Ireland, 1995: a stone is dropped into a barrel; ripples rise.

It started with a tree. Or if I look back further, maybe it was the magic tadpoles on the classroom windowsill, suspended in honey-coloured water in springtime light. Could it have been scaresome rock-pools in Donegal where I poked at squirting blood-clot anemones, stranded when the tide left them high and dry?

No, it was the planting of the tree that started me off.

I must have been ten years old, or less. In my local park, on a grassy hillside, the park ranger will have shown us the different leaves, perhaps naming them and showing us which way they went into the ground. I forgot the tree names instantly, but I can still feel the warmth of the sun on my neck, and the cool water splashing against my bare legs as we lugged buckets to the newly planted trees. It was the first ever tree I planted, and the first time I had met someone who wore shorts to work.

Scotland, 2022: ripples move outwards.

I mop my brow and take another long drink of water from my flask. The group of volunteers I have been leading all morning are beginning to wilt in the March sunshine, but we’ve finished the hard part of lifting the old turf. Tulloch Park in Perth is about to see a change.

I kneel to examine the plantlife of the land we’ve toiled over. Bottle-green rye-grass is like a slick gloss across the ground. The toothed leaves of dandelions spread out from deep-seated rosettes, while those of creeping buttercup wind their way through the short sward. There’s little else to see. The ground has been purged of its native seeds; if left to grow, the bully rye-grass would just fight it out with dandelions and buttercups for years to come. The land needs help in restoring the balance. Now that the turf has been stripped through the efforts of the volunteers, we can sow a new meadow.

I am glad to be on my own when I open the bag of seeds. I lower my face into it like an animal at a feeding trough and inhale the smell of summer. It’s delicious, sweeter than hay. My mouth waters.

It holds almost thirty different native wildflowers, and wild grasses. Some will flower this year with basic primary colours: red corn poppy, blue cornflower and yellow corn marigold. They grow quickly, flowering, seeding and dying between their first sprouting in spring and the harvest in late summer. They will be the opening act, a crowd pleaser that should look nice by July and announce to park visitors that the meadow is there.

But they’re not the main event; after two or three years the colours will become more interesting. There will be the magenta flowers of knapweed, hardy cousin of the true-blue cornflower. Bird’s-foot-trefoil will grow around the edges, its flowers flushed deep crimson before lightening to yellow and giving it the name of ‘bacon-and-eggs’. Shades of purple and blue will come from field scabious, meadow cranesbill and self-heal. They will be stitched through a complex weave of grasses like crested dog’s-tail and meadow foxtail. The meadow will be a full menagerie of plant names, with dogs, foxes, cranes and birds running wild. It couldn’t be more different to what it will be replacing.

I mix the seeds in a bucket with some fine sand. Tiny black buckshot pellets form a trickling river in which flow the shapes of other seeds. I see pocked spaceships flying in, and stout cigars topped with tufts of hair tumbling through the mix. A thousand plants could grow from a large handful of seeds, so the sand is partly to help in thinning out the broth to make it go further. The white sand shows us where seeds have been sown too; when they have grown to ten thousand times their current size, these plants will need space.

It feels like alchemy, and in some ways it is. The thought that a cupped handful of seeds could result in a flowering, buzzing, swaying meadow that sustains caterpillars which then perform their own miraculous change and become butterflies. I tell this to the volunteers as I ask them to scoop up some seeds from the bucket. I want them to know that anything that comes from the meadow will be as a result of their work today.

The din of the traffic seems to grow louder as we sow. Nobody is speaking now. The lifting of the turf was accompanied by cheerful chatter. But the seeding feels more serious, more respectful. We’ve sweated all day while uncovering and preparing the soil, and now it feels like we are anointing it with seeds and new life. 

“Now, imagine you are sheep,” I say to the group. “Or you can be a cow if you like, or a deer.” 

The time for reverential silence is over. The seeds need to make good contact with the soil if they are to grow, and I set the volunteers to the task of trampling the soil. I dig the heel of one boot into the ground and swivel it about. “Like this. Make a mess!” 

The group breaks into playful laughter again. Two volunteers link arms and stamp across the soil together like soldiers. Another takes up a rake and rips into the soil like a snuffling badger, then steps onto the same patch to finish the job of burying the seeds.

“Now the final thing is the rain dance,” I say. “Anyone know how to bring the rain for the seeds?”

“I’ll take a week off work,” says one of the men in the group. “That usually brings the rain for me,” he says, and everyone laughs.

The planting of that first tree in my hometown’s park brought me here.

Ireland, 2022: the ripples keep going.

Summer swallows and swifts plunge through the smoky clouds of insects over the park woodland with their beaks agape. They feed their young or feed themselves and when they come to migrate in a few weeks, energy from this damp corner of northwest Europe will flow down to South Africa. Next April, African flies will power their journey back to Ireland, to the very fields where these birds first fledged.

It’s almost thirty years since I planted the tree, which is now just one part of the woodland that the swallows chitter over. This woodland has since fed millions of insects. Aphids have sucked their sap, moth caterpillars have shredded their leaves, and beetles have bored into their bark. Bees too will have drunk their nectar and foraged their pollen. Each tree has been a benign battery, powering a vast foodweb that stretches across the globe. I can’t now look at a tree without seeing the things that feed on it, and the creatures that then eat those creatures. 

When I planted the tree I knew maybe three or four tree names – probably the pine, oak and hazel of primary school books, where squirrels gathered the seeds of these three to store for the winter. Nowadays I can tell the species of tree in the woodland from their bark alone, a mix of silver birch, alder, rowan and oak. My knowledge of trees and other plants has grown in the three decades since I planted my first. But without that first planting, I don’t know who I would be now. It was powerful stuff; alchemy.

Scotland, 2024: new ripples rise.

A brown butterfly stalks the edge of the new meadow at Tulloch Park in Perth. It lands on a blade of tall grass, and walks along, tasting the leaf through its feet. Something in the plant signals goodness. The butterfly dips the tip of its abdomen down to the surface, brushing it lightly, the way a swallow barely meets the river water it skims over as it drinks. 

From the pearly egg will hatch a green caterpillar. It will be voracious, grazing day and night, stripping the edges of the blades with its jaws. The thatched roof of the meadow will keep it safe through winter storms, and next spring it will gorge on fresh shoots, swelling its neon-green body further. Then one day the jaws will take their last bite. The caterpillar will crawl up a blade, spit strong silk from its mouth, and tie itself to the mast of the grass. It will writhe and squirm as one skin is sloughed and replaced by a hard shell, and then all movement will stop. It will hang there for weeks while it recomposes itself. Jaws morph into the windy straw of a proboscis. Wings appear from nowhere. Legs grow lanky. 

Cracks appear in the chrysalis.

Someone says: “I’ve never seen that kind of butterfly here before.”

The first law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form or be transferred from one object to another.

Place your power well.

Cover photo credit: Polly Pullar