Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  The big workbench once belonged to the communal farm Middleton Murry founded at Thelnetham when he lived there. It is tough and scarred, pitted and ingrained with the marks and grime of eighty years of hard work.

  There is other furniture too, of a kind: an old table with drawers where all the chucks and spindles for the lathe live, with the long-handled chisels and gauges in a rack above it, and the electric grinder to one side for sharpening them. On the wall beside the chisels is a photograph torn from a newspaper of the woodworker David Pye, and his obituary. DP was the great champion of diversity, in his own work, and in all made things, as the tonic our souls require.

  The shed is lit by a collection of theatrical floodlights slung from the ceiling beams, and a pair of anglepoise lamps that can be focused on the lathe.

  A variety of hunks of oak, cherry, sycamore, ash, hazel, hornbeam and walnut sit about in various corners or help weigh down the lathe and other electrical machinery. Stabilizing the lathe is crucial to woodturning. This is the reason woodturners often covet the big old machines like the Harrison Graduate, a bowl-turning lathe whose sheer weight in steel will ensure that it never moves or so much as vibrates. The slightest vibration can cause the chisel to jump on the spinning wood and split or tear into it.

  Books are like seeds: they come to life when you read them, and grow spines and leaves. I need trees around me as I need books around me, so building bookshelves is something like planting trees.

  Strong winds rattling the willow tops against each other. Constant rasping and clicking of twigs – rain driving across the common. I go out to prune the lavatera and the buddleia, cutting it back hard. Then I set to work pollarding the small willow by the gate. It has fourteen poles about twenty feet long, and I cut nine of them by hand, stripping off the side shoots with the billhook and stacking the twigs and small branches on the dead hedge along the north-western boundary of this garden. I stack the poles against the big crack willow with the ash poles Rufus [Deakin, Roger’s son] and I cut down before Christmas.

  I finish work at dark, and a moon comes up, pale and windswept. The cats can’t wait to come in the house and curl up straight away in their favourite places, Millie behind the Aga, Alf on a sofa.

  A big full moon low in the sky at 7 a.m., windy, clear, puddles all the way up the common, moon sitting on the horizon, rooks flying and tumbling west with the wind. Pigeons too, all birds have come out to play in the seductive wind.

  February

  The squirrel is the English cosimo, running along in the trees, quite as happy diving headlong down a slender tree trunk as climbing up it. They remind me of the Big Brother system of brass cylinders that used to shoot along a system of pneumatic tubes held aloft on the ceilings of Harrods, where I once worked in the blanket-packing department.

  3rd February

  Filming a pilot for Channel 4 all day with Mike [Dibb]. We begin with pollards: the two willows by the moat and the pollard cherry woven into a basket, and the little oak tree by the doorway of the green woodshed.

  Then we move on to the coppiced hazel, and the ash bower, and I mention David Nash and how this is the beginning of the Gothic arch in architecture. Then we look at the ash spiral, and the relation of wood to water, and the pleasure of seeing the architecture of trees in winter, when they are bare of leaves.

  After lunch, we move on to the common and I talk about the big oak tree, free-standing, free-growing and wild because no forester has interfered with it or lopped its branches to create a straighter trunk with fewer knots. Instead, this oak has done exactly as it pleases, and attained an entirely natural shape, not having been jostled for space and light by other trees, as a woodland oak would be. It has grown under optimum conditions, in good soil undisturbed by the plough, manured by generations of cows congregating beneath it for shade, with all its vital mycorhizal fungi undisturbed and functioning. A profoundly contented and healthy tree.

  I talk about the architecture of a tree, about its essential cone shape, with the branches cantilevered from the central tower of the trunk, tubular structures being the strongest. I stand beneath the branches and say there are thirty-five of them, and that their combined weight must be several tons. I love the horizontality of oak. Of all trees, it has the strength to float its outstretched branches out at ninety degrees to the trunk. These horizontal branches exert enormous forces at the cantilevered joint, which must be immensely strong. That is why the joint pieces are so sought after by carpenters and shipwrights. They are the ‘knees’ of ships, binding the ribbed frame together, joining the horizontal keel to the upright stern and bow.

  By contrast with the old aspen that stands beside it on the common, the oak has retained all of its thirty-five branches. The aspen has only five left, the rest having been broken off by the wind. This tells you why oak is so greatly valued in this country.

  Then we move inside and film a fire-lighting sequence in the main fireplace, talking about the architecture of fire, and the fact that most people in this world cook and warm themselves with wood as their fuel. Finally, something on David Nash and his work, and on the structure of the house itself: a skeleton house, not a ‘crustacean’ house, as Le Corbusier put it.

  There are 243 beams in this house, proportions natural, set by the size of trees and their girth.

  5th February

  I spent from 3 p.m. until the light ran out at 5.30 p.m. making a cut-and-warp column for Terence [Blacker]’s birthday out of a length of green cherry log. It was three feet tall and I had put in thirty saw cuts – a total of 120 if you count each cut as being four, from each side. It is punishing work, and the sweat flowed freely. I worked at my improvised wooden anvil of oak and willow logs, big cross-sections of tree trunk heavy enough to take a firm hold of the workpiece. First I squared off the four sides of bark to make a square-sided column that tapered a little towards the top.

  Making a cut-and-warp column is a good example of what David Pye calls ‘the workmanship of risk’. At any moment things could go wrong. Tip the whizzing blade of the chainsaw an inch too far into the centre, and you could undo all your painstaking work by cutting short the column. You walk a tightrope from beginning to end of what feels more and more like a performance as you go on, your glasses steam up in the cold air, you enter a trance of concentration and the sweat runs down your back and springs itchily into your scalp inside the safety helmet, behind the medieval gauze visor, and streams down your forehead. Your eyes water in the frosty air.

  After the first few incisions, you get into a rhythm and instinctively feel how deep to plunge the saw blade into the wood. By making a series of circular incisions no more than a quarter of an inch apart, you are left with a series of wooden leaves suspended, cantilevered on a slender central column of continuous heart wood. The bar of your chainsaw is three eighths of an inch thick, so with each cut you are removing as much wood as you leave standing in the sculpture, and letting a new element, air, into the wood. Thus you begin to open the tree to the air and allow the sap to evaporate, breathing it in yourself as you do so.

  With each new incision, the sculpture becomes more fragile and the potential minor disaster if you were to make a mistake that much greater. As the time goes by and the piece grows more interesting, your investment in it becomes that much greater.

  At last you make the final cut, and carry the sculpture into the house for the first time, cradling it in your arms like a baby.

  You set it down on a table and scrutinize it from every angle, from close up and from the other side of the room. It feels good. You run a hot bath and sink into it, and lie soaking your tired limbs for a long time.

  7th February

  A walk up Cowpasture Lane with Jan Stevenson and Richard. The first mistle thrush singing in the garden. We find a stinking hellebore in the far end of the lane near the railway. Form a Cowpasture Lane Society and buy the lane?

  8th February

  The moat on Mellis Common. I believe its ecology goes something
like this. It has always nearly run dry during autumn and early winter, filling with water in spring, but well drained enough not to fill very deep. For much of the year water lies over much of its length to a depth of six inches to a foot, no more, over a bed of twigs and leaves falling from the dense spinney and hedge that overhang it. This seems to be an ideal home to the ten-spined stickleback, and I have noticed over many years that a phenomenon long known and reported from the Lincolnshire fens occurs here: swarming shoals of the little fish, feasting carnivorously on the many insects and grubs that fall from the trees, and on the daphnia and other tiny organisms in the water. Sometimes you see the water boiling with them.

  Kingfishers have always frequented these moats, hunting the sticklebacks along them. The shallower the water becomes as it drains, the easier prey the sticklebacks are.

  Eventually, around August and September, there is so little water left in the moats that it concentrates in smaller, shallow pools that can seem to boil with the massed sticklebacks crowding into them. I have become convinced of the importance of shallow water to the kingfishers and sticklebacks. As the water grows deeper, the sticklebacks cease to thrive. They are pond fish, and they seem to be adapted for life in the shallows.

  Kingfishers are so much a part of the life of Mellis Common along these moats and ponds that when the barn fronting the pond and common moat to the west of Cowpasture Farm was converted into a house ten or fifteen years ago, its developer christened it ‘Kingfisher Barn’.

  However, the development interfered with the traditional flow and level of the water draining through the system of ponds and moats around Mellis Common. First, the fine old brick-arched bridge that carried a cart track into the Cowpasture barns, and over which hundreds of cows went in and out to the milking sheds for hundreds of years, was demolished. The pipe installed as a substitute for the open arch of the original bridge does not seem to be adequate to take the volume of water running along the moat system. That the water should be continually flowing is, of course, vital to maintaining oxygen levels and diminishing the adverse effects of eutrophication.

  The pipe draining water from the Cowpasture Farm pond has also been relaid at a much higher level, thus effectively damming the pond, raising the level all the way back to Cowpasture Lane, and radically altering the nature of the system of moats and ponds as habitat for a chain of plants and animals that traditionally includes ten-spined sticklebacks and kingfishers as a notable component, as well as toads, frogs and newts, some of which also value shallows as breeding grounds. The recent introduction of larger fish, notably roach and rudd, will also be affecting the ability of frogs, toads and newts to breed successfully in the ponds, while they themselves will be too big to be of much interest to kingfishers. They do, however, attract herons, especially by night and in the very early hours of the morning.

  The water level has risen some two or three feet.

  Squirrels. The way they nosedive down trees or swing, upended, on the peanut dispenser is like a leaden clock pendulum.

  The way they dive down trees, the way they know how to fall from one tree to another – a delicate, twitching flag of fur. Falling like a yellow duster dropped from an upstairs window.

  I have built a sort of wooden anvil on a level concrete pad where I store timber, work at my sculptures and split logs. It is a makeshift arrangement of large willow, oak and ash logs, cross-sections of tree trunks laid flat, notched and stepped up or down like Lego depending on the level at which I want to labour with my chainsaw. They are scarred with the criss-cross signature of the saw blade, which they cannot harm.

  Labouring amongst them the other day, and in the full flow of artistic creation, I kicked two or three logs to clear some floor space and uncovered a huddle of froglets like a heap of small change hunkered down and cowering in the damp sawdust beneath the logs. Regretting my carelessness, I bent down to move the creatures under cover and realized I had wounded one of them. Blood oozed from a wound on its side as it dragged itself out of sight under some bark. I felt nasty, guilty and brutal all night and next day. Under another log was a newt, and I was reminded of the secret lives that go on all around here all the time.

  9th February

  The decline of the Church of England is a specially dangerous thing in rural areas. It means the vicars keep on changing every few years because there aren’t enough of them to go round, and anyway the church no longer attracts the high quality of minds it once did. To make matters worse, each vicar has to look after a ‘group’ of parishes, so lacks the local knowledge and intimacy with the natural surroundings he or she would need to carry authority when pronouncing on conservation, questions of.

  In earlier times a Gilbert White or a Parson Woodforde would have been quick to spot anything amiss with nature in the parish and to speak forthrightly about it to any wrongdoers. Not any more. Worse still, you have vicars who come in and cut down cedar trees in churchyards, or yews.

  12th February

  Walking along Cowpasture Lane and Howe Lane to Thornham Parva. The trees are all wrong in Howe Lane near Thornham Parva Church. They exhibit all the classic ills of tree-planting. Whoever did it simply had not the faintest idea what they were doing. Cherries and walnuts are interspersed with pathetic little hawthorns in tight double rows in ugly white plastic tubes. Where is all that plastic supposed to end up? Just a few field maples too – but the whole lot of them bred in a greenhouse in Holland from original progeny in Romania or somewhere far off. Similarly, those hawthorns you see in full blossom in mid March on the motorway come from further south and think its spring in their plant-clocks.

  They’ve planted walnuts inches away from hawthorns, and they hate competition. And they’ve planted them no more than nine or ten feet apart when they need to be spaced thirty or thirty-five feet, so they have space to develop their huge crowns. The walnut has the biggest canopy of any English tree.

  The history of the countryside is far more a history of skulduggery of one kind or another than has generally been recognized. Written records are of only moderate usefulness in delivering up the past: most of the real action was never recorded because it took place on the wrong side of the law.

  The shaping of so many of the old pollards along Cowpasture Lane would probably be a very gradual, mostly surreptitious process, involving the covert removal of odd branches, possibly by night or very early morning: a kind of illicit pruning over many hundreds of years.

  People are still helping themselves to quite valuable hunks of common land right under the noses of the entire village where I live in Suffolk. When I arrived here in 1970, a farmer was helping himself quite openly to the two and half acres occupied by an ancient droving road that may well have been there for 4,000 years. He bulldozed and uprooted the hedges and copse trees, and dynamited the more spectacular of the oaks. It was a major piece of work, and he was assisted with a grant from the helpful Ministry of Agriculture.

  The removal of thousands of miles of old hedgerows was an act of breathtaking skulduggery in itself. In what other area of work except agriculture could people get away with such obvious vandalism?

  Lanes were removed or moved, footpaths rerouted, maps redrawn by little mafias of landowners up and down the country. In our own parish, the farmers got together in 1969/70 to redraw the parish map to their own convenience, downgrading byways to footpaths at the stroke of a pen, with no accountability to anyone at all.

  13th February

  A sunny, cold but almost springish day. I can’t resist pottering outside, re-erecting the rose on props of ash and hazel, burrowing away the ash cuttings in piles from under the ash arch. Then I cut some firewood with a bow-saw at the bench and go for a bike ride.

  The first thing the cats did today was rush about all over the garden and race up all the trees as high as they could go. Next they went hunting on the common, and Millie soon caught a mouse that she paralysed, taunted and then ate on the brick terrace with an audible crunching of bones.

/>   Yesterday I went swimming – only thirty lengths – but I immediately felt miles better. The exercise, and a few final moments in the sauna, energized me for the rest of the day, and I slept much better too.

  Tonight, the skies are clear and the temperature is dropping sharply. There will be a frost. I’m glad I fixed the chimney flashing earlier in the week.

  I spent a lot of time today mooning about my hedges, inspecting sheds and their cobwebby contents, and contemplating how I would lay the hedge of the railway wood.

  Cutting upfirewood, I came across a stem of elm wonderfully inlaid with the workings of a beetle. An English scribbly bark.

  The ash arch looks its best in the early morning frost, which highlights and etches out its form in white.

  A soft, grey morning, cold but neither windy nor frosty. Greenfinches, chaffinches, robins all over the garden, queuing to eat peanuts from the feeder. I’m thinking of Kyrgyzstan and Osh: the hotel with its threadbare rugs and breakfast of hot bread and honey brought in to me at seven, set down on a low table walled in by old sofas, worn and dusty. Everything dusty, and the bathroom barely working. Cold water, a dribbling shower.

  Starlings now appear singly, not in the flocks I remember in Mellis. No sparrows, just chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits and the jester in the pack, the great spotted woodpecker. A dunnock picking up the crumbs beneath, hesitant and watchful.