The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  22 SEPTEMBER: Blackbirds on the elderberries like plague, meaning the fruit is ripe, perfectly so. With their black brightness, the elder’s berries make for a million mouse eyes.

  I take a dozen carrier bags into the wood and load them with berries, stripping the lower tracts, leaving the upper ones for the birds, especially the addicted thrush family.

  The berries are replete with Vitamin A (600 IU per 100mg), Vitamin C (36mg per 100mg) and antioxidants. So, well worth the picking for a cordial-cum-tonic that will see you through a sniffling winter (recipe: 600ml water, 225g honey, 25 elderberry heads, boil together, stirring all the while, leave overnight before bottling and consume within three months), or for a liqueur or a rich, port-like wine.

  John Evelyn declared that an extract of the berries was a ‘catholicon against all infirmities whatever’. The old diarist got it right by four hundred years; recent research has documented the berries’ inhibitory effect on eleven strains of influenza as well as their capacity to stimulate cytokine production. Cytokines are cell messengers of the immune system, enhancing the organism’s reaction to an infection. They also contain more antioxidants than most other small berries; one elderberry anthocyanin was found to be an effective inhibitor of human tumour cells in vitro.

  Once more with meaning: in the health of woods lies our own health.

  In historical times, the elderberry, the ‘Englishman’s grape’, was grown commercially in elder orchards. Such is the versatility of the berry, it makes a delicious ketchup too, by simmering elderberries in equal parts cider and wine vinegar (just enough to cover the fruit in the saucepan), along with thyme, bay leaf, fennel and garlic salt. Bottle with a few peppercorns.

  23 SEPTEMBER: At the edge of the wood, where the wind has its exits, the wind-music is bass toned in the trees, a soft susurration down in the grass; the lianas of honeysuckle, meanwhile, are plucked like strings.

  24 SEPTEMBER: Sunny but windy; white butterflies; a lone damselfly; in the treetops greater spotted woodpeckers chack, the sound of two wooden boards clapping flat against each other. The woodpeckers are claiming winter territory.

  25 SEPTEMBER: Rain, then sun, the pattern of our days. A few house martins hanging on.

  28 SEPTEMBER: Pigeons roosting in the oaks, the ash and the top of the larch; they like an easy route to the freedom of the sky.

  30 SEPTEMBER: Cannot sleep, so drive to Cockshutt and go for a walk in the wood. The pigs also restless. Under a fleeting moon and wild, smoky clouds, I see three hedgehogs trotting around the spotlighted glade, sniffing for slugs and worms, building up their reserves for winter.

  OCTOBER

  The Fruits of Autumn

  Sallow leaves fall at the rate of three per second – the colour of rosehips – ivy flowers, and wasps – a spider’s web – collecting crab apples for the pigs – service trees – autumn leaves: the moment of colour change escalation – the language of rain – fallow deer barking – the spruce lament their needles – why do trees lose their leaves? – dog fox barking – the storm

  1 OCTOBER: At 4.41pm exactly: sun silvers the sallow, whose leaves drop at a rate of three a second. A late unseasonal burst of birdsong. With the canopy already part defoliated, there is less absorption, and the notes ping around the entire edifice of the wood.

  3 OCTOBER: Rosehips turning Christmas-tangerine orange; hawthorn berries gone red, although as BB wrote about the haw: ‘It is not a scarlet, but a rich crimson carmine, such as one sees in old brocade and velvet.’

  The hazel tree: first to burst into leaf, first to burst into flame.

  4 OCTOBER: Mmm. The soapy smell of ivy flowers. How to describe their appearance? A 3D model of a chemical molecule, but uniformly soft-sage-hued. The wasps, in their hordes, are on them, possessively, morning to night.

  Shadows steal in; the wind blows a dirge through the stands of spruce.

  The squirrel, shot with the .410, falls to earth with the thump of a boxer’s glove.

  6 OCTOBER: Early morning, and the brambles shining with spiders’ webs.

  Spiders are from the class of animals known as arachnids, named for the mythological maiden Arachne, who challenged Athena to a weaving contest and in punishment for her impudence was transformed into a spider. The creature shares with man and certain species of caddis fly the distinction of being able to set traps. The spider’s snare is constructed of silk, produced from spinnerets at the rear of its abdomen. The silk is one five-thousandth of an inch thick; thickness for thickness, it is stronger than steel.

  I’m sitting at the bottom of the Tall Oak, with the .410, waiting for squirrels. To save the birds, another two or three grey squirrels must die.

  A spider starts her web on the bramble next to me; it takes her fifty-two minutes to weave her magic.

  8 OCTOBER: A surprise: a new rabbit burrow, under a dingle-side ash, fresh earth spewed everywhere; such fine earth, no clods, the purest tilth.

  Collecting crab apples for pigs, fir cones as fire lighters. The evening air, a foxy brown glow.

  10 OCTOBER: The rams have prune-wrinkled foreheads. In trees the sap is descending: in the woodland animals the testosterone is rising.

  12 OCTOBER: To my disappointment but not my surprise, there are no fruits on the service trees. They are too immature, I suspect.

  Once, when I was young and walking around the village with my grandmother, we called in at Mrs Cole’s cottage. She had a service tree in the copse behind her house, and asked Grandma and me whether we would like to try one of the fruits.

  Mrs Cole retrieved a wooden box from her cellar, where she had put the service fruits to be ‘bletted’, stored until verging on rotten. I had my service fruit – a tiny brown pear – mashed on top of vanilla ice cream, and it tasted dangerously like adult sherry.

  The service tree is also known as lizzory, checker, chequer. The country residence of the British Prime Minister, Chequers, is named after the service tree which grows in the grounds.

  14 OCTOBER: Under sun and cyanic sky Cockshutt burns.

  16 OCTOBER: Colour change escalation, for the worse; most trees have lost vibrant hues in favour of a muddy brown mixed by a toddler let loose on a paintbox of watercolours. Albert Camus asserted that ‘Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’ Not here, not now.

  And the sky is slate. You can forget the poets’ mellow fruitfulness, milky-white mists, fire-red trees. On the Welsh borders, the rainfall is an inch higher now than in September.

  Watch the willow leaves fall on to the pond. Each snowflake is unique. And the descent of every leaf is special, its death dance. We should be there to see their last glory.

  Slopping through Lower Paddock, the air is thick with the sort of wet that frizzes human hair, and clams to a sheep’s fleece to give it diamanté shine. Mutton dressed as princesses.

  I put my face to the overcast sky to read the language of rain. It is mizzle, a meteorological signifier that drizzle, and worse, will follow.

  I have my wife’s black Labrador, Bluebell, with me. Strange to say, a dog taught to retrieve makes a useful sheepdog (it can be sent about to block escape routes) and I drive the 120 sheep easily into the pens under the alders, on which the leaves are still clinging to life. Like the oak, the alder comes into leaf late, and defoliates late.

  It is all change down on the farm in October. The wind has blown away the last straggling hirondelles; the self-same wind from the north brought the first redwings on its back edge. Thus the scene is replenished with birds.

  Some of our sheep are also migrating. October is traditionally a month of sheep sales, so I spend the morning sifting and sorting the ewes and the lambs.

  This little sheepy will go to Tenbury Wells market, this little sheepy will stay at home. Almost all the money in sheep farming is made in the months of September and October.

  At eleven there is disco-shimmering drizzle; by twelve it is raining properly. The leaves of the alders are no shelter at all, but at least the lanolin
in the sheep’s coats waxes the front of my Barbour.

  The rain does nothing to dampen the ardour of the five tups, who spend their hours in captivity trying to climb the galvanized hurdles to get at the ewes. The ewes are on heat, their hormones triggered by the decline in light. Under the low canopy of the alder the greasy musk of the aroused rams smothers like a foul pillow. Across in the dingle, the sheep’s wild cousin, a fallow deer, is barking a come-on. Even rain dripping off alder fails to drown out his Duracell croaking.

  I am finishing up dagging the sheep (trimming, with shears, the wool round their rear ends, which can get maggoty when impacted with faeces; it’s all glamour down on the farm) when Bluebell, rootling about in the year-weary nettles, discovers the hedgehog. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is unhurt by the encounter; the trademark prickly coat, which contains about five thousand spines, is effective against a Labrador’s soft mouth, and softer brain.

  After about fifteen minutes, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle unfurls. Deciding to risk the publicity of daylight, she ploughs through the soaking grass up to the base of the old brick barn, where slugs are swarming over windfall apples from a single domestic tree. She allows me the dubious privilege of standing close by. Her table manners are dreadful; selecting a large orange-trimmed slug, she bites at it, rolls it about, before finally gobbling it down. It is fascinating, but it is unnerving too. Nature can be very un-cute.

  If Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was barrel-fat and ready for hibernation before, she is even better prepared after eating the slug. She waddles off towards the wood. Of course, if you think about it, hibernation is a type of migration. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is off to the Land of Nod.

  A kestrel flies up and sits on the telegraph wire, next to a wagtail. The young fox is lying under the brambles; he bolts out, seizes a rabbit. Surprise and speed. The fox can reach speeds of 40mph.

  For a woodland fox, life will never be better. The rabbit population is at its yearly peak. There are currently around sixty rabbits in Cockshutt.

  Autumn

  I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

  Stand shadowless like Silence, listening

  To silence, for no lonely bird would sing

  Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,

  Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; –

  Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright

  With tangled gossamer that fell by night,

  Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

  Where are the songs of Summer? – With the sun,

  Oping the dusky eyelids of the south,

  Till shade and silence waken up as one,

  And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.

  Where are the merry birds? – Away, away,

  On panting wings through the inclement skies,

  Lest owls should prey

  Undazzled at noonday,

  And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

  Where are the blooms of Summer? – In the west,

  Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,

  When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest

  Like tearful Proserpine, snatch’d from her flow’rs

  To a most gloomy breast.

  Where is the pride of Summer, – the green prime, –

  The many, many leaves all twinkling? – Three

  On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime

  Trembling, – and one upon the old oak-tree!

  Where is the Dryad’s immortality? –

  Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,

  Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through

  In the smooth holly’s green eternity.

  The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard,

  The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain,

  And honey bees have stored

  The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;

  The swallows all have wing’d across the main;

  But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,

  And sighs her tearful spells

  Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.

  Alone, alone,

  Upon a mossy stone,

  She sits and reckons up the dead and gone

  With the last leaves for a love-rosary,

  Whilst all the wither’d world looks drearily,

  Like a dim picture of the drownèd past

  In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away,

  Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last

  Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

  O go and sit with her, and be o’ershaded

  Under the languid downfall of her hair:

  She wears a coronal of flowers faded

  Upon her forehead, and a face of care; –

  There is enough of wither’d everywhere

  To make her bower, – and enough of gloom;

  There is enough of sadness to invite,

  If only for the rose that died, whose doom

  Is Beauty’s, – she that with the living bloom

  Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light:

  There is enough of sorrowing, and quite

  Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear, –

  Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;

  Enough of fear and shadowy despair,

  To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

  Thomas Hood

  17 OCTOBER: Sibelius maintained that trees talked to him. Standing next to the spruce in the wind, I believe him. They lament their needles, which catch the wind, and whisper enviously of the deciduous trees, more naked by the day and so less affected by blow.

  Why do trees lose leaves? Broadleaved trees get so little light in winter that it is not worth them expending their energy on keeping dressed until spring. And as every sailor knows, one reduces sail in a wind. In trees sap retreats and chlorophyll in the leaves breaks down to expose yellow and orange pigments hitherto hidden.

  Sycamore seeds, which are winged, helicopter for yards away from their parents.

  18 OCTOBER: 4pm. Air clear and dry; the robin’s song a bell tink, perfect tone, clarity in the cold.

  Measure a spider’s web, and it is eighteen inches across.

  Pigeons fly from wood to wood to land on the oak, and cover them, like lice. A flock of a hundred, maybe? The Victorian naturalist W. H. Hudson, in Nature in Downland, saw a wood pigeon flock which ‘could not have numbered less than two to three thousand birds’. Even our pests are diminished in the new farmland. The combined sound of the pigeons’ wings is sheet metal, shaken.

  A hen pheasant slinks on seeing me, but I am no threat, I am lost in the High Church incense of autumn woodland. The dark notes of autumn – earth, wood, decay, fermentation – are enough to send one into a reverie.

  The smell of decay is beautiful and deadly. The year is dying.

  Who would be absent from England in October?

  19 OCTOBER: Ash trees die pale and greeny, sickly Victorian heroines. I guess at least half the acorns have fallen (a modest crop this year), wizened brown, but yellow where they were fixed in their cups. In good years the acorn crop is prodigious; they are planted by mammals and birds – one reason for their success as a species. Jays secrete acorns in hawthorn, safe from grazing animals. The hawthorn is the mother of the oak, the most widely distributed of forest trees.

  Dog fox barking in Cockshutt at 6.30pm, and a tawny over my head, unseen in the canopy, sub-text.

  Stars are white sparks in the sky. Sitting in my chair I watch a hedgehog, with its snail-wet nose, feasting on a slug.

  20 OCTOBER: The corroding tint of russet on the wood top sinks deeper by the day, a descending stain.

  A few leaves still on the sallow wands, quite like pennants on a cavalryman’s lance, shredded in the wars of the winds.

  Three robins singing for territory; a nuthatch hammers a hole in an acorn, which it has wedged in a crack of the Wishbone Oak.

  I think I see a kingfisher on the pool, more by what it does than by colour or shape; it flies off
a perch on the far bank, snatches something from the water, returns to the perch, then zips off. But it is dark under the trees, not because of leaves but because the alders, willows and hazel lean menacingly over the water.

  Sitting in my chair: looking left into spruce, commercial Norway, right into deciduous, old Engla-land. A squirrel: chak-chak-chak-chee. The squirrel runs through the high branches, a grey streak of lightning.

  A small black beetle scuttles about. (Saxon bitela, meaning bitter, refers to the creature’s acrid taste.) Resolve to go on a beetle hunt.

  21 OCTOBER: The storm came in the night. The forecasters gave it a girl-next-door name, Katie or some such, but really she was Maleficent. This morning, standing beside the wet beech trees at the bottom end of Cockshutt, the scene is a magnified pick-up-sticks. The woodland floor is a chaos of crashed branches and downed trunks. Among the fallen is the beech by the stile, the one I touch every day as I pass.

  Touched. Past tense.

  I look up through the vertiginous gap she – yes, to my mind she was always the empress of the wood – left. There is a hole in the roof of the wood. There is a hole in my day.

  23 OCTOBER: Showers of leaves. Since there is no one about I run around like a kid, trying to catch the leaves in mid air. I did the same, in simpler times, when the children were younger.

  24 OCTOBER: A small party of redwings arrive in the meadow next to Cockshutt. Their calls knock nails in the coffin of summer.

  Pin-thin cries of goldcrests in the larch.

  At night, checking the pigs with a torch: overhead the steady movement south of Arctic thrushes. Summer’s bird migrants come for the meat; the winter migrants come, predominantly, for the fruit.

  Finally I go on a beetle hunt in Cockshutt, leaving no log (gently) unturned, no hollow in a tree uninspected, and in twenty minutes find a violet click beetle (Limoniscus violaceus), a cardinal click beetle (Ampedus nigerrimus), another click beetle (Elater ferrugineus), a false click beetle (Eucnemis capucina), and a wood-boring weevil (Dryophthorus corticalis).

  25 OCTOBER: About a third of the leaves have changed colour; almost at a stage where the leaf litter equals the amount of leaves left on the tree. To stand under the crab-apple trees is to be inside a golden temple.