My private place of peace is very much the woods. I’ve loved being among trees since I was a child; it’s where I head for wherever I happen to be. And not long ago I actually found myself in an area of virgin woodland in Switzerland. The mountainous landscape is so difficult to physically get about in that it can’t be used as a money-making resource, so there are huge tracts where you don’t see any sawn-off tree stumps or graded tracks; no one interferes with nature. The woods there have a totally different atmosphere to the forested areas further down. I lay down on the ground and just looked up and listened. Small creatures flying around, some tiny movements under my body and beside me, the treetops rustling in the wind, and then suddenly the sun broke through a gap in the branches – like a huge eye. It was a grand moment. It gave me a new perspective on time and my surroundings.

My thoughts went back to the forest wardens and scientists I’d been talking to over the recent weeks and months. We’ve been using these interviews in WALDESRUH –»a campsite without trees«, the piece that we’re setting up in the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. We’re trying to hone people’s senses and give them a fresh key into the natural world. We’ve also got a chorus of singers doing woodland songs from the German Romantic period and we have performers talking about the latest research work on trees, deadwood and the communication lines between roots and across fungal networks. There’s so much being discovered right now!

A maple sapling strives upwards towards the light. For her WALDESRUH Mahler gathered information relating to woodland and interviewed scientists and other people who have a deep connection to the woods © Jonas Holthaus

 

For instance, the health of a wood is dependent on plants interacting effectively with fungi, microorganisms and tiny animals. Trees need this soil life in just the same way we need our intestinal flora. And for a long period of time no one has been looking at what goes on inside a forest floor. According to a neurobiologist from Bonn, František Baluška, the thing we’re most blind to is the soil beneath our feet: as a matter of urgency, we should be trying to grasp what actually goes on down there, in order to understand the broader connections. He is working on a theory that roots are the brain of a plant and the tips of the roots are analogous to our synapses. Not all experts are of his mind on this. In fact, there’s a huge debate going on at the moment over the issue of brain-like structures in trees.

If you ask me, it’s wrong just to view the forest as a source of lumber. It’s an ecosystem, a living, breathing community. It may have something approaching its own sense of awareness. Whatever the case, it’s not just there for us to dispose of as we see fit. We’re obsessed with an eternal misapprehension that the earth exists only to help us realise our own potential – and as a result it’s in an irreversible state of disequilibrium. In Germany we see that happening in our woodlands. Climate change is drying out the spruce trees and with them our indigenous beech trees. I recently went for a hike in the rolling wooded country in the part of Hesse where I grew up, looking for the best mushroom spots that I knew when I was young. They’ve gone. Nothing grows there anymore. Some of the scientists we interviewed say that nature is a dynamic entity and will find a way of coping with the shortage of water, that something new will come along. I’m sure we’re meant to take heart from that, but I get a little depressed watching us destroy our environment and that of so many other animal and plant species.

Anna-Sophie Mahler in a clearing in Grunewald. She loves areas of forest that are a mixture of deciduous and conifer trees and are not managed for profit – a rare occurrence in Germany © Jonas Holthaus

 

I’ve preferred being outdoors ever since I was a child. And I still make a point of visiting my family in the old parental home in the holidays, whenever possible. The place is an old mill, quite remote. Racoons and herons as neighbours. I love the smell of the ground after rain. I like the special ambience, cool and damp, that there is amongst the trees. If my skin is exposed to it, I kind of acquire an extra level of alertness.

My mother always used to go into a state of elation when we were in the woods. »Oh look at that, you lot, the lovely way the light is coming through those leaves!« My father was an artist and very into nature. He and my mother created a garden alongside the mill. It’s a proper biotope, and it nurtured human beings, too. Sometimes he just sat there looking at the plants and such, and he was happy when people joined him, looking for company. My eldest son has inherited this love of nature. He’s learnt a lot in his kindergarten by the woods and knows all the different birds. Sometimes, when we’re outside exploring, it’s as though my father were present. It’s nice to be a kind of channel for this love being handed down through the generations.

We live in the centre of Zurich in a place that includes a small, overgrown garden that has things like a magnolia tree and a cherry tree, but even when I’m there I find I’m pining for life in the woods. The way the light changes over the course of a day, the moods that come over a wood at dawn and dusk, you don’t get that in cities. In the streets it basically just gets light, or it gets dark, no real transition. If I go too long without savouring these peculiar ambiences, I get jumpy and have to get out of the city. Things like that won’t change.