Читать книгу The Tree Climber’s Guide - Jack Cooke - Страница 15

Fagus sylvatica ‘Purpurea’/Copper beech

Crossing over the bridge from Coldbath Street Estate, I catch my first sight of the Ravensbourne. Although it passes through the arse end of Deptford Creek on every tide, the river runs clear in a high-walled channel through Brookmill Park. Alongside, the tracks of the Docklands Light Railway hug the embankment on their way south.

I follow a path along the bank and pass a mighty three-pronged plane rising from a lawn by the playground. The fat bole has something stuffed into a crevice at head height. Curious, I walk over to find a tree fungus spreading inside the trunk like foam filler.

At the north end of Brookmill stands a copper beech, hard by the riverside. I grab the lowest branch and struggle clockwise around the trunk, before lifting myself through a tangle of limbs. Higher up, a curling horn of a branch provides a useful hook to rest on.

The river seen from the air seems low in its concrete channel, running back towards the Thames. Lumps of wall from some bygone structure sit deep in the silt, and ripples appear around them, dragging against the current. On the far side I glimpse the red-brick vault of the James Engine House through the leaves, an imposing Victorian pumping station.

Brookmill’s ornamental gardens fan out to the west. The herringbone brick paths run towards a round pool with a fountain at its centre, the water conceivably drawn from the river itself. The park is deserted and no one sits on the red tubular benches that look like the requisitioned hand rails of old Central Line carriages.

Climbing as far as the branches will permit, I find an arcane symbol hacked with a knife into the uppermost part of the trunk. The pattern is impossible to decipher, more hieroglyph than 21st-century tag. I wonder how long it’s been here and whether this old scar has shifted with time, the bark contorting in its annual growth cycle. Lichen proliferates where the blade incised the tree, colouring the hewn bark a gaudy yellow.

Descending, I place my hand in a kind of double arch in the wood, one inverted on top of the other like the famous scissor divide in Wells Cathedral. The interior of the beech is a labyrinth and I slip back to the ground as if through a ball of wire mesh.

As I retrace my steps along the bank two morbidly obese rats cross my path. They bob out of sight behind a fence, off to pay homage to their king.