Nature Speaks

Small Observations | Nature Speaks

When I was clearing my mother’s house after she died, I found a small acorn that had germinated beneath the great oak in her garden, and among all the familiar possessions I was sorting through, the things that had belonged to her everyday life and which I was now having to decide whether to keep or let go, I brought home this one small living thing, a little oak that had begun its life in the shelter of the tree she had known, and which seemed, in some way I could not have explained, more difficult to leave behind than many of the objects that had belonged to her.

I planted it in a pot and watched it grow until it stood about fourteen inches tall, its slender branches carrying the unmistakable leaves of an oak, but during this year’s dry summer the soil dried out, the leaves withered and the branches became brittle, until eventually there seemed to be nothing living left. One day I picked up the pot intending to throw it away, and I remember standing there for a moment, looking at the little tree that had come from my mother’s garden, feeling an unexpected sadness at the thought of discarding it, although I could see no reason to believe it would recover, and so, instead of emptying the pot, I put it back upon the path.

I thought very little more about it until recently, when I happened to glance down as I passed and noticed something green near its base, so startlingly fresh against the pale, lifeless branches and the brown leaves still clinging above them that I bent down to look more closely, and there, rising from the soil beneath everything I had believed to be dead, were two small oak leaves, their delicate veins and tender green surfaces belonging so unmistakably to the living world that for a moment I could scarcely reconcile them with the tree I had already given up on.

I stayed there looking at them, remembering the day I had almost thrown the pot away, and found myself thinking about how easily we come to believe that what we can see is all there is, that a possibility has ended because its familiar signs have disappeared, or that something within ourselves has been lost because it has remained silent for so long that we have ceased to expect anything from it.

Yet what moved me most was the sight of those fresh leaves beneath the dead branches, for the new growth had not restored the little tree to what it had been, nor had it removed the evidence of the summer that had almost destroyed it; both were there together, the dry wood and the tender green leaves, and I found myself recognising something I had perhaps known without quite understanding, that what has been lost does not always have to disappear before something else can begin.

I do not know what will become of this little oak, whether it will recover sufficiently to grow into a tree or whether these two leaves will be all that it manages, and I am reluctant to turn its unexpected survival into a promise that everything we lose will somehow return, because we know that life does not work that way, and there are losses that remain losses however much time passes.

But I keep returning to the moment when I stood holding that pot, certain there was nothing living left, and put it down again simply because I could not quite bear to throw it away.

Perhaps what those two leaves have given me is not certainty about what will happen next, but a little less certainty about what has already ended.