Pink-Purple Dreams of Forest Time

Beginning with photography responsive to rhododendron ponticum’s phenology

Driving through Scotland’s Cowal peninsula, intermittent walls of rhododendron high as houses grow up and over the road to Tighnabruaich. Across the Kyles to Bute a bright purple-pink haze blooms on the shoreline. I am here to interview community woodland managers and advisers who together contribute to the Argyll Countryside Trust’s (ACT), Rainforest Restoration Package. I am also following a plant.

I’m experimenting with photographic practices to consider the multi-layered roles that rhododendron ponticum plays in labours to conserve and restore Scotland’s fragmented rainforest, and how the plant weaves across conservation media narratives of forest degradation on the one hand and, through its removal, rainforest resurgence on the other. In the context of my interviews with conservation workers and their emotive descriptions of their work in holding the plant back from ecologically fragile places, I experience an unsettling feeling of threat as I witness the plants en masse. An embodied experience of Erin Despard and Michael Gallagher’s description of encounters with Argyll’s rhododendron as both ‘beautiful and ominous’ (2018).

Scotland’s temperate rainforest falls primarily on the west coast. The mild temperatures and high humidity provide a suitable climate for rare epiphytic lichens and bryophytes but also for r. ponticum. ACT notes that half of what remains of Scotland’s temperate rainforest can be found in Argyll and Bute, whilst the plant is present in 40% of this habitat (Saving Scotland’s Rainforest).

Originally from the Iberian peninsula but hybridised locally in 19th century Scotland, R ponticum is a hardy, prolific seed-spreader. The plants form dense thickets in and around rainforest habitats, preventing direct sunlight from hitting the forest floor. Suppressing the establishment of new trees, rhododendron poses a threat to the rare lichens and bryophytes for which Scotland’s rainforest are of global ecological importance. Particularly affecting lichens that depend on older, acid-bark trees, such as tree lungwort, the plant undermines fragments of rainforests as sites of refugia and ecological continuity.

In my photographic practice, r. ponticum offers a temporal lens through which to consider human-plant relations that weave across pasts, presents and futures. Its presence in Argyll offers a story in which the breakdown of rainforest resilience begins in part centuries ago with rhododendron’s hybridisation, and that in contemporary times is woven with human labour, calls by conservation organisations to ‘save Scotland’s rainforest’ and future-oriented modelling on anticipated climactic impacts on these habitats.

In May, R. ponticum is in full flower and the bright pink-purple is markedly visible in multiple points in the woodland. A visual sense of volume, spread and ubiquity in Argyll’s temperate rainforest is amplified by the plant’s bright colour against the green of the woodland. I defer my practice to the plant’s phenological patterns for a set of photographs that seeks to draw on this stark contrast in order to map affective elements of this encounter through varying focus points in camera.

In some images rhododendron lingers as a remote presence, requiring searching for, in others, the plant dissects the greens, its flowers in full view.

Whilst participating in rhododendron removal and conducting interviews within the rainforest zone, forest wardens have described a hyper-vigilance that drives the emotional and affective labour that runs alongside the physical work of managing its spread. Such work requires constant scanning for the plant, whilst simultaneously being confronted with a deep concern for forest futures triggered by the pink-purple bloom sometimes on the very edge of vision.

Clearing and then preventing the re-establishment of r ponticum are acts of labour that are caught between competing narratives of rainforest futures within conservation organisation media. Where fragments of rainforest are connected and biodiversity is protected, or where lichens and bryophytes become further limited to shrinking patches of refugia. In these narratives, encounters with r. ponticum in specific places become also an encounter with a spectre of future lost forests, even following labours to remove the plant whole. Whilst restricted through root-stem injection or ‘lever and mulch’, travelling through Argyll it is easy to observe that the plant is consistently pushing and pulling at the edges of these habitats.

References
Despard, E. and Gallagher, M. (2018) ‘Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion’, in Environmental Humanities, 10:2, p.370-396