University of Guelph Arboretum: first week of December.
Fifty-four years ago, this place where I walk and bird was officially designated as the University’s arboretum. The land, home first to the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Attawandaron peoples, and later part of the three million acres ceded to the crown by the Mississauga of the New Credit’s Between the Lakes Purchase Treaty, No. 3, had been farmed since the 1850s by the Hamilton family. In 1910, they sold the farm to the Ontario Agricultural College as a research farm.
Traces of this use still remain: a collapsed stone wall – likely dating from the Hamiltons’ years, the old post-and-wire fence lines: these are the most obvious. But other relics are being claimed by the wild, hidden among the trees and shrubs: the gate on the path that used to be a farm road; a cart, left at the side of a field and forgotten; a roller. The metal rusting into the soil, the rubber breaking down, aided by sunlight and bacteria, slowly, slowly.
In these shortening days of December, the fecundity of summer gone and the world laid bare, the processes of decay—a word loaded with negative meanings—are on display. Saprophytes are working their necessary transformation on wood both fallen and standing; unlike the brief fruiting bodies of mushrooms that appear in the autumn, these fungi aren’t ephemeral. They spread along trunks and across fallen logs, lines and layers of living tesserae, rippled and curved.
Hidden behind bark—until it loosens and falls—bark beetles create mazes of intertwining paths on the phloem, a traced, random, undecipherable writing, telling a tale of slow death for the tree, life for the beetle. The Janus-faced interdependence of life and death.
The next ten days will have less and less daylight, until the world turns again and midwinter’s darkness begins to oh-so-gradually give way. But longer days won’t ease the cold and snow for many weeks. Will the young red-tailed hawk who has learned to catch squirrels survive when they’re sleeping deep in their dreys? Blood will stain the snow; scattered feathers tell their tales; trees will be stripped of berries. Curled together in their lodge, surrounded by the ice of Wild Goose pond, the beavers will sleep.
Random Ramblings 