Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin

Author:Roger Deakin [Deakin, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Science, Travel, Nonfiction, Nature
ISBN: 9780141900513
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Driftwood

The Woods and the Water

It is early evening when I pull over above the river at Le Lézard Bleu, the village bar in Vieusson. When I turn off the engine, a wave of nightingale song rolls up out of the valley, riding over the deeper music of the mountain water racing along the winding avenue of a riverside forest. All along the river, invisible nightingales are singing in every bamboo and sandy sallow grove, in the walled cherry orchards on the alluvial soil of the flood plain, beneath every stone village crawling up the hillside. I am heading upstream along the valley towards Olargues, crossing high-arched bridges over this river, the Orb, built to accommodate its spectacular winter floods. From the balcony of the bar, glass in hand, I look down over a quickening bend in the river, a crook of pebbled banks, half obscured by willows. I have never heard so many nightingales. Some may even be heading for Suffolk. I have come to meet them halfway.

I go down a track quietly to the river, lean against the trunk of a poplar to get closer to the birds and listen: the drone of a motorbike coming up through the hairpin bends of the valley, the hollow clatter of water over pebbles, the hissing of bamboos, the slight rattle of poplar leaves overhead and, above all this, the astonishing volume of nightingales at close quarters. Do I imagine it, or are the birds singing faster than in Suffolk? They are masters of the pregnant pause, but seem to be hurrying, as French speech often seems more rapid. Has spring subverted the musical discipline? But it is an illusion, a function of the contrapuntal effect of so many birds singing in a single valley.

The riparian forest is an almost unbroken ribbon of wet-loving trees and shrub that follows the Orb and its tributary, the Jaur, for many miles through the steep hills of the Hérault. Much of the woodland is almost garrigue: ash, alder, goat willow, holm oak, strawberry tree, suckering elms, spindle tree, dogwood, elder and white poplar are woven together into a rich limestone scrub by a tangle of wild hops, dog-roses, bramble, traveller’s joy and white bryony. Further up on the hillsides, terraced vines, olives and almond groves reach up towards the dark mountain ridge of the Espinouse.

At Olargues, everyone inside the noisy restaurant is watching Barcelona play Real Madrid, while outside, the rossignol assails the night air. I throw my hotel windows open and lie in bed listening, far too excited to sleep.

In the clear morning I set out from the hill hamlet of Maroul, taking a path past a graveyard full of heart-shaped white enamel memorial plaques that flash in the sun. To my left hand, tiny terraced cherry orchards stand along the head-high bank above the path. To my right, blinding yellow thickets of the broom they once used for thatch round here, lichened rock and, somewhere below, the sound of a rushing stream.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.