Green Cathedrals

Elements #4: Into South Africa's Woods

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It's raining again outside Knysna. That George number plate: CAW, Cold And Wet, is sometimes terribly accurate, here in South Africa's temperate forest zone, otherwise known as Eden (really) or the Garden Route. A place I've nearly lived in multiple times, found and lost love, danced with all my heart, and left multiple footprints on beaches and forest paths. I first visited this area when on my way to Port Elizabeth, PE, Qeberha, and had my first encounter with local elephants - not the fabled wild forest creatures, of which there seems to be only one heartbroken female left, but others tamed and in a park for children to pet. But I had already felt the African forest when I was a boy on a hike with an English girl, visiting Newlands, the indigenous woods on the rainy side of Table Mountain, where the ground sprung wild, lush and sensual. Unsurprisingly, I wanted more, and the Garden Route provided - wilder, bigger, easier to get lost in some folk tale (though the only Garden Route wolves are in a sanctuary: brought in by the old SADF as tracking beasts in the Bush War; found to be actually disoriented outside of their northern habitats; given away as "pets" instead to unwary owners; and finally gathered by people who knew that wolves ain't the same thing at all as dogs).

I first heard about this area when still living in London. Friends who'd visited South Africa told me of having to stop repeatedly at the side of the road to take in breathtaking vistas. I heard more about it when discovering about plans for natural buildings: muddy houses sprouting in The Crags outside Plettenberg Bay. And it's certainly a compelling region, even if it's wet. I remember walking here, early enough in the day to be the first human visitors, having my first experiences of clearing the night's webs, catching the calls of louries in the trees. I remember swimming here, in the rust brown waters, en route to hidden rock pools unguessed at by the speeding cars.

Plenty of empty holiday homes along the Garden Route, and in my naughty twenties we camped in the grounds of one whose Johannesburg owner was none the wiser. Decades later I spent New Year dancing in a home that had once housed apartheid's Groot Krokodil, and we imagined our good vibes shifting the toxicity (and I met at the same party one of the makers of a little documentary about an octopus, that was hoping for success). It seems a travesty that so many people own empty second homes in a land with so many living in shacks; yet I too need more than one place, like the city shack owners who go back to the rural areas at times; so my own vision is of second places that are more cooperatively managed, collectively timeshared. So that no more golf estates creep over the perfect hillsides of dunes or forest.

Back in the nineties I marched round on midnight beaches, following the band leader's sandy footsteps. I slept with five other ruffians in a cottage that fitted one double bed and little else; I hitchhiked between the many small towns, visited inventive pianists living in forest hamlets, read novels in backpackers that had no locks on the front door before playing for holiday season gigs (though still avoiding the teenagers at Plett Rage). Swung from vines and saw chameleons for the first time, and wandered towards Big Trees, almost as elusive as the elephants. Heard from my Afrikaans city friend about the inbred white woodcutters that the old government got embarrassed about, and sensed how the rich indigenous hardwoods gave vibrancy to these original forests that the pines and wattles lacked. Each tree bending at key points in its own ultra-slow growth dance. Watched snails being eaten swimming in butter for the first time (yeuch!) at a fancy restaurant near the Knysna Heads. Then in the early years of a new millennium, saw vervet monkeys chasing round near our cabins, and paddled with our toddler, making ripples with pebbles and watching the fish by the bridges.

And then there was a time I never visited. Building a home and raising a family back in Cape Town, while others took on the forest dream, and sometimes found the going hard here in the beauty. For years the six hours east from Cape Town felt a big barrier which I couldn't cross. When I finally tripped out again it was on a solo road trip, and years had passed. I love Muizenberg, but I needed the forest. 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower' wrote Dylan Thomas, one of my linguistic inspirations. The Chinese call 'Wood' one of their five elements (too practical, perhaps, to include that ethereal air I wrote of last time). It's that life force that makes it Wood, and the tree beings are its boldest expression; even if I also love the fynbos, or the throng of spring daisies, electrifying the streets near the beach, swarming over the park around the vlei.

Near a friend's place outside Knysna there's a patch of the national park forest where intruder North American redwoods soar. You can see them from a distance, bursting through the canopy, a reminder of a forest experiment a century ago or more. There are others, apparently, in Grootvadersbos - grandfather's wood - the first hint of what's to come as one heads east from Cape Town. Unlike the pines and gums, prosaically brought in by Rhodes and his cronies from other safer parts of the colonies (and often leaving dry and sterilised floors below them in their regimented plantations), lying under the redwoods felt like a visit to an ancient community, humming with global root knowledge. And forests are great places to hide: even the redwoods have to be sought out, once the denseness of the vegetation makes them camouflaged for a while. It's a reminder, too, of the ongoing human role in creating forest spaces. The Amazon is largely formed, apparently, around a magically fertile soil base, which no moderns have been able to recreate from scratch, deliberately carried to different regions by forgotten ancestors.

On that solo trip twelve years ago, I made it much further east too, to Hogsback in the Eastern Cape. That province is full of gorgeous landscapes, but forest is a little more difficult to track down. Up in the Hogsback mists I danced among trees in places named for Middle Earth memories. All a little faux: Tolkien may have been born in South Africa, but he left as a small child and almost certainly never visited this spot. But perhaps he did in his dreams: the eponymous Hogsback mountains rise up, their spines holding evocations of ancient wizards, and the magnificent sounds and smells of the forest are elven in tone. A friend lay on the rocks above the trees once, naked in a thunderstorm, as close to plantlike as possible in that holy magic moment. Personally, on my solo trip I also got a spectacular spider bite in my tent; a message, a call for transformation, in traditional understanding. I definitely was undergoing big internal changes that the spider perhaps picked up on. And I met a wise potter, the late Anton van der Merwe, who gave us a little more respect for those water-sucking aliens, seeing planted trees in their context, part of their current landscape; still with a preferred time to fall that the whole landscape could support, not just the simplistic accounting of clear cutters.

'Forest bathing' is a Japanese term for the simple reason that the Japanese have been silviculture specialists longer than just about any other moderns. The rate of replantation in such a human-dense set of islands is their greatest contribution to future culture, whatever Mitsubishi and co might have to say. In southern Africa, organisations like Greenpop have taken on the idea; and the indigenous forest on the coast at Platbos, south of Hermanus, is a real centre for their model of replanting and remembering our ancient tree siblings. Many of those trees are milkwoods, with a pungent, funky late spring smell that stinks of riotous fertility from these beings, some of whom are older than the myth of Merlin; somehow tauter in their sinews than those in the moister Garden Route east. Quiet good news stories further north in Africa concern tree plantings, across the east or in Niger, turning desertifying dust back into viable pedosphere.

Outside of such sanctuaries in South Africa, the trees emerge in the shady places, kloofs and gorges, folds between rocks hiding evocative streams, the armpit and pubic hairs of the Mama perhaps. Some of my favourite woody nooks are above Kalk Bay, though there are plenty to be found on other walks inland. A Japanese Zen koan of course speaks of the sound of a tree falling in forests when nobody is listening. We can learn to listen again, because the stories in these African forests are still forming, constantly. Noisy humans, whose sounds, we know, make wild creatures remember to fear us, are able to listen too. When I hug a tree, I feel its humming; and soon I can hear it too. Visualising the Tree of Life, that fundamental image connecting below and above through our centre, is such a universal wisdom teaching. It could be a daily practice in school, or at the office; simple reminders from the imaginal forest. Forests are places too for other beings, other parts of ourselves to hide; outlaw Arcadias.

I listened to a colleague sharing the story of Parzival, amidst lush mossy rocks beneath the boughs, halfway up a hidden slope in the Helderberg. Parzival is, among other things, an elaborate tale about seeing the other, about Africa and Europe meeting and blending (there were a number of dark-skinned knights in the tales of the Round Table. The artists of the Middle Ages tapped into bigger concepts and creative thoughts, coming into Europe from the south, sometimes sung on string instruments that had crossed the Sahara). It is in the forests that we most easily see in metaphor how different families, with very different growing traditions, can easily learn to create community.

In the Natal Midlands there are lush forests where the green reaches an intensity that is a whole colour spectrum on its own; and the rain comes down in spectacular slides of mud that needs fantastical levels of root grip. At the base, of course, is the fungus. Edible mushrooms are just one example of the fleshy potency of mycelium networks. Even my teenagers, lost in books and phones some years ago, found interest in the weird fungal flowers popping up on our forest holiday. Wood isn't wood without a little humus, a little rotting, a little crumbly fermentation. Nor is it wood without a little of the other elements; thriving near water, playing with sunlight and warmth, breathing in the air, transforming the earth. No wonder wizards and kings carry wands, or staffs, acknowledging the power and protection of such forest-grown rods that part waves. Oh I know there are grassland fans who tell us we underestimate the value of sponsoring those biomes too, and not letting forests have all the glory; but just for today, I want to soak in the thick green.

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