Phantoms and Fruits
Do the ruins crumble into the woods, or the woods grow from the ruins? A introspection on a lost agricultural landscape, and the natural one which engulfs it.
The house stands proud at the top of the valley, peeking over the trees. It has been there for a long time, its permanence writ large in heavy architecture built to outlive the generations. Yet its future is uncertain as its history gets slowly overgrown. There are countless other ruins, some so far gone they’re only traceable by the fruit trees they’ve left behind.
I’ve come here looking for plums, with some content-filming in mind. I climb the slopes, filming the odd snippet here and there, only really appreciating the house when I’m finally upon it. It’s magisterial, in the most municipal sense of the word. It exuded the honest, austere authority of a hard life lived off the land. Three stories in the main building, with an annex off to the side, and several barns around.
The ground floor, accessed from the courtyard, would have been for livestock. It’s arched ceiling a strong as the day it was built. The top two floors were for humans. Three, perhaps four generations of cousins, siblings and more living in the uncomfortable intimacy of community. But they’ve long since gone.
Even though the house might stand proud, its roof has already caved, and soon the rest will follow. It will fall, they all do. Eventually, they’re swallowed by nature as it reclaims its space, pulling the stones back down to the earth from which they were dug. Looking away from the house, I turn my eyes to the view.
These mountains are feral. Once they were domesticated, the flanks of their hills stepped in terraces upon whose produce the population subsisted. Now, these agricultural scars heal under a thick skin of Douglas pine, hiding the gashes of their past. It seems wild, unless you know where to look.
There’s something fascinating about these ruins. They’re mysterious in their emptiness, filled with unknown phantoms and untold stories. Whenever our family visits them, we lament their loss, wondering why no one reclaims them. Yet something is reclaiming them.
Slowly but surely, leaf by stem, nature has been returning the ruins to a landscape only the rocks now remember. What if nature’s ability to turn our permanence back into its own is the real fascination here? What if, rather than feeling sad about the ruins crumbling into the woods, we celebrate the woods growing up through ruins?
The fruit trees sit somewhere between this, as the remnants of human agriculture, but agents of natural reclamation. Planted by human hands, or seeded from the fruits of trees once sowed; they are an artificial relic. Someone's investment into future generations who would one day no longer live here, as much bas they are part of the natural landscape.
Now they’re part of the flora, as naturalised as the pines. They themselves were once a plantation escapee, now turned native, whose every green trunks cloaked the hills, colonising the post-agricultural landscape. In both the fruit trees and the pines is the memory of something human, and the resistance of something natural.
In ecology, whether something belongs or not is defined by a baseline. This is a point in time before which everything is ‘native’, and after which everything is ‘invasive’. But nature doesn’t do so well with our arbitrary binaries. Who’s to say that the fruit trees aren’t ‘native’, or the pines for that matter. Are we the ‘invasive’?
There aren’t any plums here this year which is a shame, perhaps an early frost nipped them in the bud. I stand looking out from the house, struggling to imagine what life would have been like. ‘A shame’ for me could have been life and death for those who planted them. A failed harvest meant a hungry winter; a deficit of essential vitamins that could otherwise have ensured survival.
I turn to the blackberries instead. It’s hard to explain, but they grow differently here than back in England. Something about the long harsh winters and the arid summer sun making them harder, tougher, more flavoursome. Like the fruit trees, they are utterly a product of their environment.
As I pick them, and I think about the generations that worked this land, it feels a bit flippant to be filming this for content. Topless foraging for the likes, building my brand. The marketing jargon which fills my London life suddenly feels very vapid here, standing in these ruins. The people who planted these trees did so out of necessity, if they didn’t they might have starved.
But not all nourishment is nutritional, and me being here means I am sharing in their history as I search for plums on their trees. I look at the ruins and imagine their true legacy not in the edifices they erected, but the wood of the trees with which they enriched the landscape. Perhaps this is the most impactful mark they unwittingly made.
Though their individual stories are gone, and their ruins become ever more overgrown, their collective memory lives on in the fruit trees. Long after the last wall has fallen, the trees will keep self-seeding, their place a faint trace of once was. You just have to know where to look.
This article was written as part of a 3-part miniseries documenting these crumbling ruins and their fruit trees. To watch the videos, visit my Instagram @barneypau.