Guest blog – The European or Common Alder by Murray Marr

I’m a life member of The Countryside Users Association, together with 64.1 million other Brits. I’m a semi-constant trainspotting observer of this parish’s 7/52 avian soundscape. I’m a casual delver into its historic landscape. I’m a cursory extra beside these grand, abandoned alders quaking above a deep, undisturbed paleo-ecological archive.

 

The European or Common Alder: the tree that may have left its mark on the moon

The term, wildlife, tends to mean the native animals of a region. The alder attempts to waive this definition because some dictionaries include plants too. Anyway, who can object when this deciduous tree’s abundant cone-like larders, stacked with nutritious seeds, are such a vital food source for the Eurasian siskin, a small, neat, streaky passerine with yellow, green and black markings? It likes to go around in confiding, gossipy flocks. They lift the mood on chill, grey, wintry days especially when replete individuals break into communal song among the alder groves. Then, in those sylvan street partying moments, there is a sense that the tree and the finch are one; a feeling buoyed up by the translations of the German and French names for the bird – Alder finch.

As for the term, international, this is not enough for the widespread Common Alder. It claims to be the only example of wildlife to be ‘inter-terrestrially’ international.

 

There are thirty five species of alder in the world but there may well be others yet to reveal themselves in unknown or inaccessible places. They are all ecological pioneers spreading right across the temperate northern hemisphere and even penetrating south of the equator into the Peruvian Andes. This success is due, in part, to the hosting of nitrogen fixing bacteria in their root systems – a symbiotic relationship which enriches rudimentary soils allowing these trees to grow rapidly. Meanwhile their surroundings are fertilised with excess nitrates which in turn aid the spread of other plants. It is likely alders were once beneficial for the northward advance of woodland after the end of the last Ice Age. A small-scale analogy of this is seen today in the pan-subarctic Sitka alder, a scrub tree, which readily colonises landslips, avalanche chutes or flood devastated areas – thereby facilitating natural re-afforestation. Incidentally, such ecological ‘farming’ is no different from the remediation planting of alders on sterile industrial slag heaps.

If alders are agents of natural permaculture then they are also agents of human culture. Man, since prehistory, has had many uses for the tree, especially our European one, (Alnus glutinosa): split planks for bog track-ways in the Neolithic (the wood when permanently saturated never rots); underwater piles (old Venice rests on them); writing tablets (for a Roman army postal service); scaffold poles (for Ely Cathedral’s mediaeval repair work); timber for carpentry; wood for gunpowder charcoal. Then there’s its bark and leaves which were used for dyes and medicines; the list is endless. Today, however the tree has faded from the rural economy, its traditional copses abandoned because their optimal habitat, valley mires, are too soft for heavy machinery. The alder is now redundant, apart from supplying an obsolescent clog making industry for which the wood was once in great demand because of its insulating qualities and workability.

The manufacture of this important footwear required many skilled labourers to lead itinerant lives setting up temporary homes in alder copses. Their workplaces can be imagined from mediaeval landscape art depicting sylvicultural summer idylls with flower studded and sunlit mossy hummocks glowing beneath neat pollards by silver brooks. Such scenes, even allowing for a substantial degree of Arcadian fantasy, look nothing like today’s wilderness swamps where there are no limpid streams, just stagnant sulphurous black pools that stare from amongst the deeply shaded giant tussock sedges. It is unwise to wander here alone, especially away from the overgrown multi-stemmed trees with their massive root plates. These, in windy wet weather may pummel the mire and then, according to some Stygian subterfuge, quicken previously reliable paths and render them unsafe.

 

Trusted ground that begins to quake tests our judgement in the same way as any hoax or conspiracy theory. For example, there are people who believe that the 1969-72 Apollo moon missions were faked. Men in lunar orbit – perhaps. Men on the moon – never. The latter was done by trick photography – a sophisticated Cold War propaganda exercise. But now the sceptics have been silenced by new high resolution images showing clear tracks surviving in the lunar soil at each landing site. It had been feared that by now they would have been smothered by constant showers of dust-sized micrometeorites. Various measurements however, suggest the shortest time for these footprints to disappear is about ten million years. Even supposing the rate is hundreds of times faster, those trails will easily outlast today’s modern societies – written history repeatedly reminds us of the ephemeral nature of every civilisation over the last 5,000 years. In contrast, there is another story, penned by sub-fossil pollen, which is held in natural libraries of waterlogged and anaerobic peat carefully protected from ancient and modern exploitation by the presence of alder copses. Evidence from these meticulously stratified paleo-ecological records suggest that, across the millennia, some of these woods have been extraordinarily steadfast in their service to man, throughout his Will-o’-the-wisp comings and goings.

 

Judging by the current state of geopolitics and the rate of climate change, it is possible that those lunar landing sites will for ever be man’s furthest flung habitations; tiny settlements hosting the briefest of sojourns which allowed just enough time for the gathering of a small but precious harvest of rock samples that are now safe in laboratories worldwide. Similarly, there are a few cherished museum-held examples of the clog makers’ mediaeval craftsmanship. But there is little else handed down to us by those artisans of the alder woods, not even marks in the landscape such as tracks or indentations. Any signs of activity have been enveloped long ago by the build-up of successive layers of peat. The only way we know about them is through oral history and, secure in their dry dusty depths, some archives harbouring a scattering of references to clog makers down the centuries.

 

 

If those records survive in perpetuity they will inform future ‘astro-archaeologists’ spawned by any civilisation that might succeed ours. Those new space explorers will eventually discover the six Apollo landing sites with their star-and-stripe patterned flags surrounded by wandering trails of near pristine boot-prints. The scientists will note the twelve names of those first moonwalkers and perhaps later, pause to muse upon one in particular: it is the only surname with a topographic origin – Aldrin. Its Old English meaning is, ‘residence among the alders.’  

 

Well, that’s according to The Oxford Dictionary of English Surnames. Alas, words often leave varying traces of spellings in the records and because of this, the true surname derivation of the second man to set foot on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, is not absolutely certain. So inevitably, there will be some who will question the alder’s ambitious inter-terrestrial claim.

Confusion, argument and debate, it’s a bit like trying to observe, then divine, the behaviour of those excited and talkative finches with their swirling fizz of wheezy, teasing calls interspersed with bouts of choral singing. No matter: Eurasian siskins remain delightfully plentiful while the European alders stand dutifully bountiful. Yes, this widespread species has receded from the public’s attention but it endures in the individual’s imagination: an old homesteader and a remarkable pioneer to boot.

 

 

 

 

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