The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

A glimpse, no more than that, of badger at the north end of the pool.

  14 JULY: 3.30pm. The cries of four baby wrens from behind the Tall Oak, in the Tarzan-vine honeysuckle. Two nuthatches in the sycamores; the birds are always somewhat bigger than one remembers. Brighter-hued too – almost the kingfisher of the woods. I note that the birds are as dextrous at climbing up/down, down/up the sycamore bole.

  The cep mushroom that erupted last week now dry and dying; old, varnished, cracked wood.

  A cracked pigeon egg on the ground, from a birthing rather than a raiding by a predator.

  At the sunny, warm edge of the wood, soldier beetles mating on cow parsley.

  How dull life is inside a building; how clear and vibrant life is outside, in the world beyond the door.

  15 JULY: The woodland birds have all but stopped their singing. Only the pigeons in the oaks call, and their drowsy coo-cooing serves only to make the afternoon more torpid. The birds are taking their summer recess, when they moult and become easy prey for the sparrowhawk. To sing would be suicidal self-advertising.

  If trees have no brain, how do they remember? They do remember, they learn from experience. Two oak saplings I transplanted three years ago to the western edge of the wood are thicker by three millimetres than two I planted on the sheltered east of the ride. Wind-racked trees grow stouter than sheltered trees, light for light, water for water, like for like.

  16 JULY: Early morning, and in the paddock below Cockshutt I catch the thieves of the pig feed in the act: the does are sweet in the sunlight, nibbling from the troughs; the buck stands under the sallow, every sinew ready to run.

  About 10.15pm. Sitting in my chair: the perimeter of vision is fifteen yards; then the perimeter stalks me, closes in and swallows me.

  Sometimes I pick up things as aide-memoires. Tonight a stickette to remind me that a bush has changed position, so it whipped me in the face.

  The pale path. Who first made the path? Only in one place do I deviate from the path: the animals go under a low bough and I cannot limbo.

  18 JULY: 27ºC. Clouds are the gentle grey of a pigeon’s breast, the prettiest creature the wood knows.

  Sycamore leaves, sticky with honey dew. Sycamore seeds tight in their sacks, like a terrier’s bollocks.

  Sit in chair; a single wasp rasps a piece of fallen ash with its mandibles.

  The pond ripples with the percussion of digger earthworks a mile away.

  29 JULY: Sunlight in shards and splashes, then a cloudburst, allowing me to try a practical test to the question: what tree gives the best shelter? I run around trying them all, and the answer … The beech is the umbrella tree.

  30 JULY: Visit the Californian redwood, the BFG, have fun punching it, the outside bark being as soft as sponge. Higher up the tree, fragrant pine sap weeps where branches have been knocked off, wounds suppurating.

  A slight breeze, but the wind-music of the woods is unaccompanied now by birdsong.

  A dead rabbit is reanimated by the maggots inside it.

  31 JULY: Peacock butterfly resting on a stone in the south glade.

  Sitting in the crook of the Wishbone Oak, a station on my perambulation to check the readiness of the glades for grazing, I realize that I have turned over a new leaf in my life: I look at the oak – and the ash, the hazel, the elm, them all – with the eyes of the woodsman, the xylophile.

  I translate trees into the objects they will make, the food they will provide, the shelter they will give.

  Up in the distant canopy: a very slightly extra-bouncy branch. Sign of a squirrel.

  Carrying a gun concentrates the naturalist’s mind, sharpens the senses. I kill two fat adult squirrels with swinging left and right shots from the Lincoln 12-bore.

  Aspens

  All day and night, save winter, every weather,

  Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

  The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

  Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

  Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing

  Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

  The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –

  The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

  The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

  And over lightless pane and footless road,

  Empty as sky, with every other sound

  Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

  A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

  In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

  In tempest or the night of nightingales,

  To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

  And it would be the same were no house near.

  Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

  Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

  But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

  Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

  We cannot other than an aspen be

  That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

  Or so men think who like a different tree.

  Edward Thomas

  This time last year: a copse beside the Argenton river in France, where every tree is an aspen. In breathless August, when all other trees are statues, the eighteen aspens quake. The scientific name of the aspen, tremula, is well conceived. They do, indeed, tremble, and this is due to botanical styling; the leaf stalks are flattened and bendy near the leaf blade, and the leaves (oil-cloth impermeable) are spaced apart, like signal pennants on a line. Individual leaves catch the wind, and flutter flexibly.

  Trees are musical instruments. Each tree, like each human-fabricated musical instrument, is made different by design.

  AUGUST

  In the Green Shade

  The month of lassitude – sycamore leaf rot – a stoat ‘fascinates’ – our English summer is shot – hunger games – fallow deer at the pool – gathering blackberries – woodlice – ash ‘keys’ – the airlessness of the high summer wood – hauling tree trunks with a horse – the swift departs – the fox cubs become independent

  1 AUGUST: BB: ‘August, of all the summer months, is perhaps the most dull and lifeless.’

  Like BB, I dislike August, the month of lassitude.

  All seems serenity: the heavy evening peace reaches out from the lawn to the rim of blue hills; we’ve got the hay safely gathered in, and the cattle went on the grass aftermath bang on the traditional date of 1 August, Lammas Day. The lambs are weaned, the ewes and rams sorted and checked, from teeth to trotters. I’ve a glass of Pimm’s in my hand, a gorgeous valley in my eyes.

  My neighbour’s Land Rover thrums past on the lane, throwing up a pale dust cloud into the heat of the evening. On the lane-side hedge, the ladders of goosegrass are still in place, but grey with weariness and dirt. The cow parsley and the hogweed, dry and gone to seed, rattle in the humming air-wake of the Defender.

  And you just know summer’s lease is finished.

  In the wood, the sycamore leaves are rotten with tar spot, caused by the fungus Rhytisma acerinum, and are falling in a private, precipitate autumn.

  Summer woods: the darkness, the shadows, the unknown places, the mystery, the seclusion, the feel of being trapped. No clear run to freedom.

  Summer woods shut out the sky; the comfort of light, by which we see, and steer.

  Looking at my hayfield, with its succulent roll-in-me grass and bright flowers, next to Cockshutt: the wood is a brutal playground, with trees that scrape skin and sticks that trip feet.

  2 AUGUST: I thought the ‘fascinating’ by a stoat, by which the little predator bewitches potential prey by dancing them a jig, was an old naturalist’s tale but on this day I see something like it. (I should have been more generous-minded: both BB and W. H. Hudson write of stoats ‘waltzing’, and they are gospel.) A stoat is chasing its tail so fast it is a blurred red wheel. Two young rabbits outside their burrow below the holly are all eyes. The stoat
stops and ‘chatters’, then spins again, but closer now to the rabbits.

  When he breaks the dancing circle the next time he spots me, and bolts into the cowls of beech shadow.

  Normally, when one enters upon a scene of animal behaviour one feels privileged. Yet the stoat’s behaviour unsettles me, and it takes a moment or so to understand why. I feel I have fallen into a folk tale with anthropomorphic characters. The stoat’s dance was wholly human in its reasoned guile, its intentioned mesmerizing of the rabbits.

  6 AUGUST: A swooning August day, with a hot east wind from which there is no shelter. The wood is wearying with summer. The undergrowth is falling down, the leaves are old skin, and birdsong is feeble, except for robin’s.

  He is the uncontestable proof our English summer is shot. Now past his summer moult, the robin is already staking his winter territory.

  I put the red poll cattle in Cockshutt yesterday, and they have the run of the place, except for half of the eastern glade, where I have put an electric fence to protect the harebells, blue, delicate and beautiful – and rucked by bees, fighting for their nectar.

  Such is nature.

  This evening the cows stand grouped around the Wishbone Oak, waving their tails against flies, to make the essential woodland portrait. They have torn into any ash leaves within browsing height; to borrow the phrase of John Evelyn, cattle ‘are exceedingly licorish’ after ash.

  10 AUGUST: The hunger games. August, counterintuitively, is that awkward old month at the end of summer, when the majority of plants are past their profuse youthful best, the fruits of autumn are indigestibly immature, and the predator’s easy-meat pickings – the very young, the very old, the babies, the slow – have already been snaffled, but many a predator still has clamouring mouths at home.

  In summer, the mortality rate for the meat-eating birds and the beasts can be as great as winter. (I’m, improbably, an expert: I once spent a year living solely on the wild food that could be shot or foraged on our forty-acre Herefordshire hill farm.)

  With the August dearth, I watch Old Brown’s wife hopping around the wet glade pulling up earthworms, like an ungainly blackbird. The humble Lumbricus terrestris is currently the staple foodstuff for all sorts of animals. No fewer than seven buzzards hopped about on the aftermath of the hayfield yesterday, gulping the worms that had risen to the surface in the rain. All the buzzards’ usual hawkish hauteur was dropped. They had the abandoned dignity of shoppers on Black Friday.

  11 AUGUST: At the heat-drowned edge of the wood, the honeysuckle is in flower, but when I trace back the bine it goes ten yards into the interior, so that the roots are in the cool base of an ash. It’s about 3ºC cooler here than at the outer wall of trunks.

  I’m standing, enjoying the welcome escape from the heat and the toil of fencing, when the fallow deer come tripping down through the green shade of the oaks.

  As the five deer turn to stand on the bank of the pond their silk flanks catch the sun, so they shine with aureoles. In a line they stand drinking, almost inanimate, a plastic toy version of ‘Fallow deer drinking at their watering hole’.

  They must be thirsty to venture out of their fastness in the mid-afternoon.

  Deer never relax. They are permanently aquiver, electric-wired.

  I suppose some scent of me eventually carries on the warm air, because the young buck suddenly looks up. And bolts. The does are on his tail, no hesitation, no questioning. The five of them speed away, swerving through the obstacles of the trees, their bobtails flashing, waning white in the green gloom.

  The deer breast the sea of briars, the emergency exit, out into the field. The days of sun have dried the wood’s floor, and the percussion of the deers’ hooves trembles the earth.

  It is some sound, I tell you; it is the echo of the Norman chasse through the old wildwood.

  When Vita Sackville-West wanted to invoke the unchanging pastoralism of England in The Edwardians, what natural items did she list? Well, ‘the verdure of the trees, the hares and the deer’.

  They made an odd group, though, the deer. Bucks usually spend the summer as solitary wanderers, or sometimes join together in small bachelor parties. And there were no fawns. I thought the deer were from Hole Wood, extending their range, but I am now thinking they are deer-farm escapees sticking together.

  15 AUGUST: Up early, on the usual livestock round of pigs, cows, sheep. I walk in Cockshutt, intending to bid good morning to the moorhens, but get no further than the brush pile by the south glade, made when I cleared the trees there in our first year.

  A badger has, overnight, tunnelled a drift mine into the pile. He can have only just departed, since there are woodlice spewing everywhere, attended by the piss-stink of their kind when they live in a large colony. (They excrete ammonia.) There are both common shiny woodlice and pill woodlice, as weird as each other. Woodlice are crustaceans adapted to terrestrial living; they need dampness because they still have gills for breathing. The gills are located on their legs. Eggs are ported around in a brood pouch which is kept moist, like a miniature aquarium. Pill woodlice can roll themselves into a tiny ball or ‘pill’. In medieval England pill woodlice were swallowed live – as pills to cure digestive illnesses.

  A woodlouse’s closest relative is a crab. As I say, weird.

  I half poke my nose into the badger’s lice mine, but only half. Loitering are several Dysderidae, nocturnal venomous spiders with six eyes, who feed on woodlice. Dysderids have fangs strong enough to penetrate human skin.

  16 AUGUST: The ash trees are full of ‘keys’, their fruits, called keys because they hang in bunches reminiscent of the lock picks of a medieval gaoler. Ash keys are widely and wildly rumoured to be pleasant eating when first ripe and peeled of their skin. I have never found them to be anything but screw-face astringent; raw, they taste of wormwood. And pickled they taste of wormwood. Those who love them say they taste like capers and are a piquant addition to cold cuts of meat and oily fish.

  If you wish to pickle ash keys, pick fruits which are still green.

  A handy tree, the ash, if one is confronted by an adder. According to folklore, adders so loathe the ash that they would rather flee through fire than through the leaves of Fraxinus excelsior.

  17 AUGUST: A baby rabbit comes down to the pool and paddles in the shallow water before the smell of me drives it flying. I could see no reason for the playing in the water, except joie de vivre.

  All this took a minute, if that. I was left listening to the music of the breeze in the reeds, and admiring the pretty patterns the breeze made on the water.

  18 AUGUST: Walk around the wood at 5am, then get in the Saab with Freda to drive to the Somme, where we arrive at 5pm. I’ve a book about the First World War on the go, and need to check arcane aspects of the landscape. Farmers were told to diversify. I do books as my sideline.

  The deciduous copses and woods of the Somme, in which British soldiers took shade from the Picardian sun, were simultaneously the earth and timber protectors of German soldiers.

  Woods are nature’s fortresses. The British 1916 Ordnance Survey maps suggest a count of forty-four woods and fifteen copses in the Somme battlefield, with Mametz Wood, extending to 186 acres of lime, oak, hornbeam, hazel and beech, the largest. High Wood was known for the sweet chestnuts used to make pitchforks; after September 1916 it became renowned as a graveyard. It is estimated that ten thousand British and German soldiers still lie unrecovered within the bounds of High Wood. Some of the Somme’s sylvan extents had open grassy rides – which gave excellent lines of fire to the grey-clad German defenders. And so the khaki casualties piled up at Mametz Wood and High Wood, names which to this day resound with the pity of it all. Those injured at Mametz Wood, amid the ‘straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile/Birch’, included Private David Jones, author of the prose-poem In Parenthesis.

  19 AUGUST: We leave Ibis hotel Albert (a hostelry so attuned to the Remembrance trade that the carpet has a poppy motif) at 8am and
arrive home at 8pm. Then I go straight into Cockshutt Wood and am just in time to see a fox picking a blackberry in a late golden corner.

  20 AUGUST: Along the woodland ride, and into the trees.

  After the beating heat, the wood shade is pleasant … The relief is short-lived. The trees’ leaves are smothering cloth. Long gone is the springtime translucence, when every oak leaf was a pane of green glass.

  The August woodland is dark. Low overhanging branches of sycamore form black grottoes.

  Some extraordinary force has sucked all the oxygen out of Cockshutt Wood. The barrel chest of Willow, our Shetland pony, expands perceptibly. The air does not work; it provides no energy.

  We gape, just as beached fish do.

  I gee up Willow, with a shake of the long reins. We plod on, four-four beat, me walking behind him, a lonely wight in an English wood, going deeper into the murk. Willow, a palomino, luminesces; he is literally a guiding light.

  August is summer’s breathless zenith, when the vegetation has reached the limit of growth and the tree canopy is densest. In the wood, it is night in mid-morning.

  The woodland silence is almost total. Blackcap, willow warbler, wood warbler all stopped their singing in mid-July. Even the chiffchaff has ceased his piercing two-tone chant.

  But there is a rhythmic plague of flying insects. Lucky Willow is doused in lemon-astringent Naff Off fly repellent. I am not. Midges, mosquitoes grope at my face; I continuously bat the slate-grey horseflies away.

  Up in the honeysuckle, which is still in flower, some bees drone on; a drone which dumbs the brain, and drugs the wood into stupefaction.

  The path swings beside a glade, and there is a sudden joyful stab of sunlight. A peacock butterfly rests on a stump, drying its wings, after emerging from its chrysalid case in the nettle bed.

  August is a quiet month in a wood, if a busy one. Large white butterflies (‘cabbage whites’ to all gardeners) are on their second brood; a new gatekeeper butterfly threads its course through the trees like a blown leaf.

  Hedgehogs also produce second litters in August, while the first trot under cars on the lane, as they did last night, smearing it in scarlet and black. At least Cockshutt is at the edge of the local badger’s range, so the wood’s hedgehogs are not scooped apart by his mechanical grabbers.