The bottom part of this Plantlife reserve, where it meets Monsal Dale, has some of the finest trees I’ve found in the Peak District. Not for their age or massive size, but for what you might call their entangled condition. A recent find is an old pollarded horse chestnut whose sinuous limbs wave wildly, and every one of them is completely moss-and-fern coated.
If it didn’t also look so tough and monumentally static, the whole thing could easily resemble kelp swaying in the tide. The late Tony Hare, co-founder of the organisation that owns Deep Dale, invented a phrase: “As mad as a tree.” In this instance it feels apt.
Yet my Deep Dale favourites are the hawthorns. Even now, entirely leafless, they loom as thickened spheres of green. Not just the trunk, but the branches and every twig to their tips are smothered in living vegetation. Mosses of multiple species crowd round any hawthorn superstructure, and on top of their woolly bulk run silver‑grey patterns of shield lichen, while other parts have frayed tassles of oakmoss (another lichen in the genus Evernia).
These beings aren’t so much trees as miniature ecosystems: harmonies, entanglements in four dimensions. The thoughts that nag me as I attend them (and I should add, I’m tempted to fall to my knees) are, first, how many hundreds of thousands of years have these various parts lived together like this, and, second, here is something our species needs to relearn.
Another speciality of Deep Dale is some fabulous hazel bushes. Buried deep in the woods and probably coppiced last around the time of the second world war, the largest comprises 70 stems from a single stump. These spray outwards in all directions like light from a new-risen sun. The tree is, of course, made of sunlight and water, laid down as lignin and sap and living tissue. Most moving in this hemisphere-shaped tree is here at the twig ends. The flowers may be microscopic compared with the lemon-yellow aura created by 10,000 catkins – each of which incidentally sheds 4m grains of pollen – but those 5mm-long spikes are deepest blood red and the brightest colour present in this entire landscape.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
