Urwald

Today I drove a bit north to Reinhardswald, a stretch of preserved forest tucked away in a corner of Hesse. It’s very popular for hiking and picnics, and there’s a famous hunting lodge called Sababurg which overlooks Europe’s oldest wildlife refuge. It’s home to bison, deer, wild horses, boar, wolves, otters and heaven knows what else.

Reinhardswald was where the Brothers Grimm collected most of their fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood probably lived in the house down there.

I certainly don’t, because I didn’t go inside, animals are boring. Instead I went for a walk around the nearby Urwald, which is like a safari park for trees. Well, not really. Or if it was, it would be a safari park that only had two types of animal, in this case the animal equivalents of oak and beech.

I’m probably not really selling it very well, but it was cool. The Urwald is supposed to be a primeval forest, but that’s a bit of a misnomer; it’s actually just a forest that’s been left alone for a couple hundred years.

I was almost dying from hunger and I was wavering whether or not to enter, but I’m so glad I did. I’ve been walking around a lot of forests here which I assumed were more or less ‘natural’ in appearance, but none of them was like this. Even the most remote forests here are managed for logging, but a forest left purely to nature is something else.

First of all, the Urwald isn’t managed at all. When a tree collapses on a footpath, guys with chainsaws chop it up and push the pieces to the side, but that’s all. There’s a big sign at the entrance with a picture of a guy being squashed by a falling branch next to the sobering words ‘Enter at your own risk’. Without any human interference a forest turns into an enormous, slow-motion battle for survival, which of course is what it should be. As you walk through the forest you can almost see the saplings sprouting up wherever they can find an open patch of ground, the young trees grappling with their roots and branches for whatever air, sunlight and water they can get. Then you come into a glade and see an oak towering over you, four hundred years of twisting, victorious trunk, its arms thrown triumphantly in every direction, its roots sucking the ground beneath your feet dry.

A little farther on you find yourself another few hundred years in the future: there you see an ancient oak, its crown long fractured, now just a swollen body pushing food into monstrously thick branches too heavy to lift themselves to the sun. Younger saplings crowd ever closer, taking back the soil inch by inch, year by year, shading the broken old tree as it withers and crumbles at their feet.

And when it finally dies, after seven or eight centuries or more, nothing is left but a hollow tomb for fungi and moss, an opportune nest for those lightning-quick animals who live days like trees live years. What struck me most was the presence of so much death everywhere. Dead trees still standing, dead branches cluttered on the floor. With nobody to tidy the place up or take away the dead wood for fuel, it just lies there. But of course life springs from the dead forest floor to begin with.

Trees are cool, see. We just have to try to see things from their perspective...