'Poplar is in Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest borough’s in London [near] the glassy new blocks of Canary Wharf (pictured).' Photo: Ryan Tang / Unsplash.
‘We will bring about environmental change by making people feel joyful and excited.’
How can trees tell the story of our most urban landscapes? Rebecca Hardy meets the Quaker nature writer Bob Gilbert to find out.
One of my most inspiring moments came while walking along the heavily polluted Green Lanes in North London towards Wood Green, and spotting a large heron on the bank of the adjacent New River. These sudden unexpected glimpses of wildlife in urban settings are something that Bob Gilbert, an author and naturalist, has dedicated himself to recording.
‘These are special moments,’ he says. ‘If I see a woodpecker, or a brimstone butterfly in my garden, it can make my week. Anywhere it would be a gift, but here, in the heart of the city, it takes on a special significance; it is a glimpse of the divine.’
In his book Ghost Trees Bob Gilbert calls these moments the ‘unexpected eruption of nature into the everyday’ and the book is bursting with them. Ghost Trees has been described as an ‘urban botanical sleuth’, devoted to tracing and charting the rise and fall of urban wildlife in unlikely spaces. From the concrete-dominated sprawl that is Poplar in East London, where he lives with his Anglican priest wife, the self-confessed ‘warden of moths and slimes and mosses’ has documented these ‘small joys’ found on his daily walks.
‘On the surface, the book is a story of a place told through trees,’ he tells me, ‘from the trees that were there before people arrived, to the black poplar that the area is named after’ (which is no longer found there), ‘right up until “post-human trees”; those that would populate the city if humans were no longer around. But there are several other themes to the book. I believe in the importance of connections. For me, we are disconnected on several levels, cut off in terms of time and with no sense of our own history; losing our relationship with place and the feeling of belonging, and disconnected in our relationships with other human beings and other species. So the task of the book was very much about wanting to reconnect; to explore our sense of place. Yes, it is about the local area, but it is also about approaching the universal through the local. It’s about what Quaker writer Alastair McIntosh calls “digging where you stand”.’
Being aware
Bob Gilbert is sixty-nine. He became a Quaker in his mid-thirties, when, he tells me, he went to a Meeting and had ‘that moment of coming home’. When I ask if he regards the book as his ministry, he agrees: ‘I’ve had to work hard with the idea it’s my ministry and that writing is my spiritual commitment. Coming from a Calvinist background, I feel I should be out campaigning or out on demos instead. But I do think the work is very related to Quakerism; it’s related to celebrating creation and simplicity and it’s also about alternatives to consumption and capitalism, which is about being satisfied and enjoying what we have. And that’s always about paying attention, like the saying goes: “Attentiveness is love.”’
It is also, he says, a book of ‘celebration’; about ‘seeing more deeply and with fresh eyes’. This notion of celebration is key to him. ‘It involves being aware, of looking and seeing what is often overlooked and may seem insignificant. Too much environmental campaigning is done through guilt and fear. We will bring about environmental change by making people feel joyful and excited.’
This sense of celebration comes from the chronicling of details noticed on his doorstep and around his wife’s inner city parish: the Jersey cudweed that grows on Docklands’ paths; the ninety-four different species and cultivars of trees he has counted in Poplar, from Australian cider gums to Italian alders, from Indian bean trees to the Chinese ailanthus. ‘It’s looking for the weeds that grow in the cracks of pavements,’ he says, ‘the wall ferns, which are increasing now as a consequence of the Clean Air Act of the 1960s; the peregrine falcons that nestle on a tower block. I could list many special things, but it’s not so much about the unusual but about appreciating the everyday; the daily activities of the sparrows and starlings that roost on top of a crane.’
But for all the talk of celebrating, the book also feels like a lament for what we have lost (he traces lost rivers and forgotten trees) and for what is fast disappearing and can only be glimpsed fleetingly before it is swallowed up. ‘You can steal the sky, as well as the earth’, he told The Guardian recently, referring to the area’s relentless over-development.
Building better
Poplar is in Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest borough’s in London, yet it is sandwiched between the glassy new blocks of Canary Wharf (pictured), and the shiny Olympic developments of Stratford. ‘We are being decimated by development,’ he says. ‘If you look at Canary Wharf, those buildings are sheer walls of glass; they’re totally sterile and unsuitable for wildlife. We need to be designing cities for multiple lifeforms, not just people. The developments we’re seeing in Poplar are hugely damaging to local communities. They’re putting up privatised blocks with gyms and concierges on the door. The crucial question is: development for whose benefit?’
The technology is there, he says, to build greener spaces with green walls and roofs, brown roofs (with crushed stones or gravel), ‘joined-up parks’ (‘creating connectivity’), and houses with eaves and hollow bricks where sparrows, house martins, swift and kestrels can nest. ‘We need pocket parks and a certain wildness in the design. Parks are changing. Every blade of grass used to be mowed short, but now parts are left uncut. Even small things like that make a difference; leave room for untidiness in the garden. Don’t use pesticides. Leave parts of the grass uncut. Go for as much variety as you can to encourage the diversity of invertebrates, because we can build all the nest boxes we like, but if we are killing all the invertebrates they feed on, there’s no point.’
Ultimately, though, what is required is ‘a more radical shift’; a whole ‘greening’ of city design. He says it’s the small things that bring him ‘intense excitement’: walking from his house to the market and finding mistletoe growing in a children’s playground (‘the only one in Tower Hamlets’) or ‘the mistle thrush singing at three in the morning and waking up to hear that – almost like an act of resistance – competing with the buses doing their diesel-coughing and the aeroplanes taking off from London City Airport.’ He pauses. ‘Ordinary discoveries like that.’
Comments
The message of this interview really strikes a chord with me here in Shanghai.
By h.n.jootna on 17th February 2019 - 11:59
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