At the Water's Edge by John Lister-Kaye

Author:John Lister-Kaye
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-02-19T04:30:00+00:00

Animals are by no means alone in staking claims. Every seed that falls and germinates is a claim in the making. From the first sprout veering skywards from the splitting seed case, and the first root hairs tentatively heading down, every plant, whether mighty tree or tiny flower, is grabbing space and opportunity to establish its claim on sunlight, soil and moisture. We see only the delicate nodding of the wood anemone; we overlook the innate aggression in its leaves and roots, fighting for the space to survive, mustering its inner forces, doing its last-ditch best to force any other competing plant out of its patch. Some species, such as rhododendrons, resort to dirty tricks to win their space. Their roots release toxic phenols into the soil so that nothing else can grow there. They poison their way to the sun. Others, such as beech trees, produce a heavy canopy of shade to stifle the photosynthetic chances of anything else germinating around them, removing competition for precious water and nutrients for their own roots at the same time as saturating the ground with capillary root hairs so that nothing else has a chance. There is a war going on out there, endlessly, inexorably, day and night, in every ecosystem and habitat throughout our wondrous world, and always utterly without quarter. There is no place for charity in the natural world.

In the wrong place some claimants are thoroughly unwelcome. The Victorians planted an American red oak in what is now my garden. In a hundred years it had grown well to become a fine, handsomely spreading tree until it was claimed as a desirable host by honey fungus (Armillaria mellea), a devastating parasite of trees and shrubs from which there is no escape. It infects roots and butts, eventually fatally invading the whole tree with a white, fibrous rot. With a heavy heart I felled the oak and removed the stump, burning it and all the brash wood in the vain hope that I could contain the spread of the fungus. I dug out the ground around the stump and replaced it with fresh soil from another part of the garden. But the fungal spores are airborne and will have proliferated far and wide long before I took action.

To me and in my garden context, the honey fungus ravaging so fine a tree was a plague I could well have done without. But from an ecological standpoint I should not be so quick to damn its name. In a natural climax forest, where honey fungus will certainly have evolved, there must always have been many more trees than it could infect, and its depredations will have done no more than create a constant supply of dead wood for many other species, especially invertebrates and other saprophytic fungi, to claim for their own particular needs. In the long term the tree would decay back to the soil to feed new growth. The spaces in the forest its demise created would also have freed up opportunities for other trees and plants to colonise.

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