A black poplar leans into the brightest summer sky. The light is harsh and the air breathless on the hottest day of the year, but the tree is moved by its own breeze. The leaves dance. They sing. From craggy fissures in its bark to the high branches above, they sough and flutter, drone and hum, a song as old as these fields, yet entirely of the moment. This music of water, air and timber is redolent with living history.
Across the fields, the sound of guests at Sarah and David’s wedding celebration in a marquee, where the band plays mambo, fades into fields near Melverley where the Welsh border follows the River Vyrnwy into its confluence with the Severn. This is a classic floodplain landscape of the Severn Valley, a long sweep of green framed by the Breidden Hills and Rodney’s Pillar in the distance. Melverley was notorious for flooding, but newer flood defences on the Severn have changed that in recent years.
David is a conservationist who bought the old cow pasture here 15 years ago and began to plant a flood plain woodland. Sarah, the author of Swifts and Us, is also a conservationist, and their wedding is as much a celebration of rewilding as it is of their tying the knot. Many of the guests are volunteers who planted hundreds of trees, created paths for public access, built the swallow barn.
A single swallow zips across the bluest, loneliest sky, making a summer all on its own. Ruddy darter dragonflies poise in the reed canary grass, crickets leap and fly along recently mown rides, purple loosestrife flowers like old wetland outlaws, a few red admirals cruise the hedges, and maybe that’s a purple hairstreak butterfly flickering through the spaces of an old oak’s canopy.
The black poplar is a lone male of Populus nigra betulifolia, a charismatic survivor of isolated pockets of Severn Valley poplars in Shropshire and the Marches. He sings an ancient history of fertility rites and veneration. David has planted some female black poplars here and hopes future weddings will witness a blizzard of cottony seeds loaded with the potential for new giants of the river woods.
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• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (Guardian Faber) is published on 26 September; pre-order now at the guardianbookshop.com and get a 20% discount
