Near our house is a line of fruit-bearing trees – elders and hawthorns – whose origins I’ve often pondered. On visiting this spot near the Monsal Trail recently, I gained clearer insight into the agents that are responsible.
Our long-held sense of land as legal property, not to mention our intensifying notions of agricultural mastery over all physical ground, nourishes a false impression that we control the lot. We don’t. Fruit-bearing trees are often obedient to an alternative jurisdiction.
The predominant red colour in tree berries (rowan and hawthorn especially) is one clue. So is the misty bloom on fruits like sloes and plums, which apparently reflects light in the ultraviolet spectrum and enhances their visibility among the foliage, especially to anyone overhead. Those advertising techniques are evidence that trees bear fruit not for us, but for birds.
This life-enhancing symbiosis dates back to the Cretaceous period, but you can see its impacts now in any winter hedge. Go down the local lanes near you and most old trees will have an understorey of bramble, elder and hawthorn sown and manured by roosting thrushes.
The ultimate friend to fruit trees among Europe’s birds is the waxwing. As I wrote in November, last year the bird erupted into Britain in large numbers, with a flock of 250 at Hassop among the biggest ever recorded in Derbyshire. Here, briefly, they are revealing the depth and intimacy of their fruit-tree relations.
Surely this continent’s most beautiful songbirds, waxwings sport lines of oval spots – yellow, white, red – in separate sequences down their wings and tail tips. As the birds clamber, parrot-like, often upside down, in their voracious search for fruit, they flutter and spread these brilliant features. But rather than exposing the bird’s presence, the berry-like patches of colour have evolved to disrupt the owner’s outline and disguise it from predators overhead.
A secondary mark of so lovely a creature is that even its excrement has aesthetic appeal, emerging copiously and apparently resembling strings of pearls. As waxwings scour the countryside for ever more fruit supplies, they make constant seed deposits, each complete with its moiety of fertiliser, laying down future fruit-bearing gardens on which their descendants perhaps will one day feed.
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