The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  28 MAY: 6pm. Sunny. At the sparrowhawk’s perching post (a broken-off spruce, five feet tall), around the base a perfect circular necklace of blue tit feathers.

  The pattern of leaves against the sky; the dottiness of silver birch; the clottiness of oak. To appreciate the pattern, one must lie on one’s back under the tree and gaze skywards.

  Sitting in my chair. A squirrel chirrs, tail upright, but flicks the tip cat-like in annoyance. I’m blocking the path, and it takes the long way round.

  A wood mouse pitters about. BB decided mice look like gnomes, not without cause if you compare the feet of the two species.

  Hawthorn blossom: facing west it is rusting, facing east it remains fresh as dew.

  A woodpecker in alder, a goldcrest in conifers, the latter very loud. Lots of green cherries now, in wishbone pairs on the floor. Oh, and the tender air of twilight and lazy rooks.

  29 MAY: Oak Apple Day; also Royal Oak Day, Shick-Shack Day – to mark the formal restoration of Charles II and also in memory of the oak tree at Boscobel in which he hid after the battle of Worcester in 1651 – hence the ubiquitous pub name, the Royal Oak. Oak Apple Day was popular here in the Royalist west (my mother’s family apart, who were Cromwellian horse soldiers). Children wore oak leaves or oak apples in their lapels. Anyone not wearing one could be kicked, punched or even thrashed with nettles. Over time, Shick-Shack Day became a day of licentiousness, which was appropriately Royalist.

  One of King Charles II’s favourite snacks was blue violets, fried and eaten with sugar and lemons. He would be pleased, then, that they have flowered today. Country people called them ‘blue mice’, due to their shy peeking from under the spring greenery.

  The male fern (its name, not its gender) is growing tall. It has abundant tall fronds, all shooting up in a green fountain.

  Ferns are prehistoric jungle. Lie down in ferns and you can see dinosaurs.

  Cockshutt also contains horsetail ferns, which women and men cleaned bowls with before Brillo pads and plastic brushes.

  30 MAY: Already, I think, the summer diminution of birdsong. A willow warbler sits in an oak with the wreckage of ex-insects in its beak; it emits a soft hoo-eet call as it waits for me to pass, before it can fly down to its domed nest in the base of a bramble by the fence. Blackcaps, which nest higher in the brambles, make their tac, tac calls.

  By the damp woodland path, the yellow pimpernel is out.

  JUNE

  Midsummer’s Night

  Elderflower, the summer flower of the wood – the pool, a slow suicide – what is wood? – algae – the origin of trees – ‘tree hay’ – A Tree Song – foxgloves

  1 JUNE: At the dawn end of the pool the silver birches are exactly reflected in the flat silver water; in the same way that Jack playing cards have a mirror image. Where did our moorhen chicks go? Lost them all to a neighbour’s cat. Wish I’d been more of a sentinel, wish I’d been more watchful.

  Afternoon: warm, cloudy sun, and the muscatel perfume of the flaunt-it elderflowers. The English summer begins with the elder’s flowers, and ends with its berries.

  Washing in dew gathered from elderflowers was believed to preserve a woman’s youthful beauty, and concoctions of elderflower are used to this day in up-market skin cleansers: Eau de Sureau. To this day elderflower water, which is astringent, is listed in the British Pharmacopoeia as a lotion for eye and skin injuries.

  The flowers also make that classic drink of the summer, elderflower cordial. But I prefer to turn the flowers into elderflower champagne, which precisely captures in liquid form the oracular fizziness of the flower heads.

  Elderflower champagne

  8 large elderflower heads

  4.5 litres cold water

  ¼ cup wild rose petals (if possible)

  2 unwaxed lemons, sliced

  2 tbsp cider vinegar

  750g white sugar

  champagne yeast

  a collection of clean plastic mineral-water bottles

  Pick young florets, preferably in the morning when their banana aroma is at its strongest. Shake off the insects. The florets will not keep, so take them home as soon as you can, and in the kitchen ‘fork off’ (detach) any bits of stalk. This is bitter and will spoil your brew. If you can find them, wild rose petals add a subtle floral fragrance and pinkish hue.

  Put the 4.5 litres of water into a large saucepan, together with the elderflower heads, wild rose petals, the sliced lemon and cider vinegar. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Sprinkle on the champagne yeast. Cover and leave to stand for 24 hours, remembering to stir twice with a wooden spoon.

  Using a jug, bail the liquid through a sieve into the plastic drinks bottles. Put the tops on loosely and place the bottles on a plastic tray out of direct sunlight. Over the next fortnight, the champagne will ferment. When it has almost stopped, screw down the caps and store in a cool place. Allow a day or two for the fizz to build up, then the champagne will be ready for drinking – just refrigerate before pouring. The champagne will keep for months, but will gradually become drier and more alcoholic.

  The joy of using plastic bottles is that you are more likely to avoid the calamity that sometimes strikes makers of elderflower champagne: glass bottles exploding from the pressure of the fermentation process. To check the pressure on plastic bottles, simply give them a quick squeeze. If the bottle is turgid, gently unscrew the cap until the gas hisses out, then retighten.

  4 JUNE: End of day: drone of bees high in the trees; only the slightest flickering interruption in constancy, the aural equivalent of fluorescent light.

  A mouse through the bramble; its tic-tac of feet amplified by the dry leaves.

  Mosquitoes. And more mosquitoes.

  Obviously, birds sing for territory, to prove their existence. I sing, therefore I am. That supreme caroller, the blackbird, is having an off-key moment, emitting Punch and Judy noises.

  The weirdest event: a ring of barred feathers around the sparrowhawk’s perch; something has killed the sparrowhawk, then plucked her. A fox?

  A bitter happening on an evening when the surrounding hills are sweetly steeped in haze.

  The reeds have their yellow flowers; the deadly nightshade is out.

  5 JUNE: Cumulus cloud; the cock, hen pheasant and two chicks stroll around the paddock as if they own the place, freeloading on the pig food. Ripe, red cherries fall from the geans, so I scavenge them, the leftovers from the gorging squirrels and the birds. Even with a double extension ladder I cannot reach the highest, most Eve-tempting cherries.

  A seductive red, the cherry, the scarlet of Hollywood lips.

  6 JUNE: On a pool, panic has a pattern. The mallard drake takes off, into the hint of breeze, for lift. At the far end, the moorhen slinks leggily away through the reeds. She shows her white under-tail feathers as she goes.

  Small wonder the waterfowl are alarmed. I have arrived at the pool driving a Kubota mini-digger, on caterpillar tracks, with the front loader clanking. I have brought the demonic din of the Industrial Revolution to their private Eden.

  I turn the mini-digger’s engine off. Rain finger-taps the roof, drips off, in through the open sides of the cab.

  On the surface of the pool, the rain makes endless, repeating circles. Where gathered raindrops funnel off the trees, bubbles blow on the water, then pop.

  From the security screen of green reeds, the moorhen kerrupps at me. Her cry sounds as though her mouth is, rudely, full of water. Moorhens are misnamed. The bird has nothing to do with moors but everything to do with meres, meaning mires. Moorhens more than double the interest of a pond. A pond without moorhens is like a TV screen without a picture.

  Heavier rain now, which makes strange plurping music on the water. The pond takes the colour of the June storm to become a black tar pit.

  It is wet, but June muggy.

  Although the year is slipping towards the midsummer silence of the birds, this noon the birds are singing. Willow warbler. Chiffchaff. Blackbird.

 
Another glimpse of the moorhen, scurrying along the grass on the eastern bank. With her red bill and yellow gangly legs, outsize shoes, she looks ridiculous, like a girl who has got at her mother’s make-up box and wardrobe. The moorhen disappears into the base of the briar fortress where her nest is. The brambles are also tenanted by rabbits. Sometimes she hisses at them.

  A cock chaffinch flies back and forth to his nest in the hazel, feeding gape-mouthed chicks with grubs. White grubs, green grubs.

  Baubles of rain lie on the bent blades of the rushes beneath the digger’s cab, and have silver, glam-rock sparkle. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

  Denys Watkins-Pitchford once wrote, ‘A pool to me is as important as a house.’ It’s a view I share. When we have lived in houses without ponds, I have made them. A china Belfast sink in a cottage garden was a particular triumph.

  Our current pool is industrial sized, about a third of an acre, and was double-purposed as fishpool and cattle watering hole. Mind you, with no fertilizers and agro-chemicals to pollute them, almost all pools until the 1960s were fishponds, and teemed with eel, pike and trout. Some fat abboty carp linger in the pool, but for the last decades its prime purpose has been to provide drinking water for cattle.

  The wood pool is a slow suicide; it fills with silt from ditches, with leaves from trees. To keep it alive requires vigilance.

  Suddenly the rain stops. A pond changes by the hour, by the minute. Now it is placid glass, with only the very faintest scuff from the warm air. Insects emerge from their hiding. A blue damselfly, the smaller relative of the dragonfly, hovers above the reeds; an ancient insect atop a plant that thrived in dinosaur mud. Damselflies are among the oldest of all insects; fossilized remains found in coal strata reveal that enormous dragonflies, possessing wingspans in excess of twenty-seven inches, patrolled the swamps of the Carboniferous period.

  The damselfly flickers away, a horizontal shaft of neon light.

  The aniseed aroma of ground elder fills the air. Purple loosestrife bows in the heat. The peace is heavenly.

  The pool returns to its innate monkish tranquillity.

  The old cock chaffinch is still about his labour. He is the Protestant work ethic on wings. I should be about my job too. The reason I am here with the digger is that a pine tree has toppled into the pond, blocking the outlet. The tree needs to be lifted away. I switch the engine on.

  I suppose I gazed at the pond for no more than twenty minutes. A kind of thirst was slaked.

  8 JUNE: After two days of rain and wind, and broken branches, explosive bursts of warbler song, yet cacophonic, as if a hundred wet fingers were rubbed on glass.

  I follow the air trail of a great tit to its nest, a hole in the high bough of one of the elm skeletons in the dingle.

  Met a hedgehog on the ride: tipped my hat, said hello.

  10 JUNE: The swifts swirl the scent of the elderflowers through the evening air. A shower of rain on warm earth; the woodland floor is braided with violets.

  11 JUNE: Brambles in flower. We take dark shelter from the rain, me and the wood’s animals both, in the grottoes of the lower branches.

  13 JUNE: The hirondelles are stacked, airliner style, in the high blue: house martins, above them swallows, and topmost the swifts.

  One of the joys of birds is that they cause us to look up, and think about matters spiritual.

  14 JUNE: Windy, and the willows dance the dance of a million veils.

  Taking half an hour off from shearing sheep, the hardest, most back-breaking work known to man.

  Sitting in my chair: I am mesmerized by the lichen patches on a young(ish) ash, floating lumps in a 1970s lava lamp.

  15 JUNE: Flying over the pond the red kite casts its reflection on the water. I have reflections of my own:

  What is wood? On the inside of the tree is xylem, a mass of tubes that carry water with dissolved minerals up from the roots to the leaves. In broadleaves most of the xylem tubes are open all the way along but in conifers they are interrupted by perforated plates; the second group of conducting tissues form the phloem: strings of cells that carry the products of photosynthesis from the leaves downwards and outwards to the rest of the plant. The tissues of the phloem are on the outside. Collectively the phloem forms a cylinder, enclosing the solid column of xylem within.

  Algae on the surface of the pool, though any tree lover should hesitate before condemning the greenstuff.

  Algae ventured on to land around 450 million years ago, and from these eukaryotic cells containing chloroplasts came, in the late Silurian period, the first ‘vascular plants’ – plants with plumbing systems. These early vascular plants invented lignin, which toughens cell walls. (Plants sans lignin are called ‘herbs’.) Lignin is what turns wibbly cellulose into wood. A formula: wood = architecture + lignin. The first trees appeared in the Carboniferous period, about 360 million years ago.

  The green algae on the pool, the overlooking trees, are the past and the present side by side.

  The wood’s leaves are turning a darker shade of green, so it is time to make ‘tree hay’.

  A discourse on the making of tree hay.

  Collecting tree leaves for feeding livestock, usually from pollards, is a vanishingly small component of farming, though once it was widespread across Europe. There is evidence that the practice pre-dates the making of hay from meadows, meaning it has been going on for three millennia.

  Like meadow hay, leaf fodder or tree hay was stored for feeding to stock during the winter; food for the farm beasts was so lacking that, commonly, one in five animals did not survive winter, and survivors were often so weak they needed to be carried to pasture. Tree hay made a difference. Tree hay was also vital in drought; trees, with their deeper root systems and mycorrhizal fungal associations, can access moisture and nutrients and produce green leaves when the grasses have dried up. More, tree leaves are known to have medicinal benefits and stock will self-medicate where they have the opportunity.

  Tree hay is produced by the cutting or breaking of limbs and twigs of deciduous trees and shrubs in full leaf. I do not have pollards, so prune lower limbs of hazel, beech, sallow, hawthorn, blackthorn, elm on trees and bushes daubed with a dot of white paint; only the trees and bushes I know categorically do not have birds nesting below twenty feet.

  Tree hay is peasant work. The pruning, with a bill-hook or long-handled pruners, brings down the flies, and other flies, lured by the honey sweat of human, come in, bite, leaving on my neck a choker of shining pustules.

  Entomologists use a ‘beating tray’ to collect and study the invertebrate inhabitants of woodland. This consists of a light-coloured piece of strong fabric, such as calico, stretched across a frame.

  I am wearing a white shirt, which serves just as well. My shirt crawls with caterpillars, aphids, flies, spider.

  Half a day of cutting produces about a ton of tree hay. Another half a day to load it on the trailer of the Ferguson TEF tractor reversed up the ride. Taken to the barn at home, the branches are tied in tight armfuls with baler twine, and laid in a stack in a corner four feet deep.

  Some of the tree hay from last year is still green, and good.

  Thomas Tusser (1524–80), English farmer and author of the instructional poem ‘Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry’, advised the lopping of ‘all manner of trees’, but ash, oak and elm (before its epochal demise) were the preferred species for tree hay. Regular re-cutting of elm can keep its bark thickness to a minimum and thus useless to the bark beetle, meaning tree hay aids the preservation of the elm, if in its diminutive form.

  Wood fodder is hardly remembered. Indeed, I know stockmen who believe, with religious certitude, that the cattle and the sheep are best kept away from the hedge, the linear woodland, let alone a proper wood.

  Of course, they have a point. There are animals on farms these days, mentioning no continental, commercial names such as Simmental or Texel, who would be woolly-headed stupid when confronted with tree browse, an essential in their ancest
ors’ diet.

  17 JUNE: Beating sun; one of those days when one can only work in a wood in gawping, disbelieving wonder at the scale of the tall trees, the oak and the beech, and our insignificance when standing next to them.

  Another day of tree haying. Tough work now, the leather rigger gloves so moist with sweat they keep sliding off.

  The insects: they jet-zoom, zoom zoom, kiddy-play jet planes or F1 cars about my head.

  Endless flies: hoverflies, damselflies, mayflies, greenflies, blackflies.

  Another half-ton done.

  The highlight: I am so covered in tads, dribs, bits, frags of tree and bush that I pass for them. A gentle, mistaken blackcap perches on me.

  And it was worth it, all of it, for that single moment.

  I get lost in the job, as you do in physical labour, so the rest of the day is glimpsed specimens behind glass: a single puffball, eaten into a jack-o’-lantern by slugs; the movement of squirrels, causing an unseasonal crash of branches; sticky sycamore leaves; the new plantation of burdock by the stile, where none existed last year, the responsible seeds sure as hell planted by the pigs; four separate bluey clumps of rabbit fur; bluebells in their seed caps; my disappointment that we have no jay this year, a tick-box woodland stalwart (I love a jay’s scream through winter wood); the cackling of magpies in the cherry tops; and under the spruce the lightest snuggled, doggy depression where the fox lies on the dry detritus there, red on red. I have seen him.

  The speckled woods are about. They are unique among butterflies in that they can spend the winter as either a caterpillar or a chrysalis. The male is fiercely territorial and easily roused by any pretender that happens upon his turf: when that occurs, the rivals spin up through the woodland understorey in fluttery combat, until the interloper is driven off.

  18 JUNE: A development: the moorhen female has moved to the island, using the bottom branch of an alder as a sideways slipway into the water.