A weedpatch is a place of wonder and discovery

Somewhere something must have gone wrong because otherwise this empty plot would have building on it , but now it is much better. The top image shows one corner of the field and you also see a mature tree on the left. At the bottom of the tree you can see a bunch of saplings and you also see the same saplings in the middle of the first picture and in full view in the second and third pictures. There are so many of them and they all so slim that they become a light-refracting curtain. I have tried looking up the tree in my new book on indigenous plants but it isn't in there; it must be a foreigner with ways different than our own. 

Cynics will tell you it is just a field but they are wrong: it's a place of wonder with all sorts of edge effects. This field is only in it's first stages, the ground is mostly sandy in the middle but the weeds are coming, and I spotted the first signs of the blackberry, the Cortes of Cryptoforest, right at an interesting point of its history: the first upward move (see the last three pictures).

The corner tree from the first image from a different angle.

Notice the dog foot prints

A lovely edge forest

Mature tree with trail

Blackberry snaking through the underbrush

Blackberry becoming orchestratectic

A cryptoforest more beautiful than the Samothrace

Here is a tiny little cryptoforest that I first went out to take pictures of at the day I also did the car park. Most of the photos were blurry so I returned today and the pics below are taken on these two visits. 

This is a triangular wooded area at the back of the student flats that opens the Overvecht ensemble of high rises. It's next to a basketball court, a carpark and the rail track is only a fence and a blackberry thicket away.

What strikes me most is the uncouthness of this cryptoforest. It must have started out as a lawn with a few planted trees. When the willows took over the municipal mowers became ineffective. At first they tried to manage the willows (there is ample evidence of removed branches) but eventually they just gave up. The startling amount of litter added to the sense of abandonment.

I know I say this everytime but I found this cryptoforest to be a very special place, with unique elements and with a unique feel to it. I wish I could live here. 

Enigmatic for this cryptoforest.

A Christmas tree.

Hard to see: but it's a holly.

Look at the symmetry of that!

Abandoned car park

If I remember correctly this used to be the parking space to the offices of one of the larger Dutch construction and building firms. Now the company has moved elsewhere and a few students are living there to prevent it from being squatted. I love the silence and privacy I found here. Hidden behind the huge building, it's longest angle sheltered by vegetation and fences from the railway tracks there was only the sound of the wind in the trees to keep me company. 

The car park is only in its first stage of being reclaimed by nature: the plants that grow through the cracks are only just beginning the upset the paving, the blackberry, that fast and furious colonist, was only coming through at two places. Give it another year and this place will be fantastic and I hope it will get that time of abandonment. Wild urban nature is a much better use for space than the millionth car park. 

Also see.

Water creates vegetational hotspots.

Does anybody knows what this plant is called?

A lone blackberry snakes ahead.

The cryptoforest with the strange hut

In the first chapter of his 1968 best selling book 'Desert Solitaire' Edward Abbey's describes the first time he woke up in the Utah desert: "this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not-at least there’s nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.” 

This strikes me because it is completely different from the way I experience my own feral forested pockets of crypto-wilderness. The cryptoforest does not inspire any grandiose feelings. Never did I feel the need or the desire to possess the forest, platonic or otherwise. I am seeking for inhuman spectacles but what attracts me to these places is the way the human influence asserts itself even at places that most normal choose to ignore. Cryptoforests are mysterious places but not always in a good way: the lack of humans itself is reason enough to be used by people who prefer to remain anonymous. At least two murder victims have been at the kind of places I visit in the last year alone. I stumble across tents that are in use and waste that is new. I have never met the people who lived in those tents but they may not be friendly. It doesn't scare me but I am aware of the full spectrum of possibilities. Small town blues: my biggest fear is that while I am hidden from view someone steals my bike.

Last weekend I explored a forest that lines the outer elbow of double barrelled traffic system regulating the flow of traffic in and out of the North-East of Utrecht. It's a pool of open space against its crowded outlying surroundings. From whatever you direction you enter it you find that your horizon is suddenly shifting into the distance and for this reason I had wanted to look at it with a bit more patience for years. Inside this oval shaped space, bordered by a bicycle and foot paths, rail tracks and the backside pond of an allotment garden stands a forest of mature trees (poplars?) densely clustered and with bushes preventing a good view from the outside to the inside of the forest. I dare not estimate the size of it but it did seem larger from the inside than from the outside: an ever recurring visual phenomena that informs the differences between the psychogeography of the forest and of the plains. 

The pictures I took all came out badly and this indicates the uncertainty I felt about how to understand what I was seeing and my inability to find a way to relating to it. It wasn't monstrous, it was more anthropomorphic than that, it was like being trapped at a party where you fail to understand the social norms while your clothing is revealing you as a uninteresting outsider. I was an intruder and one without a good reason or story to tell when asked for credentials. This is a feeling I encounter often but never as strongly as here. The pattern escaped me, the trees just seemed to grow tall and the underbrush proliferated, a lone fern had spread like an umbrella and they all had turned their back on me at the moment I walked in. There was no question of me wanting to embrace it, instead it was embracing me, without love, just matter of factly like a disinterested nurse washing a patient. I found a shallow ditch that I couldn't explain at first but which was maybe carved out by excess water of the pond at the back when it rains. I saw frogs, a rabbit hole, heard crows... but no sense and no order, not even chaos. No sign of "Memory and desire, stirring" (after TS Elliot), just a void that wanted to be closed.     

The thing that really spelled out the implied message of this cryptoforest was a human artefact that I don't know how to explain and which turned out unobliging towards my attempts to make pictures of it. I was trying to record it in its environment but the trees prevented a good view. Instead I only have details. What it is? A deep hole filled with water and infested with mosquitoes, a wooden structure with a plastic sheeting and chicken wire fallen into it, and above it tree trunks interlocked as if to create a roof. All this surrounded by nettles and sapling trees, indicators of disturbed soil. As if someone illegally kept chickens here. But why would you?

This cryptoforest with the strange hut refused to speak to me but I know it has a story to tell. I will go back and coax it out. 

 

The Swampy Cryptoforest

Exploring the industrial area 'Lage Weide' by bike I came across a tree-covered patch 150 meters in length and at best 30 meters in depth shaped like a half oval. It's enclosed by a pond with no name on one side and a busy road on the other. There seems to be no good reason for people to visit it, it's relatively isolated and there are no people living within a kilometre's radius, but maybe workers go there in their afternoon break because there was a clear trail, though, curiously, no waste. The trail started at the only entrance and described a circle of which the back-end came as close to the reeds hiding the water from view as close as possible without getting your feet wet. There was a smaller and circular trail moving away from the main circle but considerably less well trodden.

From the outside it didn't look like much but despite it's small size there were four markedly different segments to it: the waterside had it's reeds, the trails led through a tree-covered terrain that felt very like a real forest, an undisturbed and hermetic segment covered with dense blackberry and a segment with tall but dead birches. The many fallen trees added considerably to the drama of this cryptoforest. A mysterious little place that was both open and friendly to human visitors but at the same time the hospitality of a good trail prevents you from seeing the places in it where you can't go. I saw rabbits (and they saw me) but no birds.