Bracken

The art of establishing oneself

It’s funny how words root in our memories and bubble up into the present. As I walk across the moorland common on this searing hot August morning, the words Pteridium aquilinum spill off my lips. Bracken. The open vistas of the common, a fixed reference point for maybe nine months of the year, have disappeared beneath towering stacks of bright green bracken.

Pteridium aquilinum is a name lodged in my memory from my university studies at Aberystwyth in the late 1980s. Bracken was Professor Jim Taylor’s - one of our lecturer’s - field of research and he published many papers and books about its biology and geographical spread across the British Isles. I remember little of the detail of his lectures. I saw virtually no relevance of bracken to my education, but I recall that it is carcinogenic, sheep avoid it, and thus it is free to colonise disturbed ground, perhaps once wooded or cultivated. In some parts of the country, the dubious name of ‘bracken bashing’ was once given to conservation efforts to weaken its hold on the land.

The common is an extraordinary place in all seasons. It is scored with multiple paths, sheep tracks, and wide sandy avenues where dog-walkers pace out in the mornings and evenings. Each season has its own flavour but, in the summer, the common changes character distinctly. Bracken grows everywhere there isn’t a path, turning the common into a more secretive, mysterious place, which holds its topography and ground cover close. The usual ways that lead off down the slope to the woods narrow until the fronds touch across the shady spaces beneath or end abruptly in leafy walls. Pick your way carefully in the summer: the bracken maze disorientates you quickly and you can end up walking further than you’d planned to, not a good idea on a hot day like today.

My head is full of pending decisions to make and I have come to the common to seek clarity and escape the noise of building works in our driveway. I take watchful steps across firm sandy ground, tightly knit with close-cut grass, and loosely scattered with countless small black shiny spheres of sheep poo. I place my feet between the yellow stars of tormentil and ruffles of hawkbit, as I used to avoid the cracks in the pavement as a child. Every ‘pebble and wildflower has a story to tell’ as geologist and writer Chet Raymo said, and the hawkbit speaks of disruption to how the landscape has been used in the past. Judging by the more thickly wooded valleys around here, the change relates to a shift in climate and the denudation of the moorland from its once native tree cover. Neolithic farmers required space for their new farming practices and the trees of Dartmoor were steadily cleared. Once the roots were gone, the soil could no longer hold its structure against weather and gravity, and the consequence was the establishment of the modern open moorland landscape. The fate of this landscape mirrors that of the ancient rainforests on the other side of the Atlantic. Compulsive clearing of trees to feed the need for open and easy-worked agricultural land is changing the face of that landscape forever. Once gone, the ecosystem is challenging if not impossible to restore.

Filigree discs of spiders’ webs shine in the early morning sun and cover imperceptible holes into the soil, like tiny galaxies spinning at my feet. Like everywhere else in southern England (and most of Europe) this summer, the land is dry. The thoroughfare grass is pale and straw-like and the usual muddy troughs on the paths are hardened from months without sustained rain. But the distant moorland on the horizon to the east is cloaked in green as it always is in the summer. Dartmoor, just like this patch of moorland closer to home, remains lush to the distant eye and it is bracken that gives this illusion. The plant appears to bear no grudge with drought and stands tall and robust, the only indication that it would welcome water is the occasional frond that has turned to its autumn colours of yellow and rust-brown.

I choose a quieter path that breaks east down the slope towards the woods and head for a hawthorn tree that emerges from the bracken like a rock in a monotonous sea. Barely a hundred paces from the main path, I find a shady spot to sit in the humid embrace of bracken. Lime-green stalks surge upwards from a grassy bed that is still green, protected from the sun’s fierce radiation beneath the thick and complex canopy of the bracken fronds. The low rush from the road below that runs through the valley to Tavistock can’t be heard from this spot and, apart from a fly flitting around me, drawn by the strong smell of dung from Dartmoor ponies, this place is almost silent. An occasional bird calls out, weak and dulled by the expansive heat. None of us is used to this temperature. On the other side of the valley, perhaps a mile away, dried out rhomboid-shaped fields lead up to the familiar triad of western Dartmoor peaks on the skyline to the north-east. Near and distant views of bracken and moor juxtapose in startling contrast, with nothing in between.

Bracken spores are not that effective at reproducing the plant and it is the fern’s rhizomatic nature that ensures its success in spreading across a disturbed landscape. It is able to send out rhizomes horizontally across hundreds of metres that bifurcate and send up new shoots to the surface to make new plants. Bracken has perfected the art of establishing and re-creating itself. I wonder if reaching out, finding new places, sending out my own rhizomes into the world could work for me.

Humans have been creative for millennia. It is what distinguishes us from other creatures. Establishing ourselves on the landscape, crafting connections, forever making our mark. I thank this place of bracken: it has ironed out my thoughts and untangled the knot of anxiety, my multiple paths of decision-making smoothed into one simple choice. One humble imperative. To create, again and again. Always to create, even in times of drought.