Putting down roots

16 Aug Putting down roots

The woman at the garden centre with the wide smile and weathered, knowledgeable face wasn’t sure they’d survive. ’50-50 chance’ she said as she took my £10 note with its face of Walter Scott staring into the distance dreaming up some new story. She packed the six saplings – 3 alder and 3 birch – in a cardboard box and handed them to me along with £4 change. A bargain? Bin ends, my mother would have said. 

I drove back across the island to the cottage and planted my spindly saplings generously spaced exactly as the woman had advised. ‘There’s still time for them to get their roots down before the ground becomes too hard’ she had said. It was late October and they were much too small to be bothered by the winter storms that would undoubtedly march across The Minch and batter the island later in the year. As I stood back from my planting work I remember chuckling to myself though I forget now if it was from determination or despair. Would they ever do anything? They looked so wee and vulnerable in an expanse of newly dug soil alongside the other bits and pieces I’d planted – some cuttings of wild rose pinched from the waste-ground across the hill, a few fir seedlings pocketed (possibly illegally) from the edge of the forest path as it skirts Orbost beach on its way out to McLeod’s Maidens, the fantastical sea stacks beside the coastal cliffs, a favourite walk over the years. 

The pandemic kept me away from Scotland for a couple of years. Before that, I had passed the end of the road that climbs the hill to the cottage several times but never driven up. I’m not good at going back to places when there’s a risk of regret. But, the other day I returned. Many years later and in a different life. There is no car at the cottage and no sign that anyone was staying there. I let my hand linger on the 5-bar gate. We put the gate up after a house was built on the land next door and the trees lining the drive that had led to our door were cut down, despite the promises of the owner and her claim to loving trees. I had planted the saplings along the fence that separated our garden from hers, partly as a gesture of complaint, but also in the  hope they would screen out the new house and restore the shady greens that had given me a comforting sense of remoteness.

I open the gate and close the metal latch very quietly though I don’t know why. It seems right, somehow, to make every step reverential. The alchemilla I nurtured from cuttings lifted from the roadside has multiplied and its bright green flowers froth along the gravel path. They’ve seeded themselves in the rockery beside the knotweed with the fancy name (persicaria bistorta), its waving dark pink flowers held on slender stems like upturned paintbrushes. Another rush of memories wafts in the breeze – the knotweed came from Alicia’s garden (Blog link). I rescued the rockery from the grip of grass and weed that had matted thickly over the ground, draped itself on the rocks and rooted underneath them. It was a whole summer’s work.

Was it about 17 summers ago? I try to count back but can’t. So, I count forward from the time we first found this cottage and made it a kind of home. I tackled the rockery first. The trees came later. That makes the saplings about 12 years old, I think. Trees up here don’t grow high and they tend to develop at a wonky angle, down at the front and up at the back as they bend and buffet in the wind coming up off the sea. But they have done their job. They have put down roots, thickened their girth and created a natural screen so that you can now only see the top of the neighbour’s chimney. Result!

I did not put down roots. Or maybe I did but they were shallow and straggly, mixed up with roots from other places so that sometimes it’s not clear even to me where exactly I’m from. I’m no longer sure that it matters to ‘be from somewhere’ unless, of course, you are truly displaced and then, perhaps, it matters more than anything. As I closed the 5-bar gate behind me I felt a little sad, yes. But also, glad that this bit of the world had been part of my life for a while and that I have left my mark on it, coloured in the landscape a little. Yesterday, the landscape seemed to be smiling back at me, reminding me that it is, still, one of the threads that binds my whole self together, a bit of all the jumbled-upness of life.