The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Pitter-patter of falling leaves; bomb-bang of falling acorns.

  Sitting in my chair, an electric jolt – three fly agaric mushrooms have grown in the birch. Topple one with my boot; the underneath is seductive, luxury cream; the top is seductive, luxury scarlet, thick like icing or sugar glaze. Everything about a fly agaric says ‘Eat me.’

  Viking warriors did eat small amounts of fly agaric as preparation before going into battle. The mushrooms contain a mescaline compound, which affects the nervous system in the manner of LSD. Consumption of the mushroom’s flesh would cause a loss of inhibitions and fear, spurring the Norsemen to feats of bravery, born of delusion. The Vikings took half of England because they were berserk drug-takers.

  26 OCTOBER: The first fieldfare; a bewildered tourist, looking around.

  The leaves of the service trees flutter, flicker, flame, in pseudo fire.

  Tree leaves lie on the pool: false lilies.

  All through Cockshutt Wood the ash trees are fading elegantly, while the hawthorns proffer bright berries to thrushes.

  The last days have been so cool that evaporation from the ground is slow, if at all, and fog follows mist, and mist follows fog.

  Oh, the melancholy of autumn woodland.

  28 OCTOBER: The day everything changed, the clamp of winter; a change of posture and mood among animals, trees and plants alike. To look out of the house windows is to feel cold.

  The clip-clop of Saturday horses on the wet lane.

  About half the leaves in Cockshutt are now down, compared to only a third three days ago.

  But it is cold now, and cold loosens and snaps off the leaves. An abscission layer forms on the leaf stalk, weakening and finally severing its attachment to the twig from which, in spring, it grew. Fallen leaves are the beginning of future humus.

  Back to collecting kindling. Or how humans mark the coming of the cold. It is almost the full turn of the natural year since I began this diary.

  29 OCTOBER: Overcast night. Under leaf canopy, absolute blackout.

  On such a night, when the eyes are not enough, Old Brown locates his prey by listening to movement. The ears of the owl are marvellous.

  In owls, the ears are set asymmetrically in their skulls, with one ear as much as fifteen degrees further up the skull than the other, and sometimes of larger size. Asymmetrical positioning of the outer ears means that each ear receives sound at a slightly different volume and angle, which allows the owl to pinpoint where the sound comes from. There is also a flap of skin in front of the ear which the bird can control to catch sound, in the way that old gentlemen cup their hand to their ear. Indeed, the entire facial disc of the owl acts as an amplifier.

  Night is no friend to prey animals when an owl is about. The wood (to my ears) has slept into silence. Old Brown, however, can hear the turn of a leaf … and the scamper of a rabbit on the grass of the glade.

  The scream comes from only yards away, a scream that terrifies the night. I and all the little animals in the wood stop – still as statues in musical-chairs – and hold our breath.

  It is a distinctive, high-pitched wail, well known to us wood folk.

  The Lord of the Night has killed a rabbit.

  30 OCTOBER: The bats have quit the attic to roost in the rotten ash in the dingle, the one peeling to reveal its interior. Once, in a spirit of Gilbert Whitean nature observation, I climbed up the tree and poked a torch in the hollow where the hibernating colony hang. I expected the pipistrelles to be inert; instead, they shuffled en masse and raised their heads, a sort of living wall with a hundred faces. It was fascinating, but it was unnerving too.

  I take Rupert the Border Terrier for a walk in the wood.

  Autumn glow tinged by a cold blue, which has scourged the sky of cloud; the fun of scuffing through leaves.

  The dwindling metabolism of the toad.

  Ash leaves do not fall singly but in brackets of six to eight. Crab-tree leaves fall in a shower of golden pennies; the money tree. Sweet chestnuts lie on the ground in pocketfuls.

  Native to western Asia, sweet chestnuts were introduced to southern Europe by the Ancient Greeks, and brought across the Channel by the Romans. Although the tree has naturalized in Britain, the two or three nuts or kernels contained in the spiky British burr are smaller than their continental counterparts. The sweet chestnut, despite its name, is not related to the inedible horse chestnut, the ‘conker tree’. Due to its mass of spines, country people called the sweet chestnut the ‘hedgehog’.

  The nuts can be eaten raw, but this is a waste. Raw they are tough and unremarkable; cooked they are glorious.

  More than a third of sweet chestnut kernel is made up of carbohydrate, making it a staple source of starch in some regions of southern Europe. The Italians – among a hundred other uses for the sweet chestnut – boil the kernels as a vegetable, as well as grinding them into flour for polenta, bread and cakes. To make chestnut flour, roast the chestnuts, then grind: the resultant flour is sweet and yellow but does not rise well. The French, of course, have candied the chestnut into marron glacé. In Britain, the chestnut has tended to be viewed as a savoury, the stuff of stuffing and that Edwardian country house classic, chestnut soup. And, of course, the chestnut roasting on an open fire is as redolent of Christmas as cathedral choirs singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’, huntsmen on horses and the Queen’s Speech. If you don’t have an open fire, an oven will do. Simply lay on a baking tray and roast at 200ºC. But whether you are roasting on a fire or in an oven (or indeed boiling), you must make a small X-shaped slit in the shell before exposing to heat, otherwise they explode spectacularly in a shower of sweet chestnut shrapnel. Boiling makes the bitterish inner skin easy to peel off.

  The gathering of these nuts is a great business in the south. The woods become places of pilgrimage, not so much for the country folk, who have an astonishing disregard for the fruits of the earth lying at their back door, as for the townsfolk. Out they come, by bus and car and bike, principally men, very earnest, and principally on Sunday mornings. It is a piece of yearly ritual. They raid the woods like human squirrels, spending hours kneeling or stooping or even sitting under the canopy of leaves already much thinned by rain and frost, foraging among the blanket of fallen leaf and husk, filling cans and sacks with silk-soft nuts, staggering out at last under the weight of their pot-bellied sacks, still looking very earnest but, somehow, satisfied.

  John Stewart Collis

  Chestnut purée

  Based on the recipe by Elizabeth Craig in Cookery Illustrated and Household Management, 1936

  900g chestnuts

  50g butter

  vegetable stock

  75ml milk

  salt and pepper

  caster sugar

  Cut the tops off the chestnuts and roast them in the oven for 20 minutes. Remove the outer and inner skins, and put the chestnuts into a stew-pan with half of the butter and enough stock to cover them. Lay greaseproof paper over the top, put on the lid, and simmer for 45 minutes or so, until the chestnuts are tender. The chestnuts should absorb all the stock in the cooking.

  When cooked, rub all through a fine sieve. Thoroughly mix this purée with the remaining butter and the milk. (You may not need all the milk, depending on how much stock has been absorbed.) Season with pepper, a very little salt, and a pinch of caster sugar. Re-warm and serve with venison loin.

  Or, minus the pepper, fill a crêpe, or load on top of vanilla ice cream.

  Chestnut soup

  My favourite way of utilizing sweet chestnuts.

  Serves 4

  675g chestnuts

  1 onion, finely chopped

  1 carrot, finely chopped

  30g butter

  1 sprig rosemary

  chicken or game stock

  150ml single cream

  parsley, finely chopped

  Cut crosses in the ends of the chestnuts, place in a pan with enough water to cover and boil for 2–3 minutes. Remove from heat, and when the chestnuts are coo
l enough to handle, peel, scrape off the papery inner skin, and put them to one side.

  Sweat the onion and carrot in the butter until tender. Add the chestnuts and rosemary and continue sweating over a low–medium heat for 5 minutes. Pour in the stock, then simmer for 20–30 minutes. Liquidize the soup, then strain into a clean saucepan and add the cream. Bring up to almost boiling and season to taste. Serve with a scattering of chopped parsley on top.

  31 OCTOBER: The clocks go back: next week at 6pm the Earth’s revolution will be an hour further onwards than at 6pm the week before. The cars on the lane coming home will have their lights on, past cottages lit with television screens. The year has turned – it cannot be gainsaid. The year has turned.

  And in Cockshutt the trees know it.

  I harvest my thoughts in this end of time. It is the nature of the oak to be still; it is the nature of the kestrel to wander with the wind.

  A leaf falls slowly, as if lowered on a thread. A moth on a branch has his wings half open, like a little beige coat over his shoulders.

  The animals have plundered the hazelnuts, ruins and remnants of the latter all across the woodland floor. I admire best the nuts which have been turned round and round as the mouse gnawed its hole.

  Bright masses of haws in the sun; great brown cones fallen from the spruce firs; green and rubine berries of white bryony hanging thickly on bines from which the leaves have withered.

  Owls: An Epitaph

  What is that? … Nothing;

  The leaves must fall, and falling, rustle;

  That is all:

  They are dead

  As they fall,

  Dead at the foot of the tree;

  All that can be is said.

  What is it? … Nothing.

  What is that? … Nothing;

  A wild thing hurt in the night,

  And it cries

  In its dread,

  Till it lies

  Dead at the foot of the tree;

  All that can be is said.

  What is it? … Nothing.

  What is that? … Ah!

  A marching slow of unseen feet,

  That is all:

  But a bier, spread

  With a pall,

  Is now at the foot of the tree;

  All that could be is said.

  Is it … what? … Nothing.

  Edward Elgar, 1907

  NOVEMBER

  Out of the Woods

  Yellow brain fungus – an owl pellet – the animals race against time – crab apples – acorn coffee – woodcock – Richard Jefferies on how to tread lightly, like an amateur poacher – planting acorns – my father – fieldfares – my last walk in the wood

  2 NOVEMBER: 3pm. Refreshingly chill, but blinding Gestapo sun in the west. A touch of mist from breath; rams literally panting.

  The smells of autumn: wet cardboard but with kiwi fruit undertone.

  Beech leaves on the ground; copper pennies, another money tree. Oak leaves – clotty brown pancakes underfoot, but with tobacco smell (and an instant Proustian trigger to remembrance of my pipe-smoking father, RN in World War Two).

  Elder leaf: a wet, limp handshake of a leaf.

  On a hazel stump, yellow brain fungus (the name is its description), and crows wearing their widow’s weeds in the larch top.

  The gean is the first tree to lose all its leaves. At the foot of the gean an owl pellet, a felt cabinet of skeletons and curiosities. Gingerly, with sticks, I prise apart the pellet, with its gut-bleached bones. The tawny’s diet is dominated by field voles, bank voles, wood mice, large beetles, birds and moles. (With a body weight in excess of 430g the adult female tawny is big enough to take young rabbits.) Pellets pack surprises. In this pellet I find the skull of a newt. How Macbeth’s witches would have loved that.

  5 NOVEMBER: The owl-light.

  On the south horizon, May Hill has already drowned. The visible world is shrinking to our fields and wood. And God, is it freezing; I am cripple-hunched over the tractor steering wheel as I drive along the pig field. The Ferguson is cabless, but happened to be handy and working, unlike the Land Rover; hitched on the tractor’s rear is the transport box, with a sack of sow breeder nuts and a standing Labrador trying to keep her balance. The metal of the box is ice-tacky, too cold to sit.

  The kestrel, backlit by the high half-moon, quarters the maize stubble on her last hunt of the day. Something catches her attention; she anchors, drops, then flickers away triumphant.

  Migrant birds bring change, but the kestrel is an emblem of eternality, a reminder of what in the countryside is constant.

  6 NOVEMBER: Explore the coppiced holly trees, their leaves smooth and flash. Very druidy; a dark place in a light wood. The birds and the animals are in a race against time: fighting for the berries on holly trees, the hawthorns, the red hips of the briar, the blackberries, the acorns, the beech.

  7 NOVEMBER: 4.50pm, cold clear sky, an ice star in the west, over Garway.

  I walk the ‘wrong way’ around the top of Cockshutt, pushing through the briars, hazels, bines of the eastern edge up towards the foxes; I see the wood anew, and notice a diagonal rabbit track leading from a fresh warren.

  Three jets in the sky; flaming red arrows.

  On the pool a moorhen dives under water, with the professional speed of a U-boat.

  10 NOVEMBER: From somewhere ahead Old Brown calls kerwick. I have a watch, but I do not need it now. He has clocked the coming of night.

  Trees claw at the sky for breath.

  12 NOVEMBER: As much as I love the pigs, giving them absolutely all the crab-apple windfalls is a mite too generous, so a carrier bag’s worth goes home with me.

  Sour grabs. Scarb. Scrab. Bittersgall. Gribble. Scrogg. They could be names for hobgoblins, but actually they are names for the crab apple.

  The wood, which is very hard, was used in the past for wood carving, sauce. And punishing wives:

  The crab of the wood is sauce

  Very good for the crab of the sea,

  But the wood of the crab is sauce

  For a drab who will not her husband obey.

  Malus sylvestris is native to Europe, and is the ancestor of the cultivated apple.

  The wild crab differs from cultivated and feral apples (‘wildings’) in being thorny, the smallness of its fruit (two centimetres or so) and having hairless leaves and flower stalks.

  The country names for crabs serve as a warning to the unwary biter of this wild fruit: it is mouth-puckeringly acid. In some localities, the cider made from crabs is known as ‘pig-squeal cider’, because the drinker inadvertently shrieks like a porcine on tasting the brew. The astringent fruit gave rise to the English word crabby, meaning bad-tempered. In medieval times, crab apples were used for the sour sauce verjuice, just as the modern cook uses lemon.

  You will need to sweeten your crabs in the cooking. Crab-apple jelly is the best-known way to use the fruits, not least because they are pectin-rich and help setting. But there are many other things you can do with crab apples; when Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC he found the Celtic natives fermenting the juice of Malus sylvestris. The Romans titled the drink Sicera. Cider.

  Crab-apple jelly

  Ideal on toast for breakfast, ideal as an accompaniment to roast meat. This recipe makes 2–4kg of jelly.

  around 4kg crab apples

  around 2kg caster sugar

  1 lemon

  Wash and quarter the crab apples, but leave in the cores because they contain heaps of the pectin necessary to set the jelly. Put the apples in a large heavy pan or cauldron with just enough water to cover them. Bring to the boil and simmer until the fruit is pulpy and soft (about 25–30 minutes).

  You now need to pour the pulp into a jelly bag – or double layers of muslin – and let it drip into a pan overnight. (Tying the corners of the bag to an upside-down stool with a bowl underneath to catch the apple drips is the ideal arrangement.) If you hurry the process by squeezing the bag this will make the jell
y cloudy; if you are unworried by aesthetics, squeeze every last drop out.

  Next morning, measure the apple juice and add sugar in the ratio of 500g sugar to 1 litre juice. Tip into a saucepan, add the juice of the lemon and bring to the boil, stirring with a wooden spoon to dissolve the sugar. Remove any surface scum. Boil hard for ten minutes, then test for the setting point with a sugar thermometer: this is 105ºC. Alternatively, have a fridge-chilled pudding spoon on standby and put a small amount of the jelly on the back of the spoon. If it solidifies it is set. If it is still liquid, boil some more, then repeat the test.

  When the setting point is reached, remove from the heat and ladle the jelly into warm sterilized jars. Cover with a waxed paper disc, tightly seal with a lid, and store in a cool dark place. The jelly should keep for a year. A more savoury jelly can be obtained by adding herbs, such as sage and rosemary.

  The recipe for crab-apple jelly can be used as the model for a hedgerow jelly using rosehips, haws, sloes, bullaces, rowanberries, elderberries or blackberries in any proportions you can forage, as long as the mix includes 50 per cent of the high-pectin crab apple.

  13 NOVEMBER: Leaf-stripper November wind has uncovered a blackbird’s nest in a hawthorn bush. The nest sits like an accusation; the inside is full of mice-dined haw kernels, and leaves so long dead they are skeleton. Live moss, glossy and green, has begun its sybaritic hegemony, at once gorgeous but unlovely. (We do not like moss.)

  How did I not see the nest last year when it must have been full and fecund with eggs, and chicks?

  14 NOVEMBER: A murmuration of jackdaws, ninety or more. Only the oak leaves show; the larch is golden.

  In my chair: a companionable wood mouse eats an acorn beside me. If the wood mouse did not gnaw, its teeth would grow to such an extent they would be tusks and it could not eat.

  For humans, acorns, thick with tannins, are inedible raw, though in times and places of austerity, such as Germany in the Second World War, acorns have been roasted and ground as an ersatz coffee.