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Who crawled along Snail’s Bottom? Who found beauty on Bonnyleigh Hill? Who measured Little Acre Farm? This small patch of Somerset – like everywhere else in Britain – is a storied landscape, every feature named and memorialised by mostly forgotten individuals. Our job over the next two hours is to take one such name, one such story, and overwrite it with something better.
Over a level crossing, through a kissing gate and on to a public footpath running down sloping ground. I had only been told the local epithet for this banana-shaped paddock after we moved here, though my arm already understood its origin. A priapic stallion, its coat studded with burdock burrs like a peppered mackerel, had clamped its jaws around my humerus. “That’s bitey horse field,” people told me. Bitey no more, for the poor fly-grazing beast has left, and our ever-proactive town council has secured the land on a 99-year lease.
Within the last week, the whole field has been spiked with a forest of bamboo sticks. Out of a forest will grow a wood, a project crowdfunded in memory of a young Japanese-British woman, Moko Sellars, whom the town took to its heart and will never let go. Our task today is to partner each dead stick with a live tree, a whip every bit as short and skinny as its early years support. My little team has been assigned the riverside end of the banana, a spot that is apt to flood. In our plot, we will dig in species that like wet feet – pussy willow, black poplar and alder – while those on higher ground have oak, hornbeam and field maple. Schoolchildren will plant around an oval clearing where their grandchildren might play. I can look all the way across the stick-sprouting field today and understand that all our hope and belief comes, not from what we see in the future, but what we won’t; here will be a wooded place to hide, lose and find oneself.
The council is calling this proto-copse Frome Community Woodland. Six hundred people planting for the community, by the community. And the community will decide if that name should stick.
