“You should have seen it before,” he said. In the three years he’s
worked here, he’s cleared overgrown trails and hauled out 120 tons of
trash, including a bus shelter that (along with wheelie bins) people
burn to get high. “No wonder they die younger,” he said.
To help convey a sense of safety, he often takes classes of
schoolchildren here. He’s helped organize 108 different cultural and
educational events in the past year, led evening health walks and
sponsored park worker training. Of the housing residents who have
trained with him, 70 percent went on to find permanent employment.
He is like Puck: mixing everyone up together in the forest of delights
and trusting they’ll go back home all sorted out. Like the forest
therapists in Korea, Bolton is part naturalist, part social worker, part
mythmaker. It’s a job description that didn’t used to exist, because it
didn’t need to. We once had a familiar relationship with nature; we
knew it on a first-name basis. But now we need professionals to help
us reacquaint ourselves with the woods. Soon we may need teachers
to remind us how to converse face-to-face. Like a lactation consultant
or the people who show us how to bake bread on YouTube, Bolton is a
broker in cultural salvage.
At the moment, that meant gargoyles. The small group of
depressives, petty criminals and former addicts had assembled on the
trail, and Bolton was demonstrating how to make “green men” out of
clay and paste them to a tree. The criminal and psychiatric
backgrounds of the participants were not revealed to Gold and Bolton.
Their job was to work in the present. Bolton kept up an affable
monologue as he scurried about. “Along the way I just collected a few
wee bits, leaflets; I can start pulling them off and using the shapes,
like these sycamore shapes and leaves. Oi! Here’s a holly leaf.” He
was picking them off the ground like a discerning rooster. “The good
thing about temporary art, if you don’t like it you can start again.
You’ll notice some of the leaves have quite hairy textures, some
smooth. Should I get more color?”