Ghost Trees: Nature and People in a London Parish by Bob Gilbert

‘Without our stories we can become abstractions in a virtual world, floating in an eternal present that is not so much ‘”here and now” as “now and nowhere”.’

When Bob Gilbert’s wife Jane was ordained as an Anglican priest and assigned to All Saints Church in Poplar, the family - two adults, two children, some goldfish and ‘a particularly outraged cat’ - moved from North London to a vicarage in the heart of the East End. Gilbert was already an urban naturalist, his enthusiasm owing its beginning, at least in some small part, to the writer Richard Adams, who once dismissed London as a dismal place where nothing grew. Gilbert knew this was nonsense; he’d been studying the nature of the inner city for years, and he was getting fed up with many writers’ knee-jerk disdain for the animals and plants inhabiting the places in which as much as 80% of the UK’s population now spent their lives.

And now Gilbert had somehow – and unexpectedly – become a ‘vicar’s wife’. There is, he points out, a long tradition of clergymen naturalists. He may not be a clergyman himself (he is in fact a Quaker), but what better footsteps in which to follow? Most particularly, he considers Gilbert White, who famously studied the natural history of the small village of Selborne for over forty years.

'” (White) says in one of his letters, “in zoology as in botany, all nature is so full, that the district produces the greatest variety that is the most examined.”’

In other words, focusing on a small area over a long period of time can tell you more than a quick scan of a large one. Gilbert’s mind was made up;

‘My ‘district’, I decided, would be the new parish.’

And so Gilbert walks the streets of Poplar, studying the animals that live on its wastelands, gardens, riverbanks and streets, the plants that cling to its neglected walls, and most especially the trees that manage to flourish in this most traffic-infested area. In a borough named after a tree, he wonders about the origin and location of that first poplar – but his quest leads him far beyond trees, into the long and complex social history of this ‘maze-like’ area that, like many parts of London, has seen numerous communities and industries come and go. For, as he explains, in his investigations into the area’s natural life;

‘It became clear to me that many of the questions I found myself asking were also about past influences on the landscape. I became increasingly involved in a form of ghost hunting, seeking out the resonances of what once had been.’

Successive waves of immigration have brought people from China, France, Scotland, Ireland and Bangladesh to Poplar, and every group has introduced new lifestyles, and with them new plants and produce, from mulberries to vines, figs, brown mustard plants, gourds and giant marrows. In learning to read the past through the landscape around him, Gilbert uncovers all sorts of remarkable stories, and one of the many things I love about this book is the skillful way in which he finds the connections between nature and people.

Mulberry tree (image: onlondon.co.uk)

The history of the failed silk industry – initiated by James I in the early 1600s – leads him to look for associations with mulberries, and to find many streets, pubs and even a school, bearing that name.  The persecuted Huguenots brought more mulberry trees to London in the late 17^th century – but only Gilbert could manage to dig out that plant’s connection with floating harbours built in secret in the East India Docks during the latter part of the Second World War. It is also interesting to note that the failure of James I’s plans may also have been, at least in part, due to the ineptitude of the man he put in charge of the project. William Stallenge was a former government spy who appears to have known nothing about horticulture. His unsuitability for the job didn’t stop the king paying him handsomely, in advance. How familiar does that sound in 21^st century Britain?

An investigation into the old Bryant and May match factory in Bow gives us another insight into the industrial history of the East End. Like many other manufacturers of the day, Mr Bryant and Mr May were Quakers; they tried to introduce ‘safety matches’ made without the traditional use of phosphorus, which led to factory workers suffering the disease of ‘phossy jaw’. Did this attempt at social reform work? In the short term, at least, it did not; people were not prepared to pay more for their matches. Plus ça change….

Bryant and May Factory, Bow

Gilbert’s study of the history of the horse chestnut tree reveals what is to me one of the best stories in the book, as he unravels the chain of events leading from the humble conker to the shortage of acetone needed for the production of cordite in World War One, a Jewish chemistry lecturer at Manchester University, local schoolchildren, an East End gin distillery, the Balfour Declaration and the first president of the modern state of Israel. Who knew? Not me – and not the vast majority of the general public either, for in a populist operation worthy of Whisky Galore, the locals kept the whole thing secret throughout the war.

Chaim Weizmann

In between his urban ramblings – which sometimes take him far beyond Poplar, into Shadwell, Bethnal Green and even as far as the Chilterns, following a waterway or seeking out special trees  – Gilbert is back in his vicarage garden in the company of the woodpecker, the blackbirds, the blue tits and the family’s chickens. Here he finds more stories – the rounded pebbles in the soil;

‘my own apportionment of the floodplain gravels, deposited by mile-wide estuaries and once swollen ice-melt rivers.’

The woodlice underneath the bark of the plane tree;

‘a creature for which I have always had an affection. Woodlice were my very first ‘pets’…the only land-living relatives of the crab, the prawn and the lobster.’

A winter storm leads him to wonder just how many leaves a tree produces – an oak, it seems, can have between 200,000 and 250,000.  Before long Gilbert is conducting experiments in his kitchen, weighing fallen leaves to calculate just how many tons are being deposited on his lawn and flower beds. (The answer tells us just why we find sweeping them all up such a never-ending chore.)

Bob Gilbert (image: Greenbelt Festival)

For Gilbert is a true polymath, his inquiring mind finding interest in everything, and taking us with him down every side turning and diversion that presents itself. He quotes Shakespeare, John Gay. Amy Levy and Sylvia Plath, he revisits Greek myths and the Brothers Grimm. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism all get a look in, and along the way, in an attempt to find the course of the old Black Ditch, Gilbert even has a go at dowsing with 'live artist' Amy Sharrocks.

Bob Gilbert may sometimes not find what he is looking for, but he always finds something else, and most importantly, finds the joy in that something else. It is this enthusiasm for the stories he uncovers, coupled with a wonderful, often self-deprecating, humour, that make Ghost Trees such an interesting, imaginative and inspiring book.

Ghost Trees: Nature and People in a London Parish by Bob Gilbert is published by Saraband.