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On a bright fall day in England, near the town of Peterborough, I make my way to a postage stamp of forest on the edge of a regional highway. All around are plowed fields, some with corn still standing.
But I, with the A47 highway’s traffic humming some 300 feet off, am standing next to a 500-acre patch of ancient woodland. In England, this is a designation for places that have been wooded continuously since at least 1600, when records begin to be available. This doesn’t mean that the trees themselves—the oak, the ash, the hazel—are old. They may be fairly young, because woodlands have a long tradition of human use: The trees in the Bedford Purlieus Wood have been cut and regrown many times in the course of its existence. What remains intact, however, is the diversity of species. In the undergrowth and the soil, a phenomenally rich stew of plant and other life lives. And I am here today because the bleeding edge of biodiversity conservation has just arrived in a little white hatchback.
I remember seeing a lone elm once in a Connecticut wood. It felt like an emissary from some past era.
Isabel Negri and Matthew Jeffery climb out. They are employees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where the Millennium Seed Bank harbors the world’s largest collection of wild plant seeds. Woodland trees are dying at an incredible clip, under siege from disease and changing climate. So they are here, with their clipboards and arborist’s saw, to collect seeds from native plants. Once they’ve preserved these plants’ genes, what next? Will someone use them to breed more resilient plants, to plant new woodlands? No one really knows yet. All they can be sure of, as they lace up their boots and start down a lane, is that change is coming, and it may be that the window in which they can collect the seeds of these plants here is almost closed.
The ash trees of England are dying. They are preyed upon by a fungus brought from Asia, and estimates are that up to 80 percent of ash in the United Kingdom will die in the next decade. The oak, whose towering presence has been a constant in U.K. history, is also struggling. A complex of diseases, both bacterial and fungal, and erratic temperatures are taking their toll. The ash tree above us is seriously ill. The local forester—Bedford Purlieus is owned by the U.K. Forestry Commission and managed by Forestry England—thinks it will go in the next year or two. Negri, who for two years worked on a Kew project to see if there were any disease-resistant ash that could be used to repopulate the woods, says that the carnage was unfortunately nearly complete. “Many trees initially identified as potentially tolerant ended up dying in the National Archive of Tolerant Ash as the years went by,” she says. It is likely that, as with the elm trees, which went before them, the ash are on the way out.
In 25 years, the climate in England is predicted to be warmer and dryer; London is projected to be similar to Barcelona today. Kew has been researching where to find trees that might live in the England of the future, Jeffery tells me. They are having to look to Spain and other warmer climates to find them. That means that time may be swiftly running out here for some of the species around us, and as I walk up a dirt lane, I try to fix this image, this time, right now, in amber in my mind. Coppiced hazel trees form columns of staves in the golden undergrowth, and curtains of clematis and ivy drape the roadside. This lane appears on medieval maps, Jeffery explains, as one of a set of roads radiating from the wood’s center. At the heart of the woodland was a circular crossroads, with an oak planted in the center. The roads were for charcoal burners, woodcutters, smelters. The Romans used this wood for smelting fuel. Later, in the early 20th century, it was largely cut for commercial timber. Now it is beech, oak, ash, hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, dogwood, linden, viburnums, bluebells. Peering through the thicket lining the lane, I catch glimpses of an emerald green space, deep within.
Jeffery used to tend the alpine plant collection at Kew Gardens, leaning over beds of gravel inhabited by flattened, miniature growing things. Since he switched to seed collecting, he jokes that he went from looking down all the time to looking up, and has had to retrain his neck muscles. He is looking today for the blackthorn tree, or sloe, and one of the native dogwoods, a pert little tree with black berries. He slices open the dogwood berries with secateurs, to check if there is a white seed within. At first glance, over half the slots in the berries where seeds should be are empty. It may have been too hot, too wet, too dry—so many things can affect the set of seeds. He and Negri look worried. They keep walking, hoping to find a tree with a better yield. In the future, there may not be such large populations to collect seeds from. “We do not know what climate and invasive pests and diseases may be around the corner,” Jeffrey says.
The sloes are looking good, however, plump little purple things with a white bloom. When he cuts them, they smell like sour plums, and we spend the next three hours plucking them from the laneside, surrounded by the calls of blue tits and red kites. They go into a bag, labeled with our initials and the dates. We spot a single surviving elm tree, and Jeffery points out that nearly the only elms that have survived have small trunks, young trees or trees cut for hedges. Big trunks are vulnerable to the insect, the elm bark beetle, that spreads the fungal disease that’s virtually eradicated elms from forests not just in England, but around the globe. We look at this survivor, and I remember seeing a lone elm once in a Connecticut wood. It felt like an emissary from some past era.
As the sun gets lower, the light pours through the upper branches of the trees, and we pack up the secateurs and sloes and walk back. In the vault of the Millennium Seed Bank, the woodland trees of today, or at least their genes, will go into hibernation. Perhaps they will be planted in the far north of the planet. Perhaps there will be woodlands there with the genetic fingerprint of the Bedford Purlieus Wood.
It’s time for me to head back to Peterborough, where the train station is. I go out from the darkling wood to the glinting light, into the fiefdom of corn.
In the car on the way to Peterborough, I find myself thinking of a marine ecologist on the other side of the world. Caroline S. Rogers lives in a bungalow high in the woods on St. John, in the Virgin Islands and is now an Emeritus Scientist at the United States Geological Society. I interviewed her nine years ago about a strange and lovely place near her home called Hurricane Hole. A warren of mangroves lines this bay in the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument. These trees have roots like cathedral arches, and for years, corals of more than 30 species came and made their homes on the trees. The year I met her I swam out to see them. They were like nothing I’d ever seen, tiny colorful growths spangling the roots. There was hope that the mangroves might be a refuge for corals unable to live in warming waters.
When I saw her again, seven years later, much of the mangroves and corals had been destroyed. Rogers looked haggard as she told me. Two catastrophic hurricanes had struck the bay in quick succession, with high winds tearing up the mangroves. When I went to the water’s edge myself, it was like there had never been a place like the one I saw, never been a fairyland where corals might have been saved. At the same time, around the Virgin Islands, a new coral disease was ravaging the reefs, killing corals that were many decades old in a matter of weeks, even days. “I just never anticipated that the reefs would look like this,” Rogers said.
At a strange and lovely place called Hurricane Hole, a warren of mangroves have roots like cathedral arches.
She took out a book of essays by the late nature writer Barry Lopez. “Is it still possible to face the gathering darkness … to embrace fearlessly the burning world?” She put the book down in her lap and looked ahead of her toward Hurricane Hole.
“This place has gone through a lot, and it’s diminished in many ways,” she said. “But it’s also still incredibly beautiful. That’s one of the things I’m trying to reconcile in my mind.” She went to Raja Ampat, Indonesia, she told me, to snorkel there with her sister, far from the coast and shipping lanes, and was shaken by the beauty and vigor of healthy, intact reefs, still alive. It gave her heart somewhere to stand, when she came home to the declining reefs of the Caribbean.
Maybe this is why I am in somebody else’s forest, watching somebody else’s heart break. In Bedford Purlieus, I said to Negri, I don’t go home anymore, because it is always burning. It is too hard to remember what it used to be like. More than a decade ago, the technology writer Christopher Mims wrote a short essay that I have never been able to forget. He pointed out that maybe once landscapes changed slowly enough that you might not notice that, from generation to generation, the conception of what nature should be was changing. Now that is not possible. “Any attempt to talk about the 21st century without acknowledging that every living thing on the planet will be altered by humans is intellectually bankrupt,” he wrote.
I looked up at where an ash tree used to be. “If you didn’t know about the before,” I said to Negri, “maybe it wouldn’t bother you?” She looked up, too. “But it’s happening so rapidly, you can’t not know the before,” she said. “The before was about two seconds ago.”
In Peterborough there is a cathedral. But the cathedral came before the town. More than 1,300 years ago a king of Mercia converted to the worship of a foreign god, founding a monastery on a rock in a marsh. Two hundred years later, Vikings came, sacked the place; someone rebuilt it. Time passed. The monks lived off the marsh eels.
After another total destruction, the monastery began a great rebuilding in the 12th century. It took 125 years, across the lifetimes of five abbots, to raise the structure that stands today. Before I leave Peterborough, I make my way to its front.
It is gigantic, the largest, most imposing thing for miles around. But the cathedral feels like a pastiche, built by many hands. The three great arches that make up the west side are beautiful oddities, something that made sense at the time, to someone. They seem, to my eye, to lean forward, as if they were never properly attached to the facade, and a security guard tells me that the Victorians pinned the arches on, using metal.
The cathedral is always changing, he says. They did the best they could.
I tell him it is bell ringing practice night, and I want to meet the cathedral’s band of ringers there in an hour. He brings me into the dark vastness. Inside, the patchwork quality, the sense of something built over great time by many hands and without one cohesive plan, continues. There is a stone carving thought to be from an early iteration of the monastery, showing monks fleeing. There is an ancient clock, the size of a room, with no face—it was designed to make a sound every half hour, to help the monks keep to their order’s timetable. The guard shows me the grave of Katherine of Aragon, the wife Henry VIII broke with the Pope to rid himself of. Her tomb was razed in the English Civil War, centuries later. Then more than a century after that, some Victorian Daily Mail readers named “Katherine” paid for a modest black marble slab.
Were the Victorians a blessing or a curse? I ask the security guard, as we walk outside. Is it good or bad that you can see their fingerprints everywhere? The cathedral is always changing, he says, looking up at the face of the west gate, glowing in the sunset. They did the best they could.
Up in the tower, I pull on a rope thick as a young tree, and feel the bell turning above me on its axle. I keep my rhythm as best I can, weaving a pattern of sound with the strangers who surround me, each pulling on their own ropes. I follow the ringing master out, and she tells me the bells, in fact, are new. They arrived in 1986, most of them from somewhere else, another church whose time was over. She lets me out of a thousand-year-old gate. Some men who are unhoused live there now. I walk to the train immersed in a gale of bells, as the practice continues.
Mark this moment well, this precise arrangement of the orrery of time. Once we were all here together, the oak, the ash, the hazel, dogwood, linden, hawthorn, the coral, the mangrove. Once there was a cathedral in Peterborough; once there was a wood by the A47. 
Lead art: Matt Gibson
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Veronique Greenwood
Posted on
Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Discover, Aeon, and many more.
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