Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Two of the beech’s lower limbs have melted into one another, their bark conjoining into a single continuous skin, their vascular systems growing and uniting. Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid. Like the halite down in the darkness of Boulby mine, like the calcite I had seen beneath the Mendips, like glacial ice drawing itself on over topsoil and bedrock, living wood seems to flow, given time. ‘I’ve heard this called “pleaching”,’ I say to Merlin, patting the fused branches. ‘The artist David Nash planted a circle of ash trees in a clearing in North Wales, then bent and wove the trees so that they grew not just next to one another but into one another, a dancing “Ash Dome”, made of a meld of boughs and limbs.’ ‘Actually,’ says Merlin, ‘plant scientists have a technical term for this. We call it “snogging”, or to give it its full name, “tree snogging”.’ He smiles. ‘Well, not quite. The technical term is actually “inosculation”, from the Latin osculare, meaning “to kiss”. Inosculation means “to en-kiss”. It can happen across trees and between species too.’ Though I know the word ‘inosculation’, I had not known its etymology; what seemed a chilly specialist term gains a passionate warmth, and feels true to this arboreal ‘en-kissing’, which makes it hard to say where one being ends and another begins. I think of Ovid’s version of the ‘Baucis and Philemon’ myth, in which an elderly couple are transformed into an intertwining oak and linden, each suppor...