Showing posts with label rock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rock. Show all posts

Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Marriage of Oak and Rock




The Marriage of Oak and Rock

The relationship between oak and rock is magical. Druids and assorted Celtic pagans certainly thought so. The word "druid" means "knowledge of the oak." "Drus" is the Greek word for oak and "wid" an Indo-European word for knowledge. People here in Victoria notice that when they collect acorns for planting (as in last year's good acorn fall), few survive, and not those whose long tap root doesn't grow straight down. It seemed puzzling that the things often seem to prefer a rocky location to a smooth open grassy area with lots of water in the soil, but the puzzle is solved when we consider the way the root-sprouting acorn uses a rocky encasement.

Of the acorns I planted after the last mast year, the ones that took off (meaning they are about four feet high after several years), are in little earthy areas within a natural rockery. Some people use tubes to get the roots down and established, but here their tap roots are guided downwards by the surrounding rock, and they seem to want a crevice to lodge in. When they fall onto even open ground, squirrels move them about, hiding them for a future meal. The squirrels usually forget which crevices and old stumps they lodge them in however, and the acorn sprouts. Squirrels (grey and red do the same things) and certain birds, like jays, co-evolved with the different types of oak in a beautiful symphony of behaviours that produced the characteristics of each and the adaptation of all to a certain geological environment. (Many grey squirrels play about my oak-nurturing natural rockery - they are clearly oak-familiars, and in no bad way.)

The marriage of oak and rock is one of nature's amazing local effects: in some cases (such as on Blueberry Hill in Oak Bay) one cannot see where wood ends and rock begins. A branch can dip onto rock and blend with it as it grows and becomes weightier. The hardness of oak is what makes it desirable for house, furniture and ship building -- the "heart of oak" is rock, its partner, its spouse. Is that why the Druids, who worshipped oaks as sacred, also laboured over unbelievable time frames and distances to move giant stones to their circle at Stonehenge? Pagans were "people of the countryside," and they found all these wild things sacred. We are people of the city; what do we find sacred?

B. Julian


.