Country diaryTrees and forestsWenlock Edge, Shropshire: Winged seeds come spiralling out of the murk to land in the lane
From the corner of my eye I see something move but don’t catch what it is. Then there’s another movement, a dark spinning. I watch sycamore keys come spiralling out of the murk to land in the lane.
There’s an Egyptian creation myth about sycamore. The goddess Hathor, the Holy Cow, sat in a sycamore at sunset and created the earth, everything living on it, and the sun.
There’s no Holy Cow sitting in this sycamore, only a couple of rather agitated blackbirds, but the tree’s creativity is irrepressible.
Sycamore seeds, the samara or keys, are formed from a symmetrical cluster of yellowish-green flowers that attract bluebottles for pollination. The female flowers have two fused carpels, which mature into a pair of winged fruits set at acute angles.
These pairs are positioned opposite another pair in the same symmetry as the flowers. However, they detach themselves with a free-spirited randomness to helicopter down to earth.
There must be thousands of keys ready to spring from this one tree and the chances of their finding a spot in which to germinate are high.
The ability of sycamores to grow in the shade of their parent and to create dense stands is one of the reasons this tree, introduced from central and southern Europe in the 15th century for pleasure gardens, has had a bad reputation. Zealous defenders of native species used to advertise “syccie bashing” events, getting people together to remove this “invasive alien”.
“Under the coole shade of a Siccamore/ I thought to close mine eyes some halfe an houre,” wrote Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598.
More recently, with tree experts such as Ted Green calling them the Celtic maple because of their prominence in the rain soaked, wind blasted, uplands of west and north Britain, there has been some rehabilitation of the sycamore’s standing as a great British tree.
The tree is indeed beautiful at all times of year and even the black blotches of rhytisma fungus on falling leaves have a weird charm.
A tree of good luck, bad luck and creativity, it is now a part of us. As the little seed drones twizzle through the grey winter air, their keys are tuning the locks of the future.
Twitter: @DrPaulEvans1
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