“The clown passeth by thee and heedeth thee not, / But thou’rt a warm source of reflection for me” wrote John Clare in To a Dead Tree. This clown has passeth an old dead tree in Attingham Park – at Atcham, near Shrewsbury – many times without much heedeth, but today, warmed by bright sunlight after weeks of cold weather, it is certainly a source of reflection.
Clare saw his own mortality in a dead tree, but this one speaks of a beyond-death experience. A tall, leafless, largely branchless, barkless, wraith-pale pole stands near ancient oaks, some of which also have bare “dead” trunks and boughs and are beautiful in their starkness. This vision of a ruin may be a Scots pine, perhaps more than 300 years old, and it’s been dead for many of them. A standing dead tree such as this is called a kelo tree, using a Finnish word for dead standing timber that has come into common usage.
A kelo tree that has grown for 300 years may spend the next 300 years still standing. Without bark, its external sapwood is colonised by blue-stain fungi that give it a silver-grey colour and, because it utilises cell contents rather than destroying them, delays colonisation by rotting fungi. In addition, the tree’s heartwood resists rot because of terpenes and antifungal components in its resin.
When the tree eventually falls, it becomes the niche for basidiomycetes – kelo fungi so rare that, on this vanishing substrate, they have been almost eliminated from lowland Europe. Respect the standing dead and when they fall, leave them be.
This tree, like a biblical pillar of salt, may appear in life’s drama as a minor character to which things happen, but it resists storms such as Goretti and all his blizzard and bluster. Instead, the kelo turns inward in a supreme act of endurance beyond death, a stylus holding on to its mysterious, saproxylic communities of life, pointing through the turbulence of the skies to the stars beyond.
And so, in that before-dawn time the Anglo-Saxons called uhtceare when we are beset with anxieties, we can hold the image of the kelo tree, resolute and defiant of our mithering ghosts, and let our troubles break over it.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
