The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  10 JANUARY: Very mild; but a black voice of crow at the north of the wood. The Jew’s ears have ‘inflated’ – four hundred of them, in size from buttons to porcine ears, on the elder by the stile.

  With its fissured trunk and tendency to loll, the elder tree is not a thing of beauty. But from such arboreal ugliness emerges in early summer a generous white flower that is glory to eye and nose.

  The elder thrives almost everywhere, though it likes nitrogen-loaded soil best. A sort of proof: the stile elder sits on the same pink clay mound (the remnant root system of a holly upturned an aeon ago) the rabbits use as a sentry post, and which is encrusted with their droppings.

  Judas tree. Devil’s wood. God’s stinking tree. Black elder. Bour. Scaw. Dog tree. The cruel country names for the elder reflect the belief that Judas hanged himself from the elder. It is the devil’s own wood, and if burned in Warwickshire you’ll see Lucifer himself pouring down the chimney. The Scots, among others, considered that the Cross of Calvary was ‘bour’, making it, dreadfully, symbol of both death and sorrow:

  Bour-tree, bour-tree, crookit rung,

  Never straight, and never strong,

  Ever bush, and never tree

  Since our Lord was nailed t’ye.

  Some of the evil reputation attached to the elder arose from its habit of killing the peasants of the Dark Ages as they shivered in their rude hovels. Elder wood releases cyanide when burning.

  Sambucus nigra has hard wood but hollow stems, the easy source, in times now long gone, of flutes, pipes and pop-guns. Etymologically, elder is maybe stemmed from Æld, ‘fire’ in Old English, due to the employment of its branches when blowing on nascent flames. The Latin name, at the experts’ guess, comes from a musical instrument fashioned from elder wood, called a sambuca.

  Poor elder. Its youth is green and too brief; there is no adolescence, no pert twenties, MILF/DILF thirties – it goes straight to wrinkly, twisted-bone, deep old age, and loiters about, unloved, for decades, losing its bark in an arboreal psoriasis.

  The elder is a miserable tree. Collis thought it ‘hopelessly plebeian’, a bush posing as a tree, a tree failing to be a bush.

  13 JANUARY: Snow last night, which then froze.

  I wake up to a white paradise.

  Snow remits the usual laws of life; a snowy day is a holiday.

  At the wood: vertical stripes of snow on north-facing trees. And deer prints on the horizontal path. A wood exists in plural dimensions.

  I follow the slots in the snow, lured on by the hope of spotting the deer, but the marks trot out of Cockshutt over the neighbour’s wheatfield and away into the polar distance, probably to Hole Wood. I have heard fallow deer barking in Hole, a thirty-acre black duvet tucked down in the valley.

  Back in Cockshutt. There are ten blackbirds in a flock, the largest congregation of the species I have seen. They squawk around the wood, fiercely, like outraged ayatollahs.

  The snow hardly dents the ardour of the animals in heat: a grey squirrel couple hump unashamed against the Tall Oak. Yesterday, I caught the fox pair entwined. Dogging, you might say.

  The fox, Britain’s only wild canine, has inhabited the isles for tens of thousands of years. It became native at the time of the Ice Age, originally sharing its domain with woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth cats. So, I was the interloper in the scene.

  14 JANUARY: Mid-afternoon. The piglets are at the stream in the dingle. I think of them as domestic animals; they surely think of themselves as wild. A matter of perception.

  I hold the face of one of the Large Black sows, raise her ears, and look into her brown eyes. You can perceive the intelligence. Pigs have locked-in syndrome. They have the thoughts; they cannot express them verbally.

  A raven flies overhead, unseen but marked by the distinct sound of its wings; a horsewhip flicking, a stick swishing.

  15 JANUARY: A storm in the morning; and I’m in the centre of Cockshutt, which is moving like the deck of a schooner going round the Cape.

  Timbers splinter; surf pounds through the crows’ nests; bines of honeysuckle shriek.

  Force 10. Wind so oxygenating I can hardly breathe.

  We hold on, me and the exhilarated trees.

  But the beating of the wind and the rain drives the birds out of the wood, blasts away the blackbirds. One somersaults over and again, a black handkerchief in a tumble dryer.

  By afternoon the wind is pining for its former fortitude.

  16 JANUARY: Heavy with meltwater, the stream through the dingle and the paddock is running faster than a man can walk and at the bottom the overspill has formed a small lake. The alder emerge from the water like the masts of sunken Sargasso wrecks.

  Curious: the old maps show that this new lake is where the wood’s pool was located before it was drained, and relocated deeper in Cockshutt by damming the dingle gorge with rough-cast concrete blocks in the 1950s.

  Meet the new pool, same as the original pool.

  The wind ploughs long furrows in the flood. The same wind carries the bleats of trapped sheep, and the pitiful peeows of circling buzzards over in the next valley.

  In the morning’s flat sunshine, the flood is as silver as sea. Although the flood-pool has only existed for hours, there are three mallard sailing there, tacking into the wind. A fine picture.

  The birds spark a sudden memory: the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, our children playing with wooden yachts on the pond.

  Behind the ad hoc pool, a kestrel quarters the winter kale, slipping forward in small curves, then anchoring to fan the ground into stupefied submission.

  There are long-tailed tits working the hazel trees of the hedge, tinkling as they go, minute feathered wind-chimes.

  I get to within forty feet of the duck before they launch, alarmed, up into the wind, a near-vertical take-off.

  Left behind on the water: a bobbing, bountiful tide of hazelnuts. Where did they come from? Are they a jay’s treasure hoard, stolen away by the flood? Distinctive spoors of a grey squirrel in the mud, two big feet followed by two small feet in potato-print regularity, proves it has helped itself to this unexpected gift. Grey squirrels do not properly hibernate. They are up in a drey I have not located, slothsome resting.

  The sky turns sullen. But under the hedge, a single snowdrop has pierced through the earth and bloomed. If snowdrops are appearing, then the earth must be wakening. Of all our wild flowers the white bells are the purest, the most ethereal, the most chaste.

  How the snowdrop first came to Britain is impossible to know; it was not recognized as a wild plant until the eighteenth century, and it is only here in the west that it flourishes naturally in the woods and hedges.

  Whatever; the snowdrop says that winter is not for ever.

  17 JANUARY: 9am. The wood is full of sad robin soliloquies, and rain. The notes of birdsong drip down with the drops of water.

  Globules of rain stick on the end of twigs; fairy lights.

  Midday: I go into the wood deliberately, to kill and to forage, to see what in the wood might sustain stomach as well as soul. I shoot a siesta-ing wood pigeon in the larch, with the .410 shotgun. The smell of cordite hangs in the air for an age.

  I farm for wildlife. Cannot wildlife provide me with a meal? Is that not fair? Or at least a decent bargain with nature?

  So, this is a real wood. With blood.

  Wood pigeon. Due to its generality, one forgets it is a woodland bird. Unlike a lot of native birds the wood pigeon is a proper herbivore and has a crop like a pheasant. It is a grazing animal, and under natural woodland conditions it feeds on the ground in clearings, and come the autumn has a craving for acorns.

  A heron sky-rows past. Like a headmaster, it has the eye for spotting miscreancy. The heron kranks the alarm. A chaffinch flings itself into the protected space of a hawthorn bush.

  All through the wood, scarlet elf cup mushrooms erupt through the floor. It is a good year for Sarcoscypha coccinea, which are passable when quick-fried in oil. In times past they wer
e also made into arrangements for the table.

  Slugs like them too.

  The rabbits in their winter coats have stopped hunger by gnawing the bark of the larch. They do not venture from their burrows this day. Some caution, in the ether or in the DNA, has warned them about the man with the gun.

  There is an aviary of twittering in the firs at the very top of the wood: goldcrests.

  Back down the path, I am struck by the self-possession of trees, but also their stationariness; I am never more aware of my mobility than when walking past a tree. I leave them behind.

  No, they leave me behind; a tree can live for a thousand or more years. Me? A few decades if I’m lucky, and good. (The Fortingall Yew in the churchyard of the village of Fortingall in Perthshire, Scotland, is upwards of three thousand years old.) I might only make a day more than the four decades already won.

  At the end of the day: the low winter light, the trees reduced to their bare bones, and there is only loneliness and the scent of decomposition.

  19 JANUARY: The rush of wind in spruce. A primordial noise: the first conifers appeared in the Permian period, an age before the dinosaurs. When the wind is in the spruce you hear the world 300 million years ago.

  Conifers flourish in conditions that flowering plants find difficult. Conifers are indicators of bad land; they mark poverty, as sure as ragged clothes, holes in shoes. On good soil, conifers tend to be ousted by angiosperms, the class of trees whose mature seed is surrounded by the ovule. Broadleaved hardwood, in other words. Conifer means ‘cone-bearing’. All cones are either male or female; never hermaphrodite.

  In nature you never know what you will find. Nothing is certain. Especially in a wood. Some years the beech produce no mast; once the woodcock failed to visit.

  Birch twigs were traditionally used for punishing: the generic name Betula derives from the Latin for ‘beat’. I walk into a branch, half lopped off by the wind, which cuts my face. In their dying, trees have the quality of reshaping. Thus, of surprise.

  Hazel catkins (lamb’s tails) dangle gently from the twigs, turning lemon yellow from lime green as the pollen forms in them.

  21 JANUARY: Near the end of day, and near freezing. Fog clutches the ground; fog so dense there is no demarcation between pond, wood, sky.

  Crouched beside the pool, the water coal-slack black. Waiting. Yesterday I spotted strange, obnoxious bird faeces by the pond.

  High in the oak, above the fog level, the robin whistles; the low-living blackbird is suffocated into silence.

  I hear incoming geese honking, and my worst fears are confirmed. A pair of Canada geese have discovered Cockshutt’s pool.

  23 JANUARY: A fine morning, with blue tits doing early house-hunting. Lesser celandine out. A young song thrush practises his lines. In low sunshine through the larch a ‘lek’ of winter gnats dance, as if moving up and down on unseen elastic strings. These are male Trichocera annulata seeking females.

  24 JANUARY: Heavy frost overnight, which bites into the earth, and I wood-wander in echoey isolated tones of my own making.

  Janus was the two-headed god of vigil. Sitting in my chair I look back on the old year, with its broken hogweed stems, collapsed nettles, and look forward to spring, with its green dog’s mercury. And the dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) has risen to two inches.

  Later: I spend an hour exploring the eastern edge, the long ditch, which is overflowing with the stink of vixen. I follow the path to their earth. They are the wombling foxes, making good use of the things that they find; the entrance to their earth is under a dystopian dump of corrugated iron, a woman’s bicycle, a child’s swing, tractor tyres bulldozed there by some previous farmer years ago.

  Their metal-roofed den is on the dry bank, up above the piddle stream which runs in and out of the pool.

  Pigeons come home to roost. Forty of them.

  27 JANUARY: Night in the winter wood: moonshine splays the trees, creating endless plots of light and shade. I hear the badger coming down the path before I see him. Badgers like to sleep through cold periods, a partial hibernation, although the rule, as now, is not absolute.

  The badger has found an easy source of food: leftover wheat concentrate pellets (sow rolls) in the pig troughs.

  When I first walked the wood’s path and polluted it with my man-scent, the animals avoided it, and tried to make their own parallel course. After three months or so, I became as familiar to them as the earth, the sky, the water, and they reverted to the old way.

  28 JANUARY: Still the cold continues.

  Wind crinkles the pond into sharp waves, making the geese yo-yo.

  I spend the morning coppicing hazel, arm-aching work with a bow saw.

  Coppicing is a matter of timing. Cut too early and the stump produces shoots that do not harden before frost; cut too late and it disturbs nesting birds, and the tree will have used precious energy on sap which it needs for regrowth. So January it is.

  The hazel in Cockshutt was coppiced for sticks for sheep hurdles, forage and bean sticks for the kitchen gardens.

  The to-fro rasp of a saw in woodland seems profane, as though sanctity is being violated; but it is rather the music of consideration, of a wood being cared for.

  Hazel, unusually, will self-coppice, throwing up plenty of straight rods from the stump. I have a hazel stick, cut from a hedge at Abbey Dore, fifteen years ago, with a V notch at the top, on which to hang the thumb. It is the stick I lean on to gaze at sheep while they safely graze, and wave at them when they have strayed. It is my giant extra arm when I ‘cush’, move on, the cows.

  The tallest hazel in Britain is just over the hill from Cockshutt, at Kentchurch. It is twenty-six feet tall.

  Small, bright leaves of wood sorrel emerging on the dank dingle bank.

  Wood sorrel’s leaves are perfect green hearts, carved out of jade by some master craftsman. The leaves are hypersensitive and mobile; they close when exposed to bright light, when it rains, and when night falls. (The flimsy flowers do not open until April.)

  The heart-shaped leaves of sweet violet are also shoving aside the leaf mould. Two male squirrels chase a female round and round, chattering, leaping.

  Coal tits singing their spring song in the larch, a more liquid, soprano take on the great tit’s tis sweet, tis sweet.

  In the woodland ecosystem, dead wood plays a godly role. Rot is good. In Britain, the rarest and most threatened saproxylic invertebrates (those dependent on dead or decaying wood) are found in historic parkland and wood pasture. More than two thousand different invertebrate species in Britain are wholly reliant on corpsewood.

  So, the ‘brashings’ from the coppicing are piled up, a small hill of branches and twigs. There are five other log and brush piles in the wood, composed of the leftovers from previous clearance work. All have been colonized by algae, mosses, fungi, wood-boring insects, toads, and mosquito-like flies called fungus gnats. These are weak flyers, and crawl in their hundreds over the old brush piles. So many blue tits are enjoying these easy pickings that the heaps are bejewelled blue and yellow.

  30 JANUARY: For a change, I enter Cockshutt via the field gate and the ride, and immediately stumble over an animal whose identity requires me to scroll through an internal ID chart, because it is still, and does not move. Some sort of pet? A guinea pig?

  One is unused to wild animals underfoot; the bundle is a rabbit with myxomatosis. I go and get an air rifle from the Land Rover, and put the mite out of its bleeding-eyes misery.

  The rabbit came from the small colony under the briars in the ride; there are five other colonies in the wood, all small, no more than ten adults each.

  31 JANUARY: Third day of rain; Jew’s ears rehydrated again to enormous degree, thirteen centimetres by nine. The dog’s mercury is three inches high.

  Dog’s mercury is an indicator of ancient woodland, woodland which has existed since AD 1600. Various taxa can be used to give an indication that a site has been continuously wooded for more than four hundred year
s; these include invertebrates (such as beetles associated with dead and decaying wood) and vascular plants (in conservationist jargon ‘AWVPs’, ancient woodland vascular plants), the species which tend to occur mostly or entirely in old woodland. One singular reason why AWVPs are more common in ancient woods is that they are glacially slow colonists, with relatively poor dispersal abilities. Of ancient woodland indicator plants Cockshutt contains, in addition to dog’s mercury: woodruff, wood speedwell, bluebell, wood anemone, opposite-leaved golden-saxifrage.

  I planted the wood sorrel.

  FEBRUARY

  Roots

  The warmest tree to touch – how trees grow – wood pigeon courtship – my first memory – Edith dies – the mating song of the male chaffinch – catkins – the subterranean life of trees – sheep on the ride – the fox – the shooting of the Canada geese

  2 FEBRUARY: 8.15am. According to the thermometer on the barn wall it is 2ºC. I drive the six miles east to the wood and touch the trees: the ash, the beech, the oak, the birch, the sallow – the elder is the warmest of them all, followed by the larch.

  On this day in 1787 Gilbert White recorded at Selborne: ‘brown wood-owls … sit hooting all night on my wall-nut trees. Their note is like a fine vox humana & very tuneable.’ A friend of White’s found tawnies, all tawnies, hooted in B-flat.

  4 FEBRUARY: On the lane. Looking through the Land Rover window towards Cockshutt’s iron oaks, standing their ground against the rain. I have been defeated and left my fencing work, but the oaks are uncompromising.

  In the 1990s, I rediscovered (after hazy, lazy university days) graft, by taking up the family line, farming.

  I can hack days of work outside in rain. I tell you that. In 2001 I spent six consecutive days, on the hill above Abbey Dore, in mad ceaseless downpour, building a ‘race’ (a corridor to contain cattle). Every hole for the uprights, which were railway sleepers, filled with water before I had finished digging it. I did twenty holes, hauled every sleeper myself because it was so slick the tractor’s wheels would not grip. The horizontal rails, motorway crash barriers, I fixed myself.