest in my mind, as it’s the latest offering from our gathering of artists, writers, researchers and curators. Mary Waltham’s Ancient Woodland - A Celebration of Place introduces her current joint exhibition with fellow Hampshire-based artist Jackie Amies. This is the fruit of their collaboration also with two specialists in southern England’s ancient woodland, and of the artists’ different approaches to working with the trees, plant life and soils of these surviving fragments of an old landscape.
Ancient woodlands, in England and Wales, are those that have been largely undisturbed by human activity (importantly, this does not mean ‘unused’) since at least 1600 (1750 in Scotland). Zooming in on Natural England’s map of ancient woodland shows just how fragmented this habitat is. That, of course, is unsurprising — four centuries of human population growth, changing settlement and land use, agricultural and industrial revolutions, development of property ownership and the spread of urbanisation is a process that’s deep and long. Although now covering only 2.5% of the land, it’s perhaps surprising that ancient woodland does somehow persist at all.
As Mary points out, as well as offering “a continuing record of centuries of interaction and interdependence between man and woodland, often containing remnants of archaeological features such as wood banks, pits and charcoal kilns”
“… ancient woodland is an immensely rich and complex area for exploration scientifically, culturally and artistically. Both Jackie and I feel as though we have only just begun!
“Our exhibition invites visitors … to be curious about these rare and special areas we are fortunate enough to have access to.”
Imagining woodlands
In the second ClimateCultures post, Othering — on Woodlands, Maps and Language, artist Jo Dacombe points to Enclosures and the later rise of gamekeeping as particular developments that have separated us from much of our landscape. Enclosure was already a longstanding practice of appropriating for aristocratic landowners woods and other lands, which greatly accelerated from the 1600s onwards with Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure. Our ancient woodlands are the remnants of the earlier, less planned land.
“Oliver Rackham writes of the changing maps of woodlands over the centuries. Ancient woods marked on maps appear now much as they were in earlier maps of 1580; zigzag outlines, boundaries that go around individual large trees, maps drawn to describe the natural boundaries set out on the ground, not from a draughtman’s office. Straight lines on maps do not appear until 1700, when woods started to be grubbed out or enlarged. These altered boundaries appear regularly curved or straight.”
Rackham was one of the outstanding countryside academics and writers of the last 40 years. Jo quotes him:
“'In Planned Countryside the irregular shapes of ancient woods sit awkwardly among the straight hedges laid out around them by Enclosure Act commissioners. In Ancient Countryside, the ghost of a grubbed-out wood may haunt the map as the irregularly-shaped perimeter of a ‘Wood farm’ whose internal hedges are anomalously straight.”
A reminder that it’s possible to read a map not just for what can be seen in the landscape — always selectively coded for in the markings and symbols of the cartographer — but also for what is no longer present, other than as a ‘ghost’. Imprints that the map can help us to resurface into our collective consciousness if we know to look for them, often in the place names our ancestors passed on.
Having been distanced from so much of our land for so long — and the protection and public readmittance to our remaining ancient woodlands has only really come about through the rise and popular support of landowning charities such as the Woodland Trust, National Trust or Wildlife Trusts, public agencies and post-war policy on landscape access — our historic relationship with it was greatly disrupted. It’s a relationship discussed by Rackham and other writers. Jo describes its modern remaking as something altogether different to our older cohabitation with woods:
… we do have a love for the woods, but I would argue that this is a different sort of love from the one that Rackham describes. For many of us, woodlands are like a brief flirtation rather than a commitment like marriage. We go to the woods to escape. We see them as places that are separate from our everyday lives, and that is why we love them. They are places for ‘nature’ and reserves for wildlife. We are happy with wildlife when it is in ‘its place’, in other words, not in our place.
This modern separation of our selves from our woods is developed in Imagining Woodlands, a collection of Jo’s short essays, photographs and art around the local woodlands she knows and loves, whether from her adult life or as memories of her childhood home.
In the essay, ‘Enchantment’, she suggests that part of both the lure and the fear of woodland is down to its containment, how it bounds our senses of sight and sound within its space.
“Rich in sights, sounds, smells and textures, they are also uninterfered with by external influence in our experience of them, so that the sensory experiences that they contain become heightened. Our awareness of the present moment and the immediacy of this rich environment, that perhaps we can only see a few hundred yards before us, means that our experience shrinks into the present moment, away from distractions of the meta modern world and its … information overload.”
That sense of ‘containment’ can easily be shattered, however. Jo recalls the stories of Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood, with the characters’ “sense that their Wood is vast, but that there exists nothing outside of the Wood”. But near the end, when Christopher Robin “tells his woodland friends that he has to leave and go elsewhere (to school) … suddenly they realise there is something else beyond the Wood.” This sudden dis-enchantment can feel like a displacement or dislocation.
A woodland next to my primary school in a Surrey village was an ordinary enough place to me back then, as I had enchanted woods of my own much closer to home, a few miles away. I don’t even recall going deep into the trees with my village friends. It was more a place to kick away time with them after school while I waited to be picked up to go home. There was a field next to the entrance into the woods, where we watched the cows or swung on the gate when the field was empty. I ‘rediscovered’ it just over ten years ago, the field abandoned and overgrown, the gate fallen down and rotting. The woodland itself is a small-but-large place in the sense that Jo suggests, with paths winding between expanses of bluebells and past naturally fallen trees to the banks of a stream or the edge of a farther field and the wooded hill beyond. You could easily walk through the whole place in ten minutes if you wanted — or, more sensibly, spend a good hour wandering through its twists and corners, spotting the many fairy doors decorated by children from the village and letting your eyes follow the small paths made by the non-human animals — or, maybe, by those fairies. Birdsong seems to almost, if not quite, hold back the planes hidden from view in the sky above. Over the years since, almost all sign of that gate I swung on has disappeared into the ground, just a few pieces of earth-coloured metal holding the last stubs of wood.
On my latest visit, during this year’s bluebell season, however, the whole expanse of woodland was laid bare and exposed by contractors’ incredibly careless and clumsy excuse for ‘woodland management’ on behalf of the stately home that has owned the whole countryside around about for centuries. It’s their proud boast that Elizabeth I once stayed in the house, and I’ve no doubt they made good use of enclosures over the centuries since then. That sense of a contained vastness was instantly torn away as I looked into and through the denuded woods, all the subtle contours seemingly flattened — not just by the removal of large numbers of trees suddenly opening up the sightlines and invading the woods with external sounds, or the randomly felled trunks and severed limbs scattered apparently at random across pathways and flora, but also the scale-shrinking intrusion of large, muddy-yellow diggers and branch-strippers parked up wherever they’d been left at the start of the contactors’ weekend. Local protests in the papers met with bland assurances from the landed gentry of ‘traditional management’ for the benefit of nature and people.
It was only recently, looking at the Natural England map that Mary and Jackie had highlighted in their exhibition, that I realised that this small place that had butchery visited upon it is, of course, one of those fragments of ancient woodland. I think it’s fair to say that whatever mapping or wording the stately home’s owners contrived — or signed off on from their land managers — it did a good job of ‘othering’ everything of value in this patch of wooded peace. And if they actually believed their own verbiage, then their imagination of what ‘ancient woodland’ means had truly been enclosed and tamed some time ago.
Rewording our woods?
As Jo suggests in her post, “the Othering of nature means that we become more and more disconnected from our natural environments and from woodlands. They become a desirable thing for our leisure time, but there is a danger then that perhaps they are not a necessity when resources are scarce. Woodlands are valued and magical, they are precious to us in a way, like a beautiful object kept in a glass case.”
Perhaps a change in our language could help ... There is a fascinating section in Rackham’s book about the many Anglo-Saxon words for woodlands, many for which their specific meanings have been lost. These words demonstrate the greater connection they had with woodlands, and how they reflected the way they thought of woodlands in different contexts. For example, feld is an open space in sight of woodlands, with which to contrast it. A ley or a hurst appear to mean inhabited space surrounded by woodland. These words show how woodlands were a part of a wider, connected landscape, rather than a separated area on its own. Perhaps our language needs to expand to reflect this way of thinking again; to develop a lexicon to describe landscape relationships rather than separate features.
She draws on how these ancestors combined short words to create new descriptions as a way to reimagine our wooded places.
I wonder if this is a way we could create new words to better describe our landscapes? To start to generate those connections between objects and surroundings, to embed things fully into the landscape and the way we speak of it? ‘Street-tree’ is one example, placing the tree in a particular type of location. How could we use words to better describe the different types of woodland? ‘Slope-spruce-holt’ for trees on a mountain side? (Holt being the Old English word for a wood of predominantly one species.) ‘Poplar-shimmer-shaw’ for the effect of a line of white poplar trees from a distance when the wind turns their leaves over to show the pale side? (Shaw meaning a small wood on a boundary.)
How would this way of using language change our relationship with the natural world around us? Would naming the specificity of woodlands make them more personal, more valuable, and better connect us to them?
In their exhibition, Mary and Jackie each use many artistic media and approaches to capturing the multiple essences of their local woods — knowing, I think, that no single style or working method could capture the wholeness of what makes a woodland. And, perhaps akin to conjoining old words to make new composite descriptions, this ‘patchwork of artworks’ approach in some way mirrors the web of woodland life — a map of sorts, where the map can never claim to be the system.
One of Mary’s methods involves working directly with the soil.
Painting is my primary medium for this exhibition. I have been working with soil as a paint for the six pieces in the series ‘Ground’, using earth and ash as pigment. The pieces reveal and elevate the aesthetic qualities of ancient woodland soil through their intense colours and textures. As alternative portraits of place, the six Selborne Hanger soil paintings allow the site to speak for itself. They directly reflect the history, the climate and the variety of soils that cover the Hanger.
And among Jackie’s works, a series of particularly attentive black and white images focuses in detail on the ways that trees in her local hangers tie themselves into the ground and create much of the woodland’s mystery for us.
Each piece draws the viewer into the steep chalk slopes of the East Hampshire Hangers to gnarled wood, undercut roots and animal paths heading off between majestic mature tree trunks; a world rich in an abundance of life.
As Mary said, the exhibition aims to invite our curiosity about the ancient woodlands and other habitats we might know and visit, and find new ways to rediscover the familiar but maybe overlooked. A woodland soundscape plays into the gallery, generating some of our multisensory experience within nature — an experience that Jo Dacombe explores in another of her Imagining Woodlands essays, ‘Walking in the Woods’.
In ‘Microseasons’, Jo writes
“It is difficult for us to connect to things that either we cannot see or we cannot comprehend due to the complexity and huge scale of the issue. This is where I think that science and the arts can work together, in that both disciplines attempt to make visible the things that we cannot visialise, and to explore ideas of complexity in a tangible way.”
Like Mary and Jackie, Jo worked with specialists on her wider Imagining Woodlands project, bringing in a palynologist and archaeologist and a literature researcher, and working with university students to complement their academic courses. This process of cross-disciplinary fertilisation and the production of artistic works and perhaps of fashioning other and better words with which to describe the world, this can all feed our mental maps and word-images. Composting into and enriching the way we find meaning in landscapes as we encounter or re-encounter them, this perhaps is in part a sensory and imaginative recognition of the ecological systems that we live within, part of and not apart from.
What then of our imagination in all this, of yours, and the imagination’s creative borders? Where to find or to make — with arts and sciences, maps and language — the ways to unlock us from impoverished ways of seeing the world?
Ancient Woodland — A Celebration by Mary Waltham and Jackie Amies is at the Allen Gallery in Alton, Hampshire until 20th September, but Mary’s ClimateCultures post is available indefinitely: Ancient Woodland — A Celebration of Place. For more on Mary’s work, see her website.
You can find ancient woodlands throughout England at Natural England, Ancient Woodland) online map.
As well as Othering — on Woodlands, Maps and Language, Jo Dacombe has written two other posts for ClimateCultures: Imagining Woodlands Under Lockdown and Bone Landscapes. For details of her book, Imagining Woodlands and her Imminent zine see her website, Art People Place.
ClimateCultures offers a wealth of creative responses across our blog archive from 2017 to right now, as well as our Creative Showcase and Longer feature and other series.