Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Skates echoing across the ice in early-morning frost before the ice is powdered by the passage of too many skates.

  The shouts of joy or alarm, scarves, gloves, the elaborate lacing of boots.

  Clearing out my workshop the other day I came across a pair of my old ice skates. From time to time at our local auction room a pair of skates comes up for sale, cobwebbed and little used these days.

  One of the pleasures of English weather is that the big freeze, like the heatwave, is always a possibility and speaks of holiday.

  It is the child, the subversive part, in all of us who longs for the moment when the weather brings everything to a standstill and we can go out tobogganing, sliding, snowballing or skating.

  The way birds fly. We should use onomatopoeia much more to describe their flight. A rook flying flippy-floppy, dippydoppy wings splashing around in the sky like a dog-paddler.

  I don’t have a problem with anger, I have a problem with the things that make me angry, and I think the main problem I have is that most people – society in general – are not sufficiently angry about those things that upset me. That in itself makes me angry – a sort of latter-day angry young man.

  14th April

  Sunny, warmer, bee-flies on the aubrietia. A hedgehog poo near the kitchen door. Maybe he’s woken up already? The oily courtship song of the greenfinch, like the swinging open of a well-oiled door. Ducks sleeping on the lawn, heads tucked in.

  15th April

  A Drones’ Club of mallard drakes on the lawn, all lying about and preening.

  I would choose starlings to work for me if I had a bird-building job to do. They are so muscular and determined – and greedy for life too.

  Jackdaws come to this spinney along the edge of the common and take twigs for their nests. I’ve watched them for years in spring, flying to and fro from their nests in the tower of Burgate Church, a mile away, to the spinney on the common, a goldmine of dead twigs.

  ‘A host of golden dandelions.’ I wipe a puddle of rainwater off the oilskin on my garden table and decide to count the dandelion heads. Just how many daffodils were there in that host of them that Wordsworth describes? It may sound obsessive, but I want to get better at judging, rather than guessing, the number of dandelions on a field, or gulls in a passing flock, or swallows wheeling over my garden.

  19th April

  I watch a hoverfly alight on a clematis flower and explore its stamens for pollen. It reminds me of Microcosmos and I think, yes, it really is another world, this microscopic insect world, a world apart. But almost at once I realize that to put insects into ‘another world’ or ‘a world apart’ is dangerous. In fact it is the rationale for exterminating them with pesticides. If theirs is ‘another world’, it has nothing to do with us. It is unconnected, and, whatever we choose to do to it, we ourselves are unaffected. The very reverse is the truth, of course. Unless we realize we share a single world with the insects, and that if we harm them we harm ourselves and the rest of nature, we will end up destroying ourselves – committing suicide, in fact.

  Grandpa Wood was brought up by foster-parents Rebecca George and Mr George. He was born in Chase Terrace or Chase Town – or at least grew up there. His father was Wood of Brockhurst-Wood, a timber firm in Walsall. Later, the family lived at No. 5, The Avenue, Truro. The Fentons had a big store in Walsall – a general store that grew into a department store.

  Grandpa Wood worked at the Cannock & Rugeley Colliery as time-keeper and wages clerk – after the accident in which he lost his right hand.

  20th April

  Good Friday. Chaffinches chirping their regular squeaky-machine song, the sunny, warm air filled with the hum of bumblebees and wood pigeons. They have paired up and are swooping high, cooing in their special ‘whoopee-we-are-flying-for-fun’ song. Wood pigeons wind the handle of their cyclical song, halfway or three quarters, then just leave go and let their song hang inconclusively in the air.

  The moat has warmed up to 15°C – so just warm enough for a reasonable dip. Water quality improving with the sunshine and light. I dipped in the net, and there are plenty of giant water snails, and several newts, and the first water-boatmen and pond skaters. Garden bluebells are out, so are cowslips, a solitary hyacinth, the aconites, dog’s mercury.

  I walked down Cowpasture Lane and marvelled at the variety of blackthorn and wild plum and bullaces, and the difference in their blossoms. There is no more magnificent sight in Cowpasture Lane than a mountain of snowy blackthorn blossom in the sun against a pure blue sky, and a peacock butterfly enjoying the flowers.

  Saw a speckled wood butterfly on dog’s mercury too. The trouble with ‘scrub clearance’ is that the dog’s mercury goes mad and takes over from gentler shade-lovers like primrose, stitchwort, violet (especially), and then the cow-parsley takes over, especially where the horses were allowed far too long to graze, and then the blackberry – brambles rush in where the blackthorn used to be and smother it.

  A pair of jays were in the lane, making a strange sound I thought must be foxes, or growling cats. Magpies silently snooping for birds’ nests, a crow, and a warbler, I think, was the blackcap in the big greengage tree by the outside loo this morning. Each time I set up to record them they went away or went silent as soon as I began.

  They say when you lay a hedge the branches should always be sloping upward, yet ash trees disobey the rule by growing their lateral branches out, then swooping down, then up again at the tips like chandeliers.

  The ash beside the old pollard oak by the curved pond is fifteen feet taller, yet hasn’t lost any branches at all. The oak, which must be less supple, has had several big limbs torn off by the winter winds.

  21st April

  I am on a morning bike ride in sunny and suddenly warmer weather because the wind has gone round into the south or south-west.

  Riding down Green Lane near Gislingham. Stitchwort – white dots punctuating the picture – cowslips and the bloody hoof-craters left by the horse-riders who are turning our parish landscape into a leisure park – throwing me off my bike. And crab-apple blossom bursting from a hedge where it has been cut and pruned back into the hedge as though it were a bush. An explosion of blossom.

  The frayed ends of the hedge on the common caused by the ‘bush-whacker’. Too painful to look. People say ‘it’s a bodged job’but actually the bodgers were doing a good job by comparison with these hedge-flaying machines and the all-important ATTITUDE they exemplify: ‘Don’t care, shan’t care.’

  As I cycle closer to Burgate Wood, I notice an increase in the number of cowslips, stitchwort, honeysuckle, primroses in the hedgerows. Ambassadors from the wood, they have spread out.

  On a bike ride, you can stop and talk to people. Compliment a man on his vegetable garden or allotment plot, learn more, strike up conversation.

  I can always tell the direction of the wind from my bike ride.

  The outriders of a hedge still persist even when it’s been razed – wild hops, bryony, elms spring stubbornly from the roots, maple, dead-nettles, stitchwort, primroses.

  Suddenly the bluebells are out in the old rectory garden, and as I cycle past the rookery there’s a great pool of tyre-flattened bird shit, a white pool of road-marking.

  Dead-nettles, the delight of spring bumblebees – and pylons, still here blotting the landscape after nearly a hundred years. E. M. Forster objected to them. How ugly they must have looked then; they’re bad enough now.

  A wildlife painting should have the ring of truth – like T. H. White’s hare ‘with ears like funnels of ventilation shafts of a steamer’. Originality. A way of seeing, the making of connections – Mary Newcomb. A way of articulating an unconscious thought, something hitherto unspoken until now. Lichens dappling an oak trunk.

  See poems of Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence. Clare wrote, ‘I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.’ That’s exactly what a wildlife painter does at their best. The artist doesn’t just sit in the studio waiting for the
painting to come to him – and nor do I when I write this piece – I shake it out of myself on a bike ride.

  If only all the new houses in our village were being built of timber and cob, locally grown in working woods, and the cob dug to form new ponds, which would soon fill with water and life. Think of the dragonflies and newts, the frogs and toads. And think of the beauty of the houses, and how naturally they would fit into the village landscape. The materials are the important thing. There is no reason at all why the designs of these houses should not be far more modern and innovative and original. The problem is that the planners have focused their attention on design, instead of on materials, and have missed the point about the truly vernacular.

  23rd April

  First cuckoo at Mellis. Bike ride 7.55–8.25 a.m. It was a brilliant clear morning and, as I looked up at the full hawthorn all covered in ivy that grows on the common just outside the house, I thought of a date palm and of how we often project the identities of exotic plants or animals on to our own native species as a way of expressing their newness and magic. Thus Waterton and his magpies as ‘English birds of paradise’.I looked across the common to the morning sun whitening the branches of the poplar opposite and thought it could be eucalyptus – a ghost gum.

  Today, I’ve had a big panic, been thrown into deep confusion by my inability to find my two Rotring Art Pens.

  I remember taking them out of the pocket of my rucksack because it had a hole in it, but I don’t know where I put them. Can’t see them anywhere. I cleared my desks in the study, searched all pockets of my jackets and coats, even trousers. Not a sign. I looked in the car, etc. I get very anxious when I can’t find things, especially pens, the tools of my trade. Yet here I am writing with a perfectly good pen. Perfectly good, except that it isn’t my Rotring Art Pen. But why do I always need to have more than one of things? It must be my deep fear of loss. My assumption that I am going to lose things or people leads to a need to protect myself, insure myself, against the loss of one pen by owning two or three. It’s the same with shoes, or my computer. I’m scared of losing things and of the pain of loss. It is unbearable to me, so I hedge my bets against it, and double up.

  I need someone to fold the sheet; someone to take the other end of the sheet and walk towards me and fold once, then step back, fold and walk towards me again. We all need someone to fold the sheet. Someone to hitch on the coat at the neck. Someone to put on the kettle. Someone to dry up while I wash.

  Woodcraft gives wood a new life. The willow wands harvested from the Somerset Levels by the willow-men in Kingsbury Episcopi are turned into rods and woven into baskets, or, ironically, into coffins. But in either case they have a new existence, a metamorphosis into a new life.

  A song thrush sings brightly, courageously, from the madly waving top of an ash tree as the wind blows savagely, trying all it can to unseat the bird whose song continues uninterrupted and as smooth as poured silver in its molten state. So, musically, you have the drone of the wind, and the lovely piping of the bird. The contrast is the same as that of uilleann pipes.

  A treecreeper on the mulberry, arcing up its branches upsidedown, testament to the feast of tiny insects living amongst the lichens on it. A jay comes to the plum tree and eyes the peanut-horde but resists temptation and flies a little way off to observe. A spotted woodpecker feeds for ten minutes on peanuts. It must have a nest somewhere and a mate to feed.

  But do we disable ourselves with these machines? These computers? What better ‘technology’ than longhand? What more streamlined and portable than a pen, or pencil? Or a crayon or a paintbrush?

  No one has ever done better than J. M. W. Turner did with a small travelling palette and a brush or two – and some water.

  Look how we celebrate Andy Goldsworthy for all his deliberate simplicity – his use of piss or puddle water to make ice and weld a sculpture together.

  A tree lives on air, like Hamlet:‘I eat the air, promise-crammed.’

  When I planted the willow at one end of the moat, it was a sapling three feet tall, hardly thicker than my finger. I planted it when I first came here. There is a spring in the moat eleven feet below the surface, and it never lets the moat dry up or even lose its level much beyond a slight rising and falling of the tide with the seasons. The tree grew so tall that when the big winds came in the autumn it was in danger of being blown over into the water. And in summer it was so tall that, in the afternoon sun, it cast a giant shadow across the full length of the moat.

  Now I understood why riverside willows are usually pollarded. I decided to pollard it, and asked Dave and Barney, two young woodcutters, to come over and do the work. They were a marvel to watch, climbing straight up the tree and cutting off the topmost branches first, then working downwards, shortening it bit by bit.

  At last it was pollarded, and I climbed the ladder and looked down on the sawn trunk and saw my life here ingrained in the tree. Each year I’ve lived in this place is a ring in the pale, straw-coloured trunk.

  Now, two years later, it is sending up vigorous pollard branches, and looking better than ever.

  24th April

  Cold again and almost sunny. I am sitting listening for things beside the open door of my workroom. Millie sits out on the brick terrace, and her ears are alert and moving about all the time, detecting and following sounds.

  The quince is now in full leaf and its blossom has almost finished. Yet there’s not a sign of leaf or blossom on the mulberry. The ashes are flowering but not yet budding for leaf. The plums and blackthorn have all been in magnificent flower, snow-capped, all week. Blossom now subsiding. Cuckoo still singing on and off. Lady’s smock is out on the common and on my lawn.

  25th April

  A wren tut-tutting in a bush. A blackcap and its pirouetting song. Last night a rave all night in Thornham Wood. The monotony of drum and bass, trance music.

  It must have scared away the badgers in their tumulus. Tumult on a tumulus.

  A warm sunny morning. Ants processing up and down the trunks of several ash trees. Every now and then two encounter each other going opposite ways: what is it they exchange? Do they feed each other? Or touch antennae in a conversation? What is being said? What booty are they seeking higher up the tree? One seemed to be carrying a dead aphid in its jaws. Are the aphids feeding off the sugars in the newly opening buds and being milked by the ants?

  Each ant is a handsome, shiny machine, a perfect animal. They’re walking up and down a willow stump, newly coppiced too. Is it sap or sugars, or aphids, they are after?

  Toads hauling themselves up on to floating twigs in the pond on the common.

  Cowslips in unprecedented numbers in the railway field and Cowpasture Meadow, colonizing where rabbits have grazed the ground bare.

  Every little hawthorn leaf, framed in the doorway of the shepherd’s hut, shimmers and quivers in the sunlight and breeze (light afternoon breeze). Song of the chiffchaff, wood pigeon (organ pipes muted), cascade song of the chaffinch. Chiffchaff like someone using a machine, a sewing machine perhaps.

  I hear the claws of a blue tit, amplified by the soundbox of the shepherd’s hut. A sound pinhole camera.

  Silhouette of a butterfly outside my bedroom curtains, a shadow play.

  The cutting back of the spinney would not have been so serious had parts of it not been bulldozed and had the coppice stools not been buried under a foot and a half of mud, which smothered all the wild flowers, hibernating bumblebees, etc., especially an extensive bed of violets that grew, with the more vigorous and assertive dog’s mercury and lords and ladies, under the shade of the trees. There were also large numbers of celandines, now mostly smothered too.

  The spinney afforded a superb roosting and nesting place for a variety of birds. Whitethroats nested in the brambles and blackthorn, and blackcaps and other warblers sang in there. It was a favourite roost for the wood pigeons and pheasants, and I miss the pheasants’ clumsy fussing as they settled in at night, or called out at midnight under
the frosty full moon.

  The spinney has always formed part of a natural fringe of old woodland along the south flank of the common. Dog’s mercury, shown to advance only eight inches a year by both Hoskins and Rackham, is well established as an indication of old woodland there.

  The predominant tree species are ash, maple, hawthorn and blackthorn. There are elm saplings and goat willow, mainly around the ponds amongst the blackthorn and bramble, and occasional oak.

  Bramble bushes have always been a characteristic feature here, and it has long been a tradition amongst us in Mellis to gather blackberries.

  The seclusion and shelter offered by the fringe of woodland spinney is a vital feature of this part of the common. It encourages and emboldens the shy kingfishers to come and hawk about the pond before my house for newts, water beetles and small fish. I habitually observe these beautiful birds for hours, and the trees surrounding the ponds provide vital overhanging perches for the fishing birds.

  Anyone who lives on the fringes of Mellis Common, especially to its south side at the western arm, will tell you what an elemental, windy place it is. The trees and bushes have always served an important function as a windbreak against the predominant west winds that roar across the wide, bare common in autumn and winter, right into April, seven months of the year. These west winds have brought down a good many trees along the south side, which continue to thrive as horizontal trees, often providing richer habitats, and better cover, than standing trees.