A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 150

of the new lairds and their own imagined embodiment. It stands on a
mountaintop surrounded by bare hills. The pose, gaze and setting
bear, to my eyes, a striking similarity to Franz Winterhalter's 1842 por-
trait of Prince Albert. There could scarcely be a greater contrast with
either the squalid reality of dispossession and seizure or the weedy,
stunted deer living there today.
As the freezing rain worked its way through my thin coat and
worn-out boots, we came to a high fence, and passed through a gate
which seemed like a door to another world, so great was the contrast
between the vegetation on either side of it. This was the fence which,
in 1990, the Forestry Commission agreed to erect around fifty hec-
tares of brae, using the money that Alan and the Findhorn Foundation
had raised. On one side the grass was nibbled low and covered in deer
droppings. Apart from a few small saplings buried in the heather, and
one or two growing out of reach of the deer in the crooks of fallen
trunks, there were no young trees. On the other side was a mosaic of
habitats of the kind that, Alan said, we could expect to see regenerat-
ing across the Highlands if deer numbers were reduced.
The wet ground was thick with bog myrtle, which in the summer
would fill the air with its drowsy scent. Here the pine seedlings had
crept up, agonizingly slow. Young conifers are easy to date: each star
of branches growing from the trunk denotes one year's growth. These
trees, no higher than my chest, some below my waist, turned out,
when we counted the layers, to have germinated when the fence was
erected. Apart from their size, they looked like the mature trees on the
other side of the fence: they had developed, in miniature, the same
range of growth patterns.
'They're bonsai trees. The Japanese mimic nature: growing trees in
adverse conditions like these.'
But on the drier ridge just a few yards away, the trees had been
growing as fast in two years as some of those on the boggy ground
had grown in twenty. The highest was now twenty-three feet tall (Alan
told me that this specimen had been the focus of his affection, and
that you could see the difference this made). They grew straight and
sharp; it would be several decades before they began to acquire the
hunched and spreading individuality of the bonsai bog trees. Among
them were rowans of twice my height and more, and regenerating