Tales from a Park in Lockdown

“I lived for a long time beside it in sad days, when the constant sight of such a green and shady wilderness from my window was a great consolation”.
W.H.Hudson

We are not allowed out for long nor to go far, yet on a day so beautiful it hurts to be inside. I’m listless weighed by stale internal airs, done with the excited attempts to entertain me. I lift myself out of the house like limp spinach being raised from the pan and slough my feet to the park across the way.

When there is no place to go
It’s a park. Just a park, like all the other London parks. Grass. Trees. Paths. A place to walk dogs, hold hands, ride bikes and bounce balls. I know it well and inured I am to its wonders, for it is ‘just a park’. A place familiar, and a place to go when there are no other places.

Today, I walk barefoot across the grass dodging frisbees and frowning at the too loud music from the young men foistering their pollution upon us. Dads jog with their kids who look proud and determined, puffing and rolling their heads. On the tarmac paths there’s stumbling with blades and skates on the uneven cracks and ladies push toddlers whilst talking in their native tongues on phones.

The police are back
There are police patrolling in threes - perhaps this is what is meant by community policing - they move in their own little community groups, like children. I watch them hone in on a lone hapless woman on a bench sitting in the sun, talking into her phone. I’d rage if I stopped to see the three of them harass her, so I turn the other way and look at a tree.

It is tall and skinny, bark like latticed window lead with feeble branches brushing against a pale spring sky. It looks dead. It’s one of a group, all of which look dead. Others in the park have their branches springing leaves fast and bright, but these are dead. Perhaps the soil compaction has done for them. I wonder vaguely what they are - or were - in that non committal way, meaning that I’ll be too lazy to look them up. I shrug and begin the walk back home, my hour of sunlight nearly up. Neither the police nor the woman on the bench can be seen. Balls bounce, music systems vibrate with noise and children ride their bikes in and around the basket-ballers throwing their spherical rubber where the long since broken hoops would have been.

Dead trees in a park
I return home and sit with a cup of tea, moody. I swipe my phone in a bored sort of way, sighing as I do and thumb through the apps I have. I hover over a tree app and open it. I find myself entering my park’s name thinking that the tree I believe to be dead might mysteriously be listed. I laugh at myself wondering why a dead tree in a west London park might be on an app.

It is.

I discover its a Japanese Pagoda tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) and there are less than 300 in London. 5 are here in the park.

Fingers dance through the app, ‘TreeTalk’. The park, I discover is rich in trees, some rare to London, some common and against them all, dogs pee, and men and women attach their rubber exercise bands for their stretches. Just names and shapes in a park.

Like children at school
Two days later I read Irina Dumitrescu’s words; ‘We are banned from each other, but not from nature’. It’s sunny again and the park a little emptier after the Minister’s head-masterly lecture from his lectern, warning that he will ban play-time unless we behave. Without the distraction of people at play, I see now, how alive is the park with trees. They whisper and sing and throw their leaves for others to catch, their branches outstretched like arms, green hands waving. They dance and sway to a windy beat, and play with their seeds and talking loud (I hear they do) beneath the ground. They are tall and short, in leaf and out of leaf, yellow, in blossom, red and beautiful.

The Japanese Pagoda Tree
I return to the Japanese Pagoda tree, which is one of the last of the trees to be in leaf - thus its dead appearance - and I sit against its tyre-tread bark. Since I was here last, I’ve become familiar with its story. It’s Chinese not Japanese and is the ‘official’ tree of Beijing. Via Japan, it found its way to the US and Europe arriving in London in 1753 and being able to withstand high levels of pollution, it has become an urban tree. I know now, that it was typically planted around Buddhist temples, thus the pagoda name and despite it being used as a tree to mark the graves of monks, it is associated with demons. Perhaps this makes it not the best tree to be sitting under at this moment, but the view before me of West London at play and the limes glorious on the park boundaries is too lovely a scene to leave. I have another 20 minutes officer, please let me be. I have another 690 trees to discover.