Only Fools and Dreamers

Sometimes you learn something that stops you in your tracks, upending what you thought you knew.

A few months ago I watched Only Fools and Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest (you can watch the video below). The short documentary is about Hinewai Reserve on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula. In 1987 the reserve’s manager, Hugh Wilson, let weeds take over the newly acquired farmland, knowing they would provide a nurse canopy for regenerating native plants. During the intervening thirty years his intervention was minimal. No planting. No weeding. Today the land is a forest. 

In our conservation era ’fighting’ introduced plants and weeds is seen as the preferred way to caretake the land. This documentary suggests another way.  

Instinctively appealing—so much possible with so little effort—it is also incredibly hopeful. The land really can regenerate itself. Land does the work. Time does the work.

But here’s what’s hard about it. Our job is reduced to not interfering. Our job is to let nature take its course. We don’t have a say in what grows. We have to accept whatever the process looks like. We have to be able to tolerate the long and messy in-between period when weeds seem to have won, and the whole scene screams ‘neglect!’

There is a difference between a land looking healthy—populated by plants that seem to (or once did) belong there—and being healthy—the land having regenerated itself, including all of the unseen plants and organisms involved in a healthy ecosystem (of which more than 70% is invisible to us). 

To regenerate itself the land must remain undisturbed. The soil must stay in tact. No tilling, no digging over, no aerating the soil, no spraying for ‘weeds’. Every time we do this we sever the fragile mycelium that has begun to knit everything together again. It is this mycelium that holds everything together. It is not simply the roots of a tree that feed it, it is the mycelium that reads what the roots need and finds that in the soil. Slicing into this intelligent network is the equivalent of cutting your finger and pulling open the wound every time it begins to knit itself together. It will not heal. 

The land I stand on was once rich, thick forest. I thought my job was to help that happen, and to begin replanting. Now, I’m not sure. Maybe my job is to help that happen by holding a space in which it can. Maybe all I need to do is promise not to get in the way. I’m really not sure. 

I think about all the beautiful conservation efforts I see happening everywhere. Areas that have been replanted, looking effortlessly natural but also designed to be aesthetically pleasing. There is appeal in that too. Mostly, the tidiness appeals. The sense that I would have done something, actively, to help. A little bit of ego in there, methinks. 

I keep coming back to this: the land would regenerate itself in a way that I could never replicate. I’m curious to know what that would look like. What does it feel like to stand on land that is springing into being unfettered? I do have a sense of that. There are places on our property that have been untended for the entire time we have lived here. There is an aliveness, and wildness, that is intoxicating to be in. 

I keep thinking about what I could learn from the land simply from watching what it does when no-one is looking. I still have questions—what about invasive plants, for example? But really, I know the answer to that already. In the end, left alone, the forest will always win out.

Mary xx

p.s. If you watch the documentary, I’d love to hear what you think.

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