From the ashes of the cabin rises Peckerwood — Mark Mattock’s observations of his “feral’d” back garden in London NW2.
“Crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me…”
I know exactly where he is. Not on the twiggy TV aerial gripped to the brick chimney directly opposite, below which a few scattered rectangles of amber glow dimly like open windows on an advent calendar — his usual spot; no, he’s nearer, in the ash trees. I’m not sure if it is he that woke me this time, pulled me free from another shit ending to a pleasant dream, from the briars of anxiety that creep into my half-sleep every dark fucking morning, or just the usual dark thoughts themselves. Crow. I open my eyes briefly to look up at the windows, just make out the bare naked ash tops violently swaying in the pre-dawn post-apocalyptic light — the light I imagined in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I close them again and watch him as I listen. Crow. Roaring over the squalling wind as he rides, like a crazed surfer, a convulsing branch of the big ash at the end of the garden, spraying from a crashing wave of jet-black ivy that clings around the lower half of the tree. Crow in the clanging, clattering canopy, cut against the doom sky of dread grey. His incessant caws manically pump raw, guttural euphoria into the deeply depressing dim. His whole pent, haunched and taught body doubling up, flexing, bowing, to force max volume into every rasping avian roar. Tail fanning open wide then shut; open, shut. I love it. He knows. The worm’s turned, the longest night just passed. The wired corvid is pumping thrill, threat, joy, rapture, into the dying night. Proclaiming — reclaiming — his shit for the coming spring. Somewhere below a Robin blazes up, spitting, tinkling, dribbling song in ear-piercing crystal clarity. Its lyrics float up out of the still, cavernous dark of the night garden. Together they are bass and treble. Dawn chorus in ‘Peckerwood,’ London NW2.
Mad-eyed wood pigeons hang in the waxy-leaved ivy, a gallows tree of shrunken-headed parrots in gorgeous shades of grey gorging on the ample globular umbels of berries. They flap like feet-tied chickens being carried home from market. Above them, in the bare branches, a trio of ring-necked parakeets in lurid spring green, uncharacteristically quiet. On the ground a female blackbird rifles through the leaf litter, completely vanishing every time she freezes to inspect what she’s exposed, before bouncing one hop forward to repeat, scattering leaves left and right, exposing the — already — new green spear tips of the bluebells.
It was the bluebells that set this whole thing off. The scattering of them appearing every spring in the impenetrable, fox-reeking spinney of bramble, cherry and stunted pear trees at the neglected end of the garden. Clearly not from B&Q, but from long before it. Long before the house, the houses; the vapid affluent 1930s suburban figment of green and pleasant with its fenced, regimented rows of little English Edens, of neutered nature, one tree of life bearing toxic forbidden fruit — pear, apple — per plot. Before astroturf lawns with molehills of dog excreta, paving, and green wheelie bins for your garden waste, collected fortnightly, which you can buy back later from B&Q, as near sterile as the gardens it came from. Before hawking tree surgeons who don’t know an ash from an alder. Before the gangs of pressure hose-wielding drive-cleaners. It was the bluebells nagging, what if? And the sparring, speckled wood butterflies spiralling against the blinding sun as if dropped from it at the end of every April; the pendulous sedge in the far corner, dog violets in the lawn; the puritanical roses gone feral, self-liberated pink-petalled blooms once again spread wide in defiance, beaming promises to passing bee, hoverfly and wasp. It was the wood saying, you can see me can’t you? You know me. Fuck ‘em, do it, ‘Knepp it.’
I did. It’s now twelve or so years later.
Every year since the clearing and the ruining began — the watching and wait-and-seeing, the intuition and instinct — a new and ever more complex configuration of what once was is still possible. Liberation, breakout, return, rejuvenation. Hashtag ‘re-wilding,’ leaving things mostly the fuck alone and letting stuff happen.The spinney at the end of the garden is now a thicket of hawthorn, blackthorn, dogwood, hazel, buckthorn; with a full classic woodland ground flora of wild garlic, bluebells, dog’s mercury, celandine, primroses, pendulous sedge. It merges seamlessly, under the old wooden-framed swings, with what once was the lawn, now, in summer, a waist-high umbellifer forest of cow parsley and hogweed; with campion, sorrel, buttercups, ragwort, cleavers, oxe-eye daisies, knapweeds, marjoram, assorted grasses. In the fringes, edges, and miscellaneous ‘eye sores:’ nettles, garlic mustard, burdock, cat’s ear, forget-me-not, dandelion, dock, wood avens, ground ivy, mint, valerian and the rest. Tall, pewter-grey, smooth-barked ash trees line the sides, rise from thick ivy, honeysuckle and bramble boundary hedges. A wide, majestic column of ivy and jasmine climbs the mature, wrinkled ash tree nearest to the house, towering to a height level with the top bedroom window. In just over a decade, the whole space has metamorphosed into what looks like a section of old wooded footpath from the back of a village allotment, cut, lifted intact, and dropped at the back of the house. Or spat from the vent of a time-tunnel, the other end hiding like a giant rabbit hole in the hedge of a 70s nirvana for rural, feral youth. During Covid the space was sanctuary, sanatorium, critical life support, as ‘day after day, they kept my friends away.’ The guilt of having what so many didn’t.
Ok, I’m being a little disingenuous, I do interfere. But if the cat is the space’s apex predator, since there are no stoats or weasels, and the bins or handouts that the foxes thrive on are not exactly prey, then I can be the human disturbance… That disturbance amounts to just ten, twenty hours a year of playing Ma Nature, mostly chucking seeds into the mix with a ‘if it happens great, if it doesn’t fine.’ Over one hundred species of plant have been, gone, stayed, thrived, rampaged, played their part. Some were already here, some found their own way — birds shat most of the spinney.
In the mute, wet gloom of another dim dawn, I make out the white waistcoat of a magpie moving about in the lower branches of the big cherry. It seems to have something stuck to it like a Post-It note, glowing a sickly pale orange. In its beak, a full slice of emmental cheese, the packaged sort commonly seen in the spillage of fox-ransacked bins. The pied corvid drops down to the ground and clumsily tries to push the holed cheese into the soggy claret and umber leaf mould collected against an old ash log, in the hope of caching it for later, but it keeps breaking up into ever-smaller pieces. It fastidiously perseveres until every piece is hidden. A chinking blackbird remains invisible. The ‘kek kek’ of a Great Spotted woodpecker I can’t see either. In the gusty smoke dusk sky of the last day of the year, a musket — a fierce little male sparrowhawk — circles with agitative menace disproportionate to his size. It’s a good omen, my spirit bird.
Streaks of rainwater zig-zag, as if in panic, down and across the panes. Outside, just beyond, buddleia leaves flicker like shoals of dancing grey-green dace, sheltering in the turbulent protection of a sunken branch. Beyond that the whole garden rocks, sways, arches, bends, oscillating violently. Deep cleanse by low pressure, wind blast, combing out cobwebs, husks and chaff, old cuticle and flakes of snail shell from nook, crack and cranny. Bits stick to the wet panes.
Pin-sharp crescent moon and Venus glow deep infinity blue, in the dawn at the end of a screaming fox night. The magpie perched on the ‘king twig’ of the tallest ash burns orange, recharging in the electromagnetic radiation just skimming across the rooftops. The windows beyond the back garden reflect the dawn sky and shine like puddles of vertical water in the darkest peat. Neat frosted blankets of shed roof float along the garden boundaries, still dark without dimension, a flotilla of phantom rafts. Cold hard frost, the kind that was missing last winter before the alarming spring of less and absence, of empty frog ponds and missing Orange-tips. From bed I check the time by the position of the few individual stars that manage to shine through the claustrophobic urban skyglow. I deeply miss the true dark of the cabin. 5am…ish. Get up.
The cat can’t find enough space to take his morning shit. His white paws and face — the only parts visible, like the collars on the woodies — scratch desperately at the bare iron earth where I’ve been pulling up ivy. LA is burning, I’m on the phone to family there. The dog fox sniffing his way across the shed roof stops to look up: he felt me watching him from the kitchen. He stares at me through skewed eyes, deranged, intense and indifferent. I stare back as I listen to the updates. I’m no threat so he continues unhurried. He’s big, thick-set, urban, rusty and musty, as if made from the same stuff as the upturned iron fire pit being slowly swallowed by the mountain of cuttings below him. Its exposed underside is streaked with bright orange rust, etched onto it by runs of overflowing water when it was standing upright, like miniature flows of burning lava; as vivid as the pyramid of cherry logs piled nearby. Their sawn ends are immensely beautiful, intricate, dense concentric growth rings like the grooves of a vinyl record, on which the songs of the last decades, of sun and rain, winter and summer, drought and flood are recorded.
On another morning, it’s miserably mild again, still dark. I’m momentarily freaked out by the vision of…whatever the opposite of a rising Phoenix is. Dangling, long sinewy stilt legs that hang under huge black outstretched wings distract me from my book, descending in the grey half-light gap above the hedge and fence into the neighbouring garden, like Nosferatu through a hole in a gothic roof. It’s the goldfisher heron, checking the ornamental pond in case there are any replaced fish. Like any Vlad the Impaler, he wouldn’t dare in daylight. He aborts mission with loud swooshes of wings, in turn freaking out at the sudden sight of me. He turns out to be the opening act of what becomes one of those periodical but inexplicable bird days. Like a fantasy RSPB Big Garden Bird Count. Male blackcap and goldcrest picking micro invertebrate life in the giant honeysuckle tangle slowly greening. A piercing row between a pair of coal tits. A gust of long-tailed tits. The resident male wren, getting noisier every day, has a potential mate. So does the Great Spotted woodpecker that I see daily now. I find her — she doesn’t have the red patch at the back of the head — sipping water from a hollow mid-way up the big ash. She joins the male, working the dead, thick ivy veins I severed a few years ago that wrap serpentine around the ash trunks I’ve also now ring-barked. Both climbing in stop start jolts as if controlled by magnets, they hammer, gouge and prise away, leaving lengths looking like some skinned, hawk-plucked snake.
The cat is gently sniff-reading the long springy topmost twigs of the tallest wild cherry, systematically, with serious concentration. A palimpsest of residual traces of scaly, spidery feet reach back decades: goldfinches, starlings, chiffchaffs, blackcaps, robins and waxwings. It’s weird to finally see, in the real, rather than through my binoculars, this familiar, significant and insignificant, feature from way above. After years of procrastination — it’s a cherry, prime early nectar-provider and fruit stall — I finally felled it yesterday. And I have to admit, with all the heart pounding, adrenaline rushing, risk and reckless thrill and satisfaction, to memories of mindless vandalism. The smugness of felling it into a confined space with calculated precision. I have a closing canopy and I need more sun on the ground. This cherry, in leaf, cast a lot of shade. Closed canopy forest is now one of the leading causes of diminishing woodland biodiversity in Europe.
I blow on the steaming coffee in a feel-good bliss, a soil-bacteria-induced serotonin rush. Reeking of woodsmoke; hands stained, punctured, scratched, beaded red raw and crimson. Loam-black dirty finger nails. Feeling rejuvenated, blissed, with a sense of simple no-need-to-share accomplishment. Watching the robin rust breasts, obviously this year’s breeding pair, bouncing about in the aftermath of ‘woodland management.’ The male is clearly the genetic descendent of this garden’s dynasty, recklessly tame; I’ve nearly stepped on him several times in the last couple of days. A group of bickering starlings flutter on crow’s aerial like butterflies on a thistle head. The congregation of house sparrows, flat-capped cocks and antsy hens, loud in Sparrow Bush to my left. It’s playtime at the school on the corner. The police helicopter hovers overhead and drowns the kids and sparrows out, but not the defiant cock great tit pumping out his two-note proclamations, nor a male dunnock’s loud, high-pitched, incessant trilling. Sap’s rising.
This soggy morning, just beyond the kitchen window, a female blackbird has started a tug of war with the surface of the planet. An impossibly timed spatter of avian shit hits the left side pane as if the lobworm rope just snapped.
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Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club