A brackish archipelago. Faint smell of sea-weed from tideless waters. Reeds and grasses billowing where polished bedrock plunges into the Baltic. A coastline of ash, beech, thick old growth oak. Stoney shores growing juniper, sloe, common heather. Linnets picking over bitter berries. Crowding scant mountain pine.
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A coastal shrub layer of juniper, sloe, packed culms of matgrass. Moraine mixed of boulder, stone, gravel, sand, silt and clay. Formlessly following the underlying bedrock. Two-point-five-million year granite, tundra polished smooth and round.
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A dry scrape of land reminiscent of smoke. Glacial grooves smoothed in frost-blasted granite. A shapeless moraine growing goldmoss stonecrop, purple loosestrife, seaside aster. Guarded by great black cormorants, a half-dozen species of sea-swallow terns.
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A spinney thicket, copse, clumped grove. Turning to low coarse land secreting golden meadow-sweet. Care-weed tied round stout oaks, their swollen trunks split
Open mossy mouths to speak.
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Thinning canopy fattens soils. Dead spruce dropping bark and branches. Beset by a wood-boring sickness conceived in the plantation. Mouldering stands welcoming beetles and fungi, wasps and woodpeckers. Myriad life teeming seen and unseen. Decay. Renewal. Without end. Beginning.
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Steady rains pass the Equinox. Turning soggy firth and fold. Bent bunch-grass and windlestraw matt the wooded edges spared the scythe. Fae fog-drifts over lowlands.
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Thunderous peal of woodfall. Firry carpet concealing a clearing of stumps. Wiping the dulled axe head, the whetted bow-saw teeth. Picking stray needles from gloves torn at the fingertips.
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Wood-hewn tendons. Whip-crack release of heartwood tension. One second stretching under the strain of gravity. The tree writhing in place. The two cuts creating a fibrous hinge to direct its fall. An ankle-rattling thud as the giant slams to the ground.
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Reclaiming deciduous treescape. Scores of suppressed oak, crowded rowan, creeping juniper. Aspen. Ash. Beech. Hawthorn. Hazel. Hornbeam. Maple. Spots of out-competed willow, their thin canopies and half-dead trunks worked upon by woodpeckers. Swollen stubs erupting where once thick boughs lay broken.
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Scuddy mists sandblast the cottage facade. Aspen trembling as a sea-borne bluster rakes the weaker stands; uprooting; peeling; the tallest trees whining as trunks trade bark. Old and dead wood loosed. Splintering limbs as spruce tips split.
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