The new year is a strange time for disabled or chronically ill people. I'm definitely not the first to observe that “crip time” is non-linear, and we experience such a dissonance with the calendar cycles. We also have to listen to able-bodied people make frivolous, and serious, resolutions that only they can make. If we wanted to participate, we could make resolutions about our inner lives, but even those feel fraught with difficulty and risk.

If anything, at this time I realise I need to focus on the cyclic and more-than-human timescales that we can observe in the natural world.

This year, I wrote about a particular kind of tree, that reminds us that what could appear to be an end can in fact be a new beginning.

I submitted the essay on a whim to the New Nottingham Journal and got it published! I'm sharing here but I encourage you to subscribe and/or support the fledgling NNJ if you can.

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Phoenix Trees

There is a row of cherry trees in the Forest Recreation Ground, leading to the playing fields. They are generously sized – clearly the oldest in the park, their flowers heavy and humid when cupped in the hand. The trees form a canopy, this tunnel of petals that I imagine being like Kyoto. These cherries bloom during a certain week or fortnight in April.

In 2020, when I got up from my Covid sick bed for the first time to leave the house, they were in full bloom. It was Easter Sunday. While I’m not Christian, I did feel a certain new start that day, fancying myself free of the frightening new virus that loomed over us. I didn’t know then that this feeling – rising from my sick bed and coming back to life – would become familiar.

Five cherry blooms later, I am still sick. My energy is severely limited; I spend most of the day with my feet up.

As I’ve come to learn in outings on good days, there are other notable cherry trees in the Forest Rec: the big one at the café, which creates a big pink corona over the space, and the white cherry grafted on top of another pink one.

Or the row that runs near the park-and-ride car park, where they’ve been interplanted with delicate birch trees.

But the other cherry trees that marked me are the ones just outside the wall of the Rec, in the Rock Cemetery.

They’re found in a sunken, walled section of the burial ground, where the victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic are buried.

These trees are massive, perhaps the size of a gigantic tropical ficus – the ones with the hanging aerial roots. When their leaves come in, the cherries provide shade for the massive stone markers made to honour those stricken by the flu. Names had once been carved on the markers, but are no longer clearly decipherable.

There is no gentler way of putting it – this is a mass grave, and it was designed to be hidden from view. To reach the space, you wander to the back of the cemetery and take a set of stairs – each one tall but spaced widely apart. The place feels like an imagined hypnosis prompt. One cherry flowers early, the other waits until April. They rise above the cemetery wall and, as we walk in the Forest Rec between January and April, they wave to us with their thousands of bright hands.

Besides the cherries, the centennial oaks are the other trees that mean the most to me in the Rec, and recently I found myself discussing them online. This was unexpected.

I’d joined the ‘Queerdos’ Zoom for disabled queer people in the Nottingham area, and towards the end, our facilitator Evie proposed an exercise where we’d give voice to trees.

She sent a photo of eight tree types – oak, chestnut, spruce, and so on. Then she floated off to the next breakout room, and there was a long silence. I think perhaps everyone had expected to give voice to an individual tree, a lone witness to our world, not a variety – a tree stereotype!

Somebody expressed this thought, which was greeted with nods. I said I often imagined the oaks in the Forest Rec had harboured chats between Luddites. The person who’d spoken replied that their ancestors were Luddites. Then they talked about a conker tree from their childhood that had fallen but remained alive, recumbent – a phoenix tree. Their siblings used to climb up and down it, practicing key tree-climbing skills.

That sparked a discussion about these trees, which only need a couple of roots in the ground to live. I mentioned I’d just seen a mature birch like this – with perhaps 90% of its roots just floating in the air, dried out and inert. But while it lay down, the birch was thriving.

There were nods, and an unspoken recognition about the symbolism that such a tree had for us. The Descendant of the Luddites interjected that the exposed roots of these trees can unearth archaeological treasures – as if the tree were performing a grand reveal, just for us. Then they mentioned the massive tree in the Arboretum that’s supported by sturdy iron braces. Oh, I chimed in, the fig tree. We were the only ones in the room who seemed to know what we were talking about.

I had immediately remembered the Scottish Covid Memorial, the work of Alec Finlay, an artist with ME-CFS and Long Covid who I’d met in an online support group in the early days of my illness. Despite being unable to walk beyond his garbage bins, he had conceived and created the memorial in Pollok Country Park called ‘I Remember’, which is made up of 40 ‘tree supports’ – wooden braces made for oak trees which have begun to lean. Some look like stick figures, pushing back against the trees leaning onto them. Others look like utilitarian objects. Each one has been custom-designed and imprinted with a short phrase: ‘I Remember’.

Here in Nottingham our Covid memorial is one hornbeam tree, still-juvenile, planted in the Forest Rec. The dedication took place on a grim March day; there were maybe fifty people there, bearing daffodils. Some brought printouts in memory of their loved ones, in plastic sleeves to resist the rain. It was such a profoundly lonely event.

Not far from this young hornbeam tree, there is an old recumbent oak, which fell over just after the Covid tree was dedicated. It’s part of a line of oaks that I figure are between 150 and 200 years old. It might have heard the Luddites’ conspiratorial conversations.

After the online discussion I found a paper called ‘The Ecology of Scotland’s Wonderful Recumbent or “Phoenix” Trees’. It suggests that only older trees tend to fall and stay alive; it is not uncommon for a 200-year-old tree to fall and then live for another fifty to eighty years. The authors aren’t sure why none have been found to live longer than this: whether it’s because they die off naturally, or because people use them for timber.

The paper argues for an effort to raise awareness about phoenix trees, and the ‘value and significance’ they hold. It says that professionals and landowners need to be brought along so that they don’t just consider them waste and chop them up. I was pleasantly surprised, I confess, when our park staff didn’t dismember and remove the recumbent oak.

‘Phoenix trees,’ the paper reads, ‘combine several compelling elements: their enigmatic sculptural beauty, their compelling efforts to survive against the odds, and the unlikely stories of how they adjust themselves to their recumbent positions.’

On days when my health allows me to walk to the Rec, we visit this oak, taking the dog up the reclining trunk, mining its bark with treats. My partner complains, justifiably, about the litter and used condoms at its base. We often talk about leaving a sign in the voice of the tree, asking people to respect it. Still, I have no doubt that – if the chainsaws are kept away – the sideways phoenix will outlast me.