Ghost Trees - Hardcover

About the Author

Bob Gilbert is the author of Ghost Trees and presenter of BBC Radio 4's The Passion in Plants. A regular contributor to TV and radio, including Natural World and BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, Bob has also been a long-standing campaigner for inner city conservation and chair of The Garden Classroom, a charity that promotes environmental education in London. Ghost Trees is available in hardback and paperback.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This was the area of London to which we had come; to a large, draughty Victorian house with bars on the windows and multi-coloured brickwork. St. Michael’s Vicarage was not attached to the main church at all but to one of the smaller, now redundant churches that dotted the rest of parish. Its high clock tower with a conical steeple, worn like a witch’s hat, looked out over the area that would be our home, to which Jane would minister and whose wildlife I would record. It was no Walden, and I set out to investigate it with little other expertise than that of experience and a belief in the importance of looking more deeply.

I began the practice of noting down anything that caught my interest or attention: the tall patience dock clustered around a car breaker’s yard, the colony of brown-lipped snails surviving on a tiny piece of wasteland, the perfectly formed goldfinch nest revealed in the bare branches of a shopping centre tree. One day, walking with my youngest son, we found a wood mouse cowering at the base of a brick wall; on another we had the rare gift of a peregrine sitting in the plane tree in our garden and eyeing the small birds on the feeders.

Here in the heart of the city, where we have tried so hard to ignore the Earth’s natural rhythms, I was to become more aware again of the influence of daily and seasonal cycles. In spring, the horse chestnuts open their leaves far in advance of the other trees whilst the ash holds back to the very last. By April, the lawns are lighting up with daisies, white like a late snowfall, whilst on one estate I find a colony of lady’s smock and hope that the mowing gangs will hold off for another week or two. Goldfinches enliven the stiller summer months with flashing flocks that maintain a constant gossipy commentary on existence. For one week a great spotted woodpecker takes up residence in our small garden, before moving on to find a permanent territory elsewhere. In early autumn I find shaggy ink cap mushrooms growing en masse in front of a refurbished housing block, though the family are less than enthusiastic when I bring them home for breakfast. Though the hotter summer months have desiccated the pavement plants, the little gallant soldiers are only now beginning to bloom, in front of a builder’s yard and beside the Prince Charlie pub. When winter arrives, the triple bark of a fox, or the shriek of a vixen, join the other night-time noises; and the song of the robin, by night as well as by day, somehow becomes more apparent. And then, approaching spring again, a mistle thrush begins to sing in early February, spilling out its chorus every morning before first light, battling the backdrop of the A12 traffic, the planes taking off from City Airport and the car sound systems turned up full volume.

The inevitable consequence of observation is the questions that it inspires. Why, I found myself asking, had the greenfinches appeared almost daily in one year, then disappeared in the next? How was it that Alexanders, a plant usually associated with the coast, was appearing increasingly inland and even growing as a back-garden weed in Poplar? And why was it, as my notes seemed to indicate, that the great majority of plants that continued to bloom into the winter were white?

At times this increasing familiarity with the natural life of the area led me into odd side alleys of investigation. I took part in a project trapping and measuring elvers as they moved up the River Lea and became fascinated by the relationship between the East End and the eel. Learning of a possible link between housing type and house sparrow numbers, I began to map their population in the parish in order to test the theory that sparrows thrived in areas of greater deprivation. And could I really learn to tell the time by closely observing the sequence in which all the yellow dandelion-like flowers opened across the morning? Or chart the different waves of immigration to the area in the presence of street plants such as Chinese mugwort and the Bengali brown mustard?