Sunday 8th February, 2015.

Sidney Hall - from, Urania's Mirror

Hollybush Hill E11 - February 2015

Lost in time between heaven and earth, I found, 'The Humming Garden of Vulpecula'.

One route to get to our allotment takes in Hollybush Hill, along a road that passes between the verdant expanse of Leyton Flats (at the southern tip of Epping Forest) and what appears to be an affluent suburb of large detached houses, between the Green Man Roundabout and Snaresbrook. Two foxes have recently come to rest within half a mile of each other on the forest side verge of Hollybush Hill. Their battered corpses appear more decomposed each time I pass them. Their dark hollow eye sockets gaze along the verge of a litter strewn eternity. I’ve thought about collecting their bodies and carrying them, by bicycle, up to the allotment to bury them there as some sort of redemptive undertaking. Perhaps I will pick them up next time and so carry the stench of our ‘autogeddon’ along the suburban way, via Woodford and Chingford, to the allotment garden. 
I was surprised then to find yet another dead fox at the bottom corner of our allotment, where we are establishing a new forest garden. 

Ian discovered the fox and at first he thought it might not have been dead. The fox certainly was dead when Ian showed it to me a day later. I volunteered to bury it. I chose to bury the corpse between two fruit bushes. I wondered what had caused the fox’s death. The fox’s coat was in good condition as were its teeth however there were some puncture marks in or on its snout. Perhaps the fox had been in a fight with another fox or a dog and had been overwhelmed and then succumbed to the cold. Was it just old? When I picked the fox up it was stiff with rigor mortis, but hardly wasted or cadaverous, and it was heavier than I expected. 

Our new forest garden resides in the northwest corner of the site, at the bottom of a slope, where, for the last few years, the ground has become increasingly water logged. When I dug a hole down just a spit (a spade depth), water flowed into the bottom forming pools of nebulous swirling silt. I imagined the buried fox dissolving, liquefying and flowing freely from the slightly cramped confines of the pit I’d dug. Would the fox form a mycelium-like network of redemptive nutritive oozes? Ryan has recently inoculated an area of ground with fungi quite close to the burial site. Alan and I also moved in large sections of fungus ridden tree trunks from recent tree works around the site. This patch of forest garden could become even more of a dark mysterious soupy concoction of benevolent decaying materials nourishing new and sweeter fruits. 

Was my act, the deed and the thoughts, something verging on hokey mysticism? As I shovelled the excavated soil back into the hole on top of the fox, creating a heavy London clay sepulture, up through which a wheezy compressed exhalation of myriad festering gut flora could just be heard, I paused to consider more morbid and grim outcomes for the earthly body of the fox. The fox was out of sight but not out of mind and, in the latter, how the fox decayed became a matter of a personal sense of place and belonging on the site. The, or our, or my, or your allotment site might be an environment cultivated and fertilised with all sorts of assumptions, suppositions and misunderstandings. Science and magic, myth and reality, all equally mysterious, melded in the chthonic body of that place. My fantasy of a benevolently rotting fox infused forest garden, a subterranean constellation of revivifying particles and pulses, Vulpecula’s celestial garden, faltered in a cosmic bog of adipocere – an impermeable fatty waxy mass of putrefaction formed, I’m told, ‘by the decomposition of soft tissue in dead bodies subjected to moisture’ (OED, 2006). The garden in my mind became a barren stodgy mush of inert mud and grease.

Perhaps it would have been better to create a new compost heap, with the foxes' corpse at the centre. We could have put the corpse inside or at the bottom of one of our ‘dead-hedges’ where it might have ‘hummed’ an olfactory ‘hum’; a little unpleasant resonance diffusing into the ground. However, our allotment site is surrounded by household gardens and the fetid presence of a field of dead foxes is unlikely to be well received and therefore, despite the abundance of dead foxes, I will probably restrain my undertaking impulses.

Allotment - New Forest Garden - 8th February 2015.