Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  This was the case in the spinney that has been destroyed. What is condescendingly described as ‘scrub’ is to me and my neighbours a wilderness, full of mystery and magic, a place full of secret corners and dens.

  When the spinney was lost, so were all the children’s dens and campfire places, the moorhen nests in dead trees in the moat, the duck-nest corners under blackberries, and the cool glades where the deer lay up all day, after straying into our garden and staring musing before my workroom window. Now there is no cover at all for the deer, ducks or moorhens in this part of the common.

  The Hymac digger even managed to remove the very tree, an ancient, near-horizontal hawthorn, in which the children had built their tree house. It was with some sadness that my son and I removed what remained of the tree-house boards, and the ropes they’d used as swings.

  The local distinctiveness of this place is what is now at issue. I have lived beside this spinney, and delighted in it, for more than thirty years. I know from talking to many of the older residents of our village, from pre-war aerial photographs and from maps, as well as from the straightforward botanical evidence of the trees themselves and the wild flowers, that the spinney had existed undisturbed for well over fifty years, and probably for centuries before that. The many violets, the cuckoo pint, the primroses and the dog’s mercury are all sure indications of a long-standing woodland tenure.

  The spinney itself contains old holly trees of considerable interest, since they are of the rare variety that has no spines on its leaves. It was also full of ivy, the source of our Christmas decorations for years. Now there is none. The ivy was also an important food source for the birds, especially the wood pigeons, that thrive round here and make our spring and summer days such a delight with their gentle song.

  It was a tremendous shock and sadness to discover that all the trees and wood had been burnt on two bonfires; one of these was on the common, right on top of an ancient ring of field blewits, the beautiful mauve-tinted, fawn-backed fungi that come up after the first frosts of autumn, and often in January and February too, always in cold, damp weather. Thirty years ago there were plenty of them on the common; now, except for on my own fields, they have all but disappeared, and this was the last of the faery rings.

  I met Ronnie at Wormingford Church, where I mooched about in the churchyard waiting for the service to end, and noticed the varied menu of trees there, planted by a Victorian vicar – a big cedar near the redbrick tower, an apple and a kind of prunus with copper leaves opposite the entrance. Ronnie showed me the graves of John Constable’s uncles in the yard. Fine view over the Stour Valley from next door to the church.

  Back at the house, Bottengoms, there’sa fine bank of bluebells and the deep pink of red campions on the most shaded banks of the hollow-way on the way down. I admired the garden – the forest of Japanese knotweed John Nash introduced along with the tall horsetails, the mauve irises whose name neither of us knows, the two pale peach paeony flowers, John Nash’s favourite, the Gloire de Dijon rose by the door, the pink spears of bistort, pots full of geranium cuttings. Inside, a vase of cow-parsley and one of the mauve irises, and one of Ronnie’s two cats, the white one, not the tortoiseshell, asleep on the kitchen sideboard on a dishcloth.

  Ronnie showed me his newly painted white study, but he is still working downstairs with his old portable typewriter on John Nash’s old paints table. Upstairs, a pair of exquisite chairs with plaited cane up the backs.

  We pack the picnic things – my veg pie, Ronnie’s tongue sandwiches, wine, etc. – and set off past the wind chimes by the door.

  On the way to Tiger Hill we pass a field full of flints, astonishing numbers, beside the river, where Ronnie and Richard have found Saxon flints, arrowheads, etc. And the great house with a bricked moat round it.

  Ronnie tells me about euphorbia, and how it took its name from the doctor of Alexander the Great’s father – Dr Euphorbia. Later, in the bluebell woods, I learn how Hyacinthoides non-scripta got its name. Many other hyacinths have markings inside the flower bell that signify the Greek death-cry Ai, ai, as in Greek tragedy when someone dies – or when a mortal is transformed into a tree or plant and cries out Ai, ai. The bluebell doesn’t have such markings – hence, non-scripta.

  Back at Mellis I am splitting willow. Driving in the axe (maul) with pure Zen belief that I’ll split it in one blow, Zen and the Art of Archery stuff, Kung Fu. The cats are growling their way up to a fight in the woodpile, where Millie has got herself caught. She has retreated to its cavernous shadowy depths as Alphonse advances on her, black tail twitching. Both cats growl, but mostly Millie. Alf doesn’t care much and is twice her weight anyway. He always wins if he feels like it.

  As I wheel a barrow of split logs to jigsaw into the pile up the south wall of the woodshed, there’s a sudden explosion of cats, spitting and yowling and clattering in the logs.

  It is cold, and ducks fly low and fast in pairs at dusk.

  In the New Forest at camp, we used to run downhill with our canvas campbeds held high above our heads and jump in an attempt at human flight. This was a new, lightweight design of campbed, light enough when assembled to raise above your head and use as a wing.

  28th April

  Mellis Common. I photographed cowslips on the far side of the common along the bank between Hall Farm and School House. They are all notably tiny specimens – very weakly this year. Why? Numerous and dense in patches close to the edge of the bank.

  Also photos of cuckoo flowers. Counted only thirty-seven specimens in the section between Cowpasture Farm and Walnut Tree Farm, with most of these at the end near CPF and very few indeed near WTF. To the west of the WTF track, there were more than twelve specimens where twenty years ago, or even ten, there were hundreds, turning the common mauve-white. Why?

  When you look at the water, you look at the surface, as most of us do, most of the time. But there are literally millions of tiny creatures existing beneath the surface. So the interesting thing to do is to look beneath the surface, to inhabit that strange land. Going down into the water is just the same impulse as going up into the mountains, leaving the median territory of ordinary day-to-day life.

  You could spend a lifetime studying a hedgerow, or a pond. Some years have elapsed since Small is Beautiful.

  I’ve realized today, as I watch a plump female house spider securing and dragging home a fat bluebottle, that the spider is our household octopus. It has eight legs, bites its prey with poison fangs and holds it still as it pumps in paralysing poison.

  30th April

  Yesterday, the wind changed. It went round from north-east to south-west, and at last four swallows appeared over the house. I heard them first, then saw them flying and twittering round and round above the garden. It was like waving a magic wand: everything changed. The quince blossomed its pale pink peony flowers, the apple tree came into flower, and the cuckoo flowers on the lawn and out on the wide windswept sea of the common were in full pale mauve flower.

  I have been eating the young dandelions, the fresh, sharp, tasty, new sorrel leaves, land cress and white campion leaves, which John Evelyn recommends in his herbal. Those swallows and their magic wand brought all the waving sea of cow-parsley outside my north window effervescing into a white froth of flower. The ash tree filled with goldfinches pecking at its flowers – fascinated by them – and greenfinches flitted along the hedges like English parrots.

  May

  5th May

  A glorious, warm, sunny day. The wind in the ash and quince makes beautiful music – I record it. Just as I have everything set up and recording, the next-door dogs start barking. Bumblebees everywhere this year, and some very interesting-looking carder bees and solitary wasps and ichneumon flies. Curious layer of larvae lying in the moat – or are they young newt tadpoles at a very early stage?

  I see a frog near the moat. Orange-tip butterflies in garden on cow-parsley. Red admiral on nettles by ash sculpture. Ash-art is just beginning to leaf.

&nb
sp; 6th May

  3 p.m. Met Richard walking on Wortham Common. Large meadow saxifrage out there. Everywhere soaked. Everyone on Wortham busy making their own water features out of the moat, digging it deeper with steep bare sides, linking little artificial dew ponds in front of their residences. Planting bamboos and other exotic bushes – cotoneasters, ceanothus – on the common, and mowing, mowing, mowing; or putting out their horses to graze it so tightly and mercilessly that nothing much would fail to feel disheartened. And the classic way of land-grabbing without actually appearing to do so: cantilevered decking – an unmistakably Australian effect.

  All over the common, people have planted trees, and almost every one of them is an exotic: copper beech, horse chestnut, holm oak, cherry. Not one, except possibly ash, is native to the common itself. No hawthorn or blackthorn, even the oaks are out of place; early-budding specimens from Italy or Romania via the big forcing nurseries in Holland.

  Evening, 9 p.m. An eclipse of the moon. It turned brick-red, drenched with the blood of Apollo, low down, full moon, south-south-east over the black hedges of Cowpasture Meadow. A clear purple-magenta sky and just a single white breadloaf cloud over to the right on the horizon, and some fast-moving light, stratified smoky clouds.

  All is very still – only the sound of a cat squawk in a nest in the hedge – feral cats or kittens in a nest.

  6th May

  Hedge garlic – Jack by the hedge – has colonized the strip of land where the spinney was outside my house. Butterflies love the pinprick white flowers – speckled woods, orange-tips and cabbage whites all flock to it.

  Chaffinch

  Like a child in the playground

  It slides down its song

  Climbs back

  And slides down again

  Hour upon hour until tea-time.

  Drainpipes. We would get our mums to drainpipe our trousers for us: school trousers as much as we dared, and party trousers or jeans as much as possible without making them unwearable, or impossible to get off once on.

  We used to buy corduroys from a shop in the Kilburn High Road that catered for the large Irish population there. The cords were for labourers, chocolate-brown, and built to last. Drainpiping them was a bit of a challenge.

  There are sheds all over the country full of the cobwebbed wooden treasures of past craftsmen, and the things in them are of far more value than the carefully presented, perspexboxed, interpreted items on show in our museums. Give me the dusty basement any day, or the mouldering, unattended displays of fossils or butterflies in glass cases as they always used to be in the Natural History Museum – and still are in rare museums like the one at Wakefield, where Charles Waterton’s stuffed animals from his travels in South America are displayed, or at the Ipswich Museum.

  I have a lost ant on my desk. It has been there for several days, wandering about in a baffled sort of way. I catch glimpses of it as it ducks out of the shadow of a coffee mug and dives under the overhang of my writing pad. Then it decides to make a break for it across five inches of open desk and shelter under my glasses case. But it’s a restless soul, and no sooner has it arrived under the deep strip of shadow under the glasses case than it’s off again, this time to the haven of an old copy of Sight and Sound, where, to my surprise, instead of burrowing under, it marches straight across an interview with the film director Monte Hellman about Two-Lane Blacktop, pausing on a picture of Dennis Wilson, James Taylor and Laurie Bird standing on a rock looking into a river. But this ant is never still. It’s off again already, running along between the tramlines of grain in my Oregon pine desktop and disappearing under the blackness of the telephone. How does it survive? What is the secret of its never-ending energy?

  I can’t help it with directions, because I’ve no idea where it came from in the first place. I could make a guess and simply put it outside. But it is cold and rainy out there; not ant-weather at all, so it is better off in here, although I worry that I may accidentally squash it under a book, or under my elbow.

  It is like a Palestinian, evicted from the Gaza Strip. It is a refugee from somewhere, frantic to go home, cut off from its family and fellow workers, going mad with loneliness. I suppose, if I’m honest, I feel some fellow feeling for it myself, cut off in book-purdah, while my friends are out there at play.

  The knowledge that this tiny creature is lurking somewhere on my desk, but could be anywhere, means that I daren’t move anything in case of causing an accident to it. Where is its home? What keeps it going all this time? Will it run out of energy? Should I feed it honey, as one would a bumblebee?

  Cut off from its tribe, it has lost all sense of itself. It is really a part of a body in search of the rest of the body, like the tail of a lizard left twitching after amputation. An ant colony is really a single organism that is differentiated into various functions, chiefly feeding and breeding, so if one tiny component gets lost like this, it feels some imperative, some compulsion, to rejoin the rest of the ant-body.

  I feel sorry for it, but I suppose there’s nothing much I can do. Just when I think I’ll never see it again, up it pops, doodling its imaginary trail all over my desk. If I could somehow get it to walk through ink and trace its path, it might make some sense, some pattern even, but I doubt it. It is just a wandering ant, a damned soul, condemned to eternal exile on my desk, like Philoctetes. The kind of ant you get in your pants. One of the few ants in the world whose natural enemy, the human, is actually concerned about its survival as an individual, except that the concept of individuality is completely alien to an ant.

  Watching Millie pad her way carefully and silently through the vegetable garden, I forgot again about the question of the footprint – the footprint on the earth. This is the key: when we dig out a ditch or coppice some woodland, we should use hand tools as much as possible. A digger makes a deep impression on the earth, too deep. Only today I read of the clumsy killing of El Grande, the biggest eucalyptus tree in the world, by a Forestry Tasmania bulldozer. It had scraped all the earth off the roots and damaged the trunk and bark. To cap things off, they set fire to the tree for good measure.

  Everywhere I went in Tasmania I saw the tracks of huge bulldozers crushing the delicate, under-storey life of the rainforest, its seabed, green and misty, in dappled shade and sunlight.

  Those big trucks going in straight lines down the left-hand lane of the highway. Road-trains with a trailer and thirty tons of tree trunks, destined to be chipped, then pulped into paper. From tree to toilet paper, from Fraxinus to fax, from riverside to typing pool.

  7th May

  Everywhere this morning in the May sunshine I notice the sudden, magical growth of trees. The mulberry has just come into leaf overnight, only the beginnings, but yesterday there was no sign of anything more than the tiniest buds.

  The ash arch is sending out shoots. The laid hedge of the wood is bursting into fresh green leaf. The coppiced hazels are sending out buds in the wood. Even the two ring-barked ash trees are sending out tiny shoots from their roots. This is magnificent courage and defiance. Both trees are still in leaf this year, although dying back in the lower branches. Soon, surely, they must die off at the top? They are living on residual sap. Tiny maples have sprung up everywhere under the places where the old maple used to overhang. I have laid the hedge to let in the light, and this is the explosion.

  The ley lines of cowslips in the railway field are more pronounced than ever. Long mole runs of straight-line cowslips, self-seeded into the disturbed soil of the mole runs. But Richard says that ants may carry seeds on their backs. All the cowslip ley lines lead towards the giant three-foot anthill in the middle.

  A couple of rabbits about, and, last night, a deer at the end of the middle field. We stood and watched each other for several minutes. I flinched first and walked home.

  All morning I have been packing polythene freezer bags with peat that I dampened and filling them with apple pips from Kyrgyzstan. This is called ‘breaking dormancy’. I have some trouble with
the same thing myself, so I’m sympathetic with the apple pips. The fridge is full of these peaty bags filled with apple seeds or walnuts. I soaked and sieved the pips first – hawthorns too.

  I moved the derelict shepherd’s hut by tractor to a new place on the field near the concrete pad.

  Often you get a strong sense of the tides and currents of history flowing through the works in the undercurrents of Mike Westbrook’s Piano.

  The piano is ticking away underneath it all, and, as the other players fall silent, it is revealed, the musical imagination of Westbrook, working constantly away underneath it all, the bedrock of this big sound.

  Sometimes it ticks like a clock, then surges into a rolling tide and sweeps the music forward in a lyrical surge, into the new era of a piece, a fresh movement.

  There is often a sense of moving from room to room of an idea or theme, as in the stanzas of a poem.

  The language, words, are the basic component of jazz. The sounds of languages are constantly with us, and, as we ruminate on them in our heads, jazz plays with them, and with the rhythms and sounds, so that ‘salt peanuts’ or ‘tutti frutti’ turn into poems.

  Musicians are always looking for total silence. Sebastian Rochford took us close to it in a superb diminuendo drum solo, simplicity itself, in which the entire audience held its breath as the drums, instruments of the greatest subtlety and delicacy in his hands, brought us to the threshold of audible sound, looked over the edge and then brought us back again. It was a great moment in an evening of telling moments.