The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Today, I have given up, bowed before the elements. I am flesh. The trees are wood. We are not the same.

  The Hebridean sheep, also made of flesh and tough, have sheltered behind the boles of the oaks, which are bulwarks.

  Where does tree growth come from? How can the trunk increase in thickness and be continuously functional?

  Xylem is plant vascular tissue that conveys water and dissolved minerals from the roots to the rest of the tree, and provides support. In trees, xylem builds a ring of new xylem around itself. Dead xylem becomes heartwood; and the newer xylem outside, still serving as plumbing (like the Pompidou Centre), becomes ‘sapwood’. The heartwood provides the backbone of the tree, the stick for the lolly. The age of a tree may be determined by counting the number of annual xylem rings at the base of the trunk, when cut in cross section.

  8 FEBRUARY: Owls still hunting at 7am.

  At 8am, I begin laying the western hedge of Cockshutt, cutting each ‘stemble’ (as the old-timers would call a stem) to within a quarter of an inch of its life then laying it down at thirty-five degrees. There are four degrees of frost. Morning notes of a blackbird in the ash skip off the white surface of the adjacent wheat-field, as thrown flat pebbles skim over water.

  My hands thick with leather gauntlet, I drop the big axe. There is no thud; instead the earth rings with the metallic toll of a bell. I let the rest of the medieval executioner’s tools fall to the ground. Small axe, bill-hook, bow saw. The music is atonal, Stockhausen.

  By ten I am hot, my face rinsed with sweat, and not just from the hedge-laying. The day has gone warm. The thawing of the earth frees the salad smells of new life.

  Over the thicket, a pair of wood pigeons rise and fall in flight, oddly like the swooping paper darts one threw at school. Such is their courtship routine. Country folk used to believe that Valentine’s Day was for more than humans; it was the day the birds became betrothed. Chaucer wrote a poem, ‘The Parlement of Foules’, on the very theme.

  The love of birds is very British, very old.

  There is an unexpected privilege in hedge-laying; one gets to peep into the inner sanctum of this linear woodland before the harem veil of leaves comes down. You see the hedge’s secret life. Chopping into the base of a hawthorn, properly almost severing it but not quite, the billhook hits a patch of glossed bark, and swings back with two or three ginger hairs stuck to the sappy blade. Whether from weasel or stoat I am not sure, but I have found the passageway of a mustelid.

  Hedge-laying is one of those jobs that place one in the river of all human time. I’m cutting at wood with a metal billhook; the first Neolithic farmers here chopped at the wildwood with flint adzes.

  Different cutting medium; same perspiring action.

  There is another antique element in the scene. Man and dog. I have Edith with me, and she alternately mooches in the hedge and then lies in the sun with matronly dignity.

  I have known her since the moment she was born. I watched her enter my world. She has always been the most beautiful black Labrador, outside and in. She would be a shoo-in for a canine Country Life ‘girl in pearls’. Indeed, her proper name is Edith Swannesha, ‘Edith Swan-neck’, in honour of the legendary Anglo-Saxon beauty married to King Harold.

  My Edith is dying. She has cancer, and I am atomic-clock counting down the days of her life. Tick. Tick.

  Tick.

  My first memory: I am a toddler, strapped in a Silvercross pushchair, the one with the green canopy to keep out the 1960s sun. My parents (I learn later) are on holiday in Venice, and I am in the care of my great-aunt and great-uncle, Kathy and Willi, who farm sheep at Llangennith on the Gower.

  The pushchair is on the stone flags outside the front door of their lime-washed (with Snowcem) farmhouse. Shadow, Willi’s sheepdog, slinks up to the side of the pushchair, levers himself up and peers at me. Before biting me on the face.

  I was bitten by more than a dog that afternoon, I was bitten by a bug: I have loved dogs and farming ever since.

  I’ll explain. It was, of course, my fault that Shadow bit me; I had provoked him by waving an ice cream with a 99 chocolate flake in his face. I would have bitten me too.

  Shadow was my brother – I did not have a human one, or a sister – and on that summer afternoon in the 1960s I learned to treat him like one: with awe. Modern biologists reveal almost monthly that the ‘species barrier’ between animals and humans is thin; I learned that, Mr Scientist, in my pushchair.

  I think it was the same afternoon that I saw Shadow flush sheep from the vague ruins of the castle on one word of command from Willi. I held Willi’s wind-tanned hand; transmitted through it was the Zen contentment of a man in harmony with his dog, his stock, his land. I wanted the same. I have always wanted the same.

  10 FEBRUARY: For another day the black oaks have stood in squalling rain, straight as the masts of naval ships. They did not bow, they did not yield.

  Edith dies, and I howl.

  11 FEBRUARY: I listened to the sweet south wind this morning …

  12 FEBRUARY: Chaffinch singing in the cold winter sunshine, which is then dashed by sleet. He has acquired a blue cap, and a rich pink waistcoat. This is the first full mating song by a Cockshutt bird.

  13 FEBRUARY: Sunny, which brings the forgotten delight of sunshine on water, and gnats jigging.

  I poke, with a stick, at the decaying ash tree in the dingle, the one which passes for a perpendicular split banana, revealing its rotten, crumbling grey core.

  Trees age in their way, not ours. The decomposing heartwood, the fallen twigs, branches and leaves all go to feed the tree. In order to keep growing upwards and outwards, the tree cannibalizes itself. By this means, it can reach an effective immortality, for how else would you categorize a life of a thousand years or more?

  Trees first evolved on Earth around 400 million years ago. They survived the meteorite that did for the dinosaurs.

  Britain is home to more dead-wood invertebrates than any other European country for the simple reason we have more veteran trees.

  The lords and ladies, with their poxy leaves, are four inches high.

  A kestrel at the edge of the wood: the humming bird of prey, vibrating on the edge of ecstasy.

  Atop the rabbits’ sentry stump are hazelnuts split clean down the middle, the forensic proof of the grey squirrel, which gnaws a small hole in the nut, then bisects with bottom incisors to make a clean break along the manufactured weakest line. Small neat holes in nuts are made by wood mice or voles.

  The male catkins on the alder have expanded from hard chipolatas to soft lengths of pipe cleaner.

  My last pig joke: I ask Lavender if her favourite painter is Francis Bacon.

  Actually, I have one more piece of porcine humour. The pigs like to itch against the rough bark of alder, making, I suggest, ‘pork scratchings’.

  The pigs also chew at the alder. Alder, when bitten or cut, turns a striking red – the colour of blood. The tree was thus deemed human by the native tribes of Britain and revered as the water spirit’s sentinel.

  15 FEBRUARY: On/off rain. I spend the morning chopping down, and de-limbing, two spruce trees to repurpose as poles for the repair of the corrugated-iron pigsty. White chips fly, and the scent of pine resin fills the morning.

  On the larch, the leaf buds sit in fat little pods along the dry brown twigs; soon the fresh green needles will emerge. The honeysuckle is already in new leaf.

  Underneath the beech, a young beech rises from the ground, as muscular as a conger eel.

  To trim a tree flush with the trunk is ‘snedding’, same as it was in Anglo-Saxon England.

  Under the woodland floor, the unseen life.

  Trees are networkers, not solitary acts. Trees communicate with one another through underground fungi – mycorrhizae, which weave into the tips of their roots and extend through the soil to form a subterranean internet, via which can be sent nutrition (sugar, nitrogen, phosphorus), along with warnings about such crucial arboreal
matters as aphid attack. The so-called ‘Wood Wide Web’.

  The relationship between these mycorrhizal fungi and the trees is old, and mutualistic. The fungi siphon off food from the trees, taking some of the carbon-rich sugar that they produce during photosynthesis. The plants, in turn, obtain nutrients the fungi have acquired from the soil, by use of enzymes that the trees do not possess.

  It is not a case of every tree for itself. In the Wood Wide Web a young seedling in a heavily shaded understorey might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbours.

  But I have an axe to grind. Contemporary arborists are tempted to portray the society of trees as a hippie, communistic utopia (hence the ‘Wood Wide Web’ in which the trees have personhood, like the Ents in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Ents held ponderous conversations that ignored paltry human timescales, and were capable of love.

  Trees are not Ents, and to suggest they are as sentient as primates is to diminish them, and us.

  Every generation looks at the trees, and takes what it wants. Once, we looked at the trees and considered ourselves and them heroic individuals.

  ‘Ent’, incidentally, is Old English for ‘giant’.

  19 FEBRUARY: Move the sheep down to the ride and the far bank of the dingle, confining them with a hundred metres of electric netting. Grass needs cutting in order to thrive; the wood tries ceaselessly to ‘re-forest’ all areas, and untended grass would become scrub. There are days when I seem to be fighting the wood.

  On this same day, I herd the four cows out of the wood and the pigs to the adjacent paddock (which itself is partially wooded; pigs have the devil’s piggy appetite for bluebells, and if left in Cockshutt would consume every last one). For the first time in months there are no livestock in Cockshutt, and the wood has lost a little of its soul.

  20 FEBRUARY: Once when Cockshutt’s trees were silent and white under snow a woodcock fell from the sky, black and fast like a comet from heaven. The trailing sparrowhawk, having misjudged the attack, crashed into the tatty Gothic drape of snow-covered honeysuckle.

  After a moment or two, the wriggling sparrowhawk fell to the ground beside the woodcock, but, out of its sky element, unable to attack, flew off.

  I watched the wood fill with white that day, until the petrified woodcock became a sugar bird.

  Outside their metal grotto, the foxes have left the skin of a lamb.

  22 FEBRUARY: Frost on snow. Each and every tree in the wood is made individual by the paleness of the backdrop.

  Each day, a change, a note to make. A female blackbird, balled up against the cold, searches hopelessly through the sycamore leaves, all stiff and curled. She sees a thin, red twig, which she must have realized was a twig but hopped to it anyway and picked at it. Such was her hunger, and her imagination. I have some apples for the pigs, and throw one her way.

  A shrew resorts to hunting in broad daylight.

  Afternoon: the disconsolate dog fox, everything about him diminished and dejected, tippy-toes into the pig paddock.

  I accidentally let go of the bucket. The fox thins, his mask switches left, then right, sees me. He appears to be smiling. He runs, but he will be back.

  We both know this.

  23 FEBRUARY: Thaw, due to sunshine. The seasons steal days from each other. Today it is summer in winter. Along the ride, my footprints fill slowly with water; the Anglo-Saxon word rode meant woodland ride. The display flight of the woodcock, ‘roding’, is derived from rode, because the birds often seek and follow rides and the edges of clearings.

  Woodcock are now amber-listed in the UK.

  27 FEBRUARY: Sitting in my chair. Mist. 2ºC. A blade of light appears in the east, and the brightness grows over the pool. The fusion of wood and water. Watching the dawn is the never-diminishing privilege of the early riser.

  The birds of the wood can wait no longer. Their desire to mate is stronger than the gravity of returned winter. A great tit raises his voice in confirmation.

  28 FEBRUARY: The Canadas have attacked everything: the frogs, the moorhens, any mallard which land. I shout at them, fire off guns, get the dogs to bark at them. They will not budge, they will not move. In the desperate end it is the pool’s life or the Canadas’.

  My son and I decide to shoot them, with heavy BB cartridges, on this bone-bleak day when the birches on the bank give an oddly apposite North American aspect to the scene.

  The Canadas are sitting on the water. A 12-bore broadside to the gander … I expect the goose to fly, she refuses.

  Tris, as startled as I: ‘Do I shoot the other one?’

  Is it love? Loyalty? I do not know, only that the goose bravely faces the gun. I say ‘Yes,’ but I am no longer thinking about pest control, only stopping a bird’s anguish for the love of its life.

  Dead on the water, the Canadas float on their backs, and when the wind blows them towards us they are as menacing as pillows. Hauled on to the bank, the Canadas are such beautiful corpses, their black snakey necks damn good enough for a stempost on a Viking longship; the fine sawtooths of the bills delicate engineering beyond the skill of man.

  A Winter Eden

  A winter Eden in an alder swamp

  Where conies now come out to sun and romp,

  As near a paradise as it can be

  And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

  It lifts existence on a plane of snow

  One level higher than the earth below,

  One level nearer heaven overhead

  And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.

  It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast

  Where he can stretch and hold his highest feast

  On some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,

  What well may prove the years’ high girdle mark.

  Pairing in all known paradises ends:

  Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,

  Content with bud inspecting. They presume

  To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

  A feather hammer gives a double knock.

  This Eden day is done at two o’clock.

  An hour of winter day might seem too short

  To make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.

  Robert Frost

  MARCH

  Buds

  Back to black weather – the first celandine and primrose – the glade I made – a forager’s soup – ivy – birch syrup – the arrival of the chiffchaff – a blackbird makes a nest in the elm – BB’s Brendon Chase – a traveller in a new land: spring – bramble leaf miners – sycamore

  1 MARCH: Back to black weather (as Amy Winehouse might have written). With no leaves for umbrellas, the rain trickles down the trunks of the trees like sweated sap. Bluebell leaves are long fingers of green stars.

  Like all owls, the tawny is no great home-builder. By choice, the tawny will nest in a cavity in a hollow deciduous tree, preferably wrapped with creeper (hence yet another country name for the bird, ‘ivy owl’), with the female scratching a desultory scrape in arboreal debris. Which is exactly what the Cockshutt tawnies have done in the dingle.

  The rain has not stopped the flowering of the first celandine and the first primrose, with its intense, saliva-inducing lemon beauty.

  2 MARCH: The rain has washed and exposed more of the roots of the alders in the paddock, the gall-like structures which grow on alder roots now clearly visible. These bacteria-laden nodules fix nitrogen, and so improve the soil.

  One of my farming neighbours has recently cut down all the alders in his hedge.

  Along the silent path; a rabbit shoots out of the bramble, a white-tailed thunderbolt. A blackbird chinks; then another, so there is a chain of chinking across the trees and hedges and fields to the village gardens on the hill. The success of garden birds, né woodland birds, such as the blackbird is heart-warming. The blackbird is not a high flyer (bird lover’s joke) and the dwarf apple trees and shrubs of the villagers suit it well.

  On
e blackbird begins to sing. Is there a better chorister than the blackbird? When Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the US, came to Britain in 1910 he was aghast at the local indifference to the music of the blackbird. I too am enraptured by this darkling bird, the fluting melodies, the pitch perfection. It is not the devil in the detail; it is the divine. Surely.

  3 MARCH: In the rains the woodland plants are springing up, especially the dog’s mercury, now six inches tall, creating a long low kingdom of spires in sulky corners of the wood.

  Change of plan, and I return sheep to the south glade and this time mob-stock, twenty sheep close confined to eat down the sward which is full of reddy sycamore seedlings.

  This grassy glade was laid down three years ago, and is, if I can keep the sycamores at bay, full of meadow-land wild flowers (cowslips, red clover, yarrow, harebells, ox-eye daisy and dandelion) and grasses galore (meadow fescue, red fescue, cocksfoot, timothy and rough-stalked meadow grass). It is a picture worthy of Sisley or Burne-Jones in late spring.

  No grazing by livestock, no glade.

  Ideally I would have put the cows on the glade – different types of livestock graze differently, creating varying micro-environments and sward heights, a mosaic of habitats – but it is too wet to support their weight.

  On my way out of the wood I disturb a waddling mallard pair having a constitutional.

  The sallow wands are turning green: the colour of spring appears early in their skin. Sallow is the Church’s substitute for the palms laid on the path of Jesus. Each year, crucifixes made from sallow twigs are distributed as palm on Palm Sunday. Folklore states that Christ was once whipped with a sallow rod, and if this indignity was visited upon children their growth would be stunted.

  I coppiced some of the sallow three winters back; the sallow shoots now are two and a half metres high. In the same area on the east of the wood I coppiced three ash; the new stems thrash, Medusa style.

  4 MARCH: Gale. The claw-ends of the spruces are blown off to create horror scenes of decapitated green hands on the woodland floor. A very small pinch of the fresh pine shoot is pleasant to taste; these shoots, eaten constantly, were once considered to cure chest disease.