During lockdown I spent a lot of time looking at three particular trees on Google Earth. One was a Scots pine at the bottom of the garden in my English childhood home on Dalmore Avenue in Claygate, Surrey. Another was a red maple in back of the Toronto home my family moved to after we immigrated to Canada. The third was a monkey puzzle tree that grew in the garden behind my aunt’s house, but was entirely visible from her house. She liked to look at it while she did the washing up in the evenings. The monkey puzzle tree, like the Scots pine, was in the south of England.

I was not even two when we left Southampton in the fall of 1962 on SS Homeric, bound for Canada, but I do have, while not quite complete memories, certainly strong sensations of my early life on Dalmore Avenue. I was aware of the birds singing outside my bedroom window, the soft rain that fell on me when I was in the garden, the intermittent sun peeping out from the clouds and the loom of the pine as I lurched in and out of its shadow all day long on my stumpy child legs.

The red maple my father planted behind our Toronto house was to celebrate my brother’s birth. The silver maple put in the ground a few years earlier for me would later be cut down. Its roots snaked into the basement and heaved up through the concrete, twining around the water pipes. My sister’s tree, an ash, was killed by an infestation of emerald ash borer beetles. While his tree lives on, my brother is the only one among the three of us who is dead.

What was fascinating about the monkey puzzle tree was that it hosted a flock of parakeets in its spiky branches. The parakeets had bred out from an escaped pair years before and they drifted freely through my aunt’s leafy suburb. The birds and the tree originated from the same part of South America and had found one another again in Surrey. It was one of the most joyful sights to see the colourful parakeets swirling around the tree.

My aunt’s house was the place we came back to when we returned, collectively and individually, to Britain. I knew that house as well as I knew our home in Toronto—the little blue kitchen, the soft board in the hall floor, the deep bell of the grandfather clock, its melodious footfalls shifting the darkened hours.

What was I doing when I was looking at those three trees, night after night? I was looking into the past,
I suppose, or more specifically, I was trying to see how the past was doing without me.

My parents moved to Canada for several reasons. My father had lost his job and couldn’t easily find another one. My mother was annoyed that her parents were interfering in her married life. My father’s own father had a plan to immigrate to Canada and start a fruit farm, but he was killed during WWII when my father was still a boy. Continuing on with the family plan made a certain kind of sense to my father, and my mother, being in her early twenties, was up for the adventure.

They would both say, if asked, that they believed there was more opportunity in Canada for their children at the time.

I have an ongoing conversation with a friend who also immigrated to Canada with her family when she was a young child. What we talk about is whether, if we had had any choice in the matter, it would have been better for us to stay where we were born. My friend thinks that leaving has given her a happier life. I’m not so sure. Aside from missing my extended family, as I get older, I realize that I crave the landscape of Britain and its growing season. I dream of being able to garden all year long, and of a spring that begins in February.

Plants seem to hold the key for me in how this essential question of my life could be answered. I want to see what it means, on a deep level, to stay put, so I decide to go and visit the oldest flowers in Britain, a seam of wildflowers in the Upper Teesdale valley that have been growing there since the last ice age. They are arctic, alpine and southern European species and survive in what are some of the last natural wildflower meadows in Britain. They have literally remained in place for thousands of years.

The group of botanists whom I join in Teesdale for a week are a mix of amateur and professional, all of them older than I am. After the first couple of days, it strikes me as odd that no one talks about their children, or about the jobs and careers they once had. It is not as though they have no children—they do, or that they have had boring and inconsequential jobs—they haven’t. One of them was a doctor who spent years working in Africa. One was an engineer in the Antarctic. But they have left that part of their lives behind. They no longer dwell there. They are interested in botanical time now, which is not a linear affair, but grows, glacially, outward.

On the first night, over a hearty dinner in the pub where we are to be housed for the week, the trip leader informs us that lunches are not included in our expedition, but that a bagged lunch can be purchased from the pub each morning. I and a couple others decide to go for this option. We are to be tromping around outside all day, and I know I will be hungry. A few of the other dozen participants head up to the Tesco to buy supplies to make their own lunches, but at least half of the people decide to go without. Dinner is plentiful, and breakfast promises to be the same, and the gulf between the two meals can be bridged by the abundance of food provided at each.

It rains part or all of every day. Even though it is June, the Upper Teesdale valley is freezing. We spend almost all of our time in our raingear, all views obscured by fog.

Before I committed to going on this trip, I had puzzled over wording in the written information which specified that we would be moving at a “botanizing pace” through the week. What exactly did that mean?

The alpine flowers are tiny, microscopic in some cases. They are so small that unless you bend down with a magnifying glass, you will miss them altogether. A botanizing pace is extremely slow, and sometimes isn’t a pace at all, but is a crouch, or a lying down in the wet heather. One day we spend an entire eight hours inching around a one-acre meadow.

I find the fact of the flowers’ persistence more interesting than the flowers themselves. It is moving to see a tiny patch of wood anemones on a bare hillside, still holding onto their little piece of ground even though the forest they once belonged to is thousands of years gone at this point. The singular patch of wood anemones has become a memorial to all the trees that once surrounded it.

In the evenings, after dinner, everyone reads out their finds of the day and the leader writes them down on a master list that will be added to all week, and then distributed to everyone after the expedition is over. I am not a wildflower expert or even a passionate amateur, and the roll call of Latin names washes over me, leaving no trace. On the third night, I spend this time after dinner having a drink in the bar, but I can still hear the quavering voices of the elderly botanists calling out their finds through the wall—Carex capillaris, Equisetum pratense, Polygala amarelle, Saxifraga hirculus.

The wildflower we had all been hoping to see, myself included, was the spring gentian (Gentiana verna), a piercing blue gentian that is part of the Teesdale Assemblage, a specific combination of flowers that do not grow alongside each other anywhere else in Britain. The botanist Dr. Margaret Bradshaw began studying the Assemblage in the 1950s. At the current age of ninety-nine she still rides her pony out to the Teesdale valley every spring to check on the plants.

The spring gentian has historically flowered in mid- to late spring and should have still been in bloom when we were in the valley in early June. But climate change has shifted the flower’s season earlier, and there were no blue gentians dotting the hillsides and the meadows during our week in Teesdale. It was a disappointment to many in our group who had come specifically to see that one tiny flower. Blue is not a colour often seen in nature, and the striking blue of the spring gentian is not a blue often seen in flowers.

On the fourth day, after we had crouched under a bridge in the pouring rain to eat lunch—those of us who had lunch, mind you—a thick bank of fog rolled across the open moor above the Cow Green Reservoir. Even though most people wore brightly coloured raingear, it was still hard to see anyone who was more than a few feet ahead on the path. By the time we got back to the parking lot where the minibus waited to shuttle us back to the pub, it was clear that we were missing several members of our group. We waited, and then waited some more. No one loomed out of the mist towards us. We got into the minibus and continued to wait. Eventually, since the dinner hour was approaching, and those of us who hadn’t eaten lunch were frantic with hunger, the bulk of our group was driven back to the pub, while the trip leader and his assistant stayed behind to search for the missing botanizers.

It was hours later that they returned, having stumbled around in the fog for much of the afternoon and early evening. There was no cell signal up at the reservoir, and they had stepped off the one path through the moor and then couldn’t find their way back to it. When they finally arrived at the pub, they were wet and exhausted, scarfing down the dinner the kitchen had kindly kept warm for them.

“I’m sorry for all the fuss,” said one of the women, when I asked her about the ordeal. “We were just a bit confused.”

On the last day, in the midst of yet another rain shower, we were to climb down a rock face from the reservoir to a path below, in what the trip leader called “a slight scramble.” It was an almost completely sheer cliff, slick with rain, and with little vegetation to hang onto on the way down. I didn’t think I could do it without plunging to my death, and so I refused and said that I would just retrace my steps back the way we had come. Several others decided to retreat with me, and we had a very pleasant, stress-free meander back to the trailhead.

That night, two of the more frail members of our group had cuts on their faces and hands from having fallen down the cliff.

“It was just a little tumble,” said one of them, when I asked him about his injuries. “No need to worry. There wasn’t that much blood.”

My question about staying or leaving is a difficult one to answer in any kind of conclusive way.

But, strangely, after that conversation, I did find some resolution in the Upper Teesdale valley. Just not where I expected to find it.

The thing about the alpine flowers is that they have survived for thousands of years by learning to make themselves smaller over time, to avoid being eaten by sheep, or ravaged by weather.

The adaptation of staying put has been to make less of themselves.

‍

Image: Joanna Rogers, Possible Worlds. Dolls House, 2022, photo collage