A The black poplar leans into the brightest summer sky. The light is harsh and the air breathless on the hottest day of the year, but the tree is moved by its own breeze. The leaves dance. They sing. From jagged cracks in the bark to the tall branches above, they rustle and flutter, roar and hum, a song as old as these fields and yet so current. This music of water, air and wood is filled with living history.
Across the fields, the sounds of guests at Sarah and David’s wedding reception in a marquee where the band plays mambo fade into the fields at Melverley, where the Welsh border follows the River Vyrnwy to its confluence with the Severn. This is a classic Severn Valley floodplain, a long green expanse framed by the Breidden Hills and Rodney’s Pillar in the distance. Melverley was notorious for its flooding, but newer flood defences on the Severn have changed this in recent years.
David is a conservationist who bought the old cow pasture here 15 years ago and started planting a riparian forest. Sarah, the author of Swifts and Us, is also a conservationist and their wedding is as much a celebration of rewilding as it is of her wedding. Many of the guests are volunteers who planted hundreds of trees, created paths for the public and built the swallow barn.
A single swallow darts across the bluest, loneliest sky, creating a summer all its own. Red dragonflies hover in the reed canary grass, crickets hop and fly along freshly mown paths, the purple loosestrife blooms like ancient marsh enemies, a few red admirals fly over the hedges and perhaps that is a Purple Blue butterfly fluttering through the gaps in the canopy of an old oak tree.
The black poplar is a lonely male of Populus nigra betulifolia, a charismatic survivor of isolated poplar stands of the Severn Valley in Shropshire and the Marches. He sings an ancient tale of fertility rites and worship. David has planted some female black poplars here and hopes that future weddings will bring a blizzard of woolly seeds with the potential to become new giants of the riverine woodlands.
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