LOVE IN A WET CLIMATE

Alison Averis

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? asked Shakespeare of his mysterious lover, four hundred years ago. Thou art more lovely, and more temperate …

Standing in a midwinter landscape at the far grey edge of Europe, where the woodland blends imperceptibly into the mist of the mistiest isle, I muse on the meaning of temperate. Moderate, without extremes, say the dictionaries. But not lovely, not like a summer’s day. Not like that at all.

Mild winters, cool summers, we ecologists say, and Shakespeare might have been describing the West Highlands when he went on to write Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May / And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

The days we remember; those breathless lengthening sunlit days of spring when the birds sing in a dazzle of new leaves, when the paths are dry, the air full of the heart-lifting, heart-breaking fragrance of birch leaves and bluebells, and the sea and sky that shining intense unclouded blue; are so rare, so few in the West Highlands and the Hebrides. Because this is rainforest. Rain. Forest.

I stand in the obliterating winter rain on the shore of a sea loch, where the waves break endlessly cold on the pebbles; breathing the wet air, listening to the small wind blowing melancholy in the branches and to the splatter and splash of water falling on stone. Behind me the trees rise in a terraced vertical garden of grey woods on a grey hillside; brush-strokes of bare branches interlaced against a blank sky, with the pale silver shine of oak and rowan; the faded old gold of hazel, shining out against the burnt-sienna backdrop of birch. Diffusing into the chill air is the piercing pungency of peat, leaf-mould, decaying grasses, collapsing trunks and branches, the exhalations of fungi, mosses and liverworts. It’s January. It could be July. Only the leaves on the trees would let me know.

Mild winters? This is not the fine flying rain, the gossamer mist-and-dream of story and song. Romanticism is wrong. This is real rain: hard, steady, relentless, and so cold I wonder how it is still liquid.

Rainforest. Rain falling from a wet-on-wet dissolving watercolour sky. Across the loch the hills are as insubstantial and faint as old dreams, blurred behind the white tapestry of the rain. In this wood every twig is shivered and silver with water. Even as it beats into my face, freezes my fingers white, plasters wet hair onto wet skin, the rain leafs out the lovely blossoming of lichens on the flounced sleeves of the trees and lights up the incandescence of bryophytes and ferns.

This is where plants that are rare in the rest of the country are common. They are truly at home here, luxuriating in a perfection of climate where the rainforest reaches its fullest expression in Europe: this particular combination of the enormous quantity and the great frequency of rain, the short, cool summers and the long, wet winters is without equal, and so these Scottish rainforests themselves are without equal. It is to these West Highland woods that we should compare the rest of the western European rainforests: it is these that are more lovely and more temperate.

People see the bryophytes and ferns and lichens in these woods and they write about a green carpet, a green blanket on the rocks and trees. Green is not enough of a word for this richness, this depth, this texture of colour, these hundreds of different species interwoven. It’s a golden green, primarily, given depth and richness by the red stems on so many of the mosses; highlighted with emerald, malachite, bloodstone, jade; green that is almost grey; green that is almost black; greenness variegated with ochre and gold and russet, garnet and purple and crimson; shades of liquid translucency from the steel-gold of Chablis to the warm rich raisin-brown of Madeira. All the tones of honey and whisky. All the greens and golds we can see; and more than we can name. All of them brought into three dimensions with texture, from the wrinkled skins of lichens to the uncountable tiny leaves of liverworts.

Bryophytes are old, old species. They have had all the time in the world to evolve these thousand shades of green. Not just older than all other land plants, they are older than the hills. When the Old Red Sandstones were being laid down in shallow seas three hundred million years ago, there were already leafy liverworts; their frail green leaves absorbing the warm Devonian rain. Survivors. Tiny things, drifting north on the continents through the long ages, persistent through unnumbered cycles of change and decay. Two hundred and fifty million years passed before oaks and birches joined the mosses and liverworts and lichens and ferns, and temperate rainforest began to exist. Their time on the earth is a thousand times longer than ours. Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade / When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

They once possessed the earth as we do now. And they are still here. Softening the edges of a hard land. Enduring these grey months of rain and darkness. Against all the odds of survival: these woods, these ferns, these mosses, these liverworts, these lichens. The earth is green because of their long legacy of refining and redefining the meaning of green. We are here because they made the earth inhabitable, and the air breathable.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Quotes are from Shakespeare, W (1609). To HIs Love (Sonnet 18). In Shake-speares Sonnets. Thomas Thorpe, London.