Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Every now and again I passed a pink thatched cottage, with a modest garden, two or three apple trees, and a makeshift garage and a range of tin sheds slanting towards oblivion. Nearly all of them had the builders in. A white van, a cement mixer, a pile of Durox building blocks and the beginnings of an extension or a porch were the only evidence of activity. Not a sign of anyone actually at work, not even Radio Norfolk to break the silence.

  At the corner of two fields and the road, a digger had been excavating a pond. There are so often ponds at the intersections of fields here in Suffolk, and it was good to see how sensitively the big machine had been eased in amongst the trees that fringed the pond; how it had deftly scraped out only the leaf silt, leaving the hard clay-bottom intact.

  A multiple covey, or an extended covey, of dozens of partridges whirred up like an aeroplane the other side of the hedge and dived straight ahead, flying two feet off the ground. They landed, stood about long enough to realize I was still gaining on them and broke into their comical run, eventually taking off with their usual reluctance.

  The country began to roll a bit just here, and the dark cushions of ancient maple and sloe hedgerows snaked and curved away downhill, following the classic undulations that signal old field boundaries. I had turned off Clay Street into a green lane signposted ‘The Six-Mile Loop’, passed another shadowed pond winking out from a canopy of trees and turned left along a banked field boundary. The line of massive pollard hedgerow oaks, and sheer bulk of bank and width of ditch, suggested that this may once have been the boundary of the medieval park at Thornham. The trees were hollow and black with ivy. Out of the shaggy log of one of them flew a little owl.

  Rabbits had made their burrows amongst the huge roots in the sandy, dry earth inside the hollows, and a beefsteak fungus jutted out of the trunk.

  I entered a wood of overgrown ash and old hazel coppice bursting densely from old stools and followed the rides on a course that curled back towards the road behind the cottage and gardens that occasionally fringed it.

  I ducked through the hazels into a clearing and saw the first of the old coppice oaks. It was a giant, superbly misshapen, its trunk a cluster of carbuncles and its branches withering and bursting forth at the same time. It was alive and dead, young and old, all at one. There were fourteen trees grouped about no more than an acre and a half of tangled blackberry and nettle jungle. Two or three oaks had collapsed, splitting themselves apart under the weight of their own crowns and falling outwards in several directions. Another had simply died on its feet, standing straight up like a ghost, but more petrified than rotten, riddled with beetle burrows and woodpecker drills.

  Seized by a nerdish urge to measure and to count, I spread out my arms and flung myself flat against the trunks of these oaks, hugging them close to my bosom and stretching out my fingertips as far as they would go, then worked around the tree back to the point where I had begun. Each tree was just over three arm spans in girth five feet off the ground. My arm span is a fraction under six feet, so the trees are eighteen feet in girth or 216 inches. Applying the unreliable method of a half-inch to every year for a tree in a wood (or an inch a year for free-standing trees) they would be at least 430 years old. That would place them around 1570. Oliver Rackham says he knows of pollarded oaks in Epping Forest of only fifty inches in girth that are known to be at least 350 years old. The trunks of pollards grow more slowly because the tree is concentrating on growing its topmost boughs: doing what it is meant to do. The trunk is simply the body of a roman candle, shooting out leafy fireworks every spring and summer.

  Beyond these oaks, the kitchen lights of one of the thatched estate cottages winked out as dusk began to fall. The cottage had a lawn and an apple tree still festooned with pale yellow fruit, unharvested, and more windfalls all over the lawn beneath. This was a sight you would never have seen in the past, any more than pollard oaks left uncut; such things were the staples of the lives of working people.

  This place, with its oaks, is still known as ‘the meadow’ and would have been a miniature wood pasture, with sheep or a cow or two grazing beneath the oaks, and perhaps some pigs let in to eat the acorns.

  I searched for acorns to plant and propagate descendants of these trees but found none. They must all have been gathered already by squirrels and mice.

  Walking back down Clay Street, I chased the same whirring partridges and passed more bright pink spindle trees.

  Great ropes of ivy, six inches thick, clambered up the wayside oaks, and they seemed none the worse for it. On some trees the ivy had been sawn through to kill it, though it sometimes managed to mend itself and grow back together.

  I passed barns converted to houses with the regulation full-length glazing, floor-to-eaves, affording too public a cross-section of life inside, as though the inhabitants were living on the set of a rural Big Brother show. These barns are always weather-boarded and creosoted a uniform black, and they always have crisp shingle drives and open-fronted pseudo-cowsheds as garages. Water butts are in vogue too, and the barn I passed on Clay Street contained a long-legged Persian cat, too domesticated to be allowed out of doors.

  Most of these barns used to be prime habitats for bats until converted. A recent survey amongst the barn conversions of Hertfordshire showed that, in spite of the fitting of the regulation bat lofts, access holes and the rest of it, as required by the planners, the bats have disappeared from 75 per cent of them.

  The gamekeeper, patrolling the stubble fields round the woods and copses in his Toyota pick-up – sinister, impersonal, detached, alienated from nature.

  The hedgehog is male (it has no discernible apron) and, as it fumbles about furtively prospecting for a hibernaculum amongst the horded Tesco bags under the butcher’s block by the kitchen sink, it sounds like a boy masturbating in a dormitory after lights out.

  19th November

  Hornets. All through the late summer and autumn they kept coming. Each night successive waves of bombers droned in across the garden, targeting the study window in front of my desk. I had to remember to close it before switching on any lights. They went straight for the light, flying in down the beams that reached out into the autumn evening mists, and picketed the windowpanes. They were inches away, the other side of the glass but still dauntingly big, their striped bodies throbbing with energy, wings never still. Close up, I watched as they demolished whole leaves and stems of the jasmine plant, each insect eating its way methodically down its chosen stem, from tip to base.

  Up in the roof, their nest kept growing like a giant brain, lobes ballooning ever higher into the apex of the roof behind the chimney, where the hornets squeezed in and out through a crack between the bricks.

  I notice the difficulty I have in stepping off the paths across the common and treading my own new one. There is almost a force field that guides my steps. But, in doing so, I can express myself in the landscape: leave my mark. But it raises the question of how paths are formed in the first place. This path along the common that passes in front of my house is relatively recent. I would say it originated no more than eight years ago or even less. It is one of the ways people go towards Cowpasture Lane.

  Recently, more and more people have come to live in our village, converting barns or even building new houses. In my own stretch of the common, which runs just over a mile, the population has risen since I first settled here from twenty-nine (including children) to sixty-five.

  I can lie in my warm bed upstairs and watch the pheasants waking up in their roost in the spinney at one end of my house. The old cock pheasant roosts there – he patrols the lawn – and today it is not until 7.30 that he eventually flies down to the field to feed. He has spent twenty minutes rousing himself out of a ball of feathers into the shape of a pheasant. It has been a sharp frosty night, and the twigs are sugared with frost.

  To my mind, a microscope, or a telescope, or a pair of binoculars, are all far better presents for a child than a TV set.

  A microscope gives you
access to a whole world of amazement and wonder.

  21st November

  A sharp, sugaring frost. The mulberry is at its best in November when at last it undresses itself. It does a sort of striptease before my study window, lightly letting go its leaves in a light breeze that seems to touch only this one tree after the stillness of the frosty night. The leaves float down in twos and threes, or just a single leaf at a time.

  The glory of the mulberry at this moment of the year is in its pool of fallen leaves: pale yellow softened by pale green and buff (the last from beneath the canopy). The pool is a little sea, choppy with leaves. (Each leaf is a wavelet.)

  Mulberry leaves feel tough and gleam like oilskin. They are dull green when they fall from the tree, then turn to chestnut brown as they oxidize. Each leaf is serrated subtly and evenly with little millimetre sawteeth, and the veins are the tributaries of a river, whose delta leads down to the stem.

  Elderberry leaves pale almost to white except for their veins, which blush a deep crimson as though animal or human arteries, filled with coursing blood.

  Last year I made a maze in the mulberry leaves to celebrate the birth of a little girl – for her first visit here, a labyrinth.

  Why are park-keepers so keen to sweep up leaves? They are the glory of autumn and surely would feed the ground if left alone to be drawn underground by earthworms and composted?

  All the leaves are falling this morning after such a frost. It has loosened them, frozen and cut off the flow of sap, made each stem brittle.

  A pair of crows come to the bullace tree on the common before the house and balance on twigs too slender to bear their weight to eat the plums, translucent pearls of pink and yellow, softened and ripened by the frost, their sugars concentrated now. Magpies follow them, then a dozen blackbirds, a pair of song thrushes. A wood pigeon on the hawthorn after haws.

  The hazel is dropping its leaves too, shivering now and then in a breath of slightest breeze. Leaves come to earth like birds to a field for grain, or grubs.

  Why don’t all the leaves come down at once?

  The fun of scuffing leaves as you trudge through them as if through a snowfall, the woodland floor turned to a palette with each tree at the centre of its particular colour. (Turner’s palette.)

  As the leaves fall away from them, the naked branches reveal their lichened beauty. The pool of fallen leaves is a mirror, reflecting the tree as it has been: the whole canopy in two dimensions. Only the skeleton of the tree is left to represent the third dimension.

  That is what trees give us: the third dimension in our landscape.

  Left alone to cloak the woodland floor, leaves accumulate layer by layer over the years into a deep crust of leaf mould. Walking, or clambering, through old beech or chestnut woods in France and Poland, I have sometimes fallen through the leaf crust and dropped many feet into a soft drift of leaves. These leaf drifts often fill hollows or old quarrying sites for limestone or chalk.

  I go for an early swim and notice the fine old ash pollards on the road back to Thrandeston, and on Thrandeston Green. They need cutting too, but who will do it? I must make a map of Mellis pollards. All need attention to survive. And why not start new pollards too, as I have with my pollard willows?

  25th November

  Curious effect of a sky in two minds about itself. One half, the eastern, dirty grey and smoky with low cloud; the other glowing palely white and washed-out blue, falling away to the south and west. Then rain comes, straight down through the bare remnant leaves, falling on dead leaves.

  I talk on the phone to Peter Randall-Page on Dartmoor. He is racing to get his Eden Project sculpture of Cornish granite finished by June. As usual, nobody realizes quite how much work goes into such things. He had a giant lathe built to turn them, but it took the engineer nine months to make. Now it is working well. Meanwhile, he is making a new square in the middle of Cambridge near the Corn Exchange, and waiting for the stone he went to New England to select for his memorial to a Mohican American Indian at Southwark Cathedral.

  The peanut dispensers hanging on the plum tree outside my window are busy with tits and greenfinches. I notice there are more sparrows this year. They come in flurries with the wind.

  People now are constantly thinking in terms of artificial re-creation of natural places. They want owl-boxes instead of old barns or half-derelict hollow pollards. They want to plant hedges instead of just letting old ones be. They must plant trees and accelerate their growth with plastic sheaths like greenhouses, and weedkiller round the roots. They must plant whole woods, rather than letting them find their own way into existence.

  A hectic, strange week at Mellis, returning on Sunday night, late after Steve Ashley’s gig, driving home with Harvey Brough to find the house in darkness from the gales and a power cut. On Sunday morning during the height of the gale I had to saw my way out along the track to get out to buy an Observer.

  A big dead ash tree came down on the common and I decided to go and cut it up for firewood: 30 ft tall, 90″ girth, 2′6″ diameter of trunk and 148 annual rings, the tree’s history of drought and plenty, warm years and cold ones, all there in the rings. I sawed up from both sides and split the big logs so I could lift them on to the trailer, then took a scaffold board and rolled them up like cheeses. I stored them in a row against a fence, and made a tin roof over my store. Also filled up the woodshed to the roof.

  Wild is an absolute: you can’t have wildish, or semi-wild.

  Rob, chairing the seminar in Cambridge, says that everything I’ve said tends towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self or selfhood. I reply that ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’– that poets, in Keats’s view, have not any real individuality. I should have mentioned Lawrence and self-conscious: his detestation of it as something that de-educates children and militates against spontaneous creativity. The swimmer, dissolving himself in water, immerses himself in the natural world and takes part in its existence.

  There is all the difference between the twitcher going to see the bird and ticking it off in his book (this is all to do with the twitcher, not the bird, a reality) and the poet/swimmer, who allows things to swim ‘into his ken’–the naturalist or poet as passive more than active. ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’(Keats).

  A journey and its serendipity.

  You look back on where you have gone and realize that unconscious connecting forces have been at work. Or were they acting somehow from outside? Are you following some natural pattern you instinctively recognize but at a preconscious level? Did I know, when I went to Hell Gill, that it would represent such primeval, atavistic forces? Such life and death, being born and descending back into the earth. But then, how did I find my way there at all? Purely by chance, apparently. And yet I did have a deep desire to go underground, to follow water underground.

  All the most sacred places are secret; therefore you don’t want to have a website publicizing them. I swam in countless places without revealing where they were. This is the advantage of writing a novel. When I wrote Waterlog I approached it like a novel.

  A few years ago I found myself in Aldeburgh, living in a seaside house and making a film about Auden’s and Britten’s Paul Bunyan: six young opera soloists singing about trees and woods.

  I remember the stirring of spring in the forest, evoked in the opening music in the woodwind. It is billed modestly as an operetta, but I think it is a wonderful work, because in it we hear the stirring of the spring in Britten himself. It is his first attempt at writing opera, and he is doing it with one of the great poets of the twentieth century, Auden. The opera got me thinking about woods and trees, and what wood people we all are.

  The carved oak angels in the roofs of Blythburgh Church, and at March in the Fens, and along the road in Southwold, are watching over us, like the trees themselves. They are our guardians.

  At Christmas people usually perch a fairy or an angel on the Christmas tree’s top. But perhaps all trees have an angel in t
heir branches somewhere.

  When the wind blows and the elms go, we feel a great sense of loss. Trees are the guardian spirits of the land, therefore angels.

  27th November

  What are a cat’s whiskers for? Looking at Millie, I wonder what the ‘eyebrow’ whiskers, like Salvador Dali’s upward-reaching ones, are for? Are they redundant relics of earlier evolutionary advantage? Or gene-linked characteristics like the cockerel’s comb?

  Stationery, the tools of the trade, never fails to excite most writers. I say most because when I wandered, swooning with delight, through the Pencil Museum at Kendall in the Lake District with Richard, he was less enthralled than I – but nevertheless humoured me most generously.

  A stationery stall in the Queen’s Crescent Market in Kentish Town is one of my favourite haunts. Whenever I travel abroad, I buy notebooks and interesting pens.

  In a little cupboard of a room next door to my study, I keep a stash of ink bottles, pencils, notepads and folders. My friend Min knows a special shop in Museum Street where she can still buy old-fashioned dip pens and brass nibs of all sizes to fit them. This is about as near as we get, these days, to the quill, but I have made quills and used them, if briefly, in the past. Swan or goose feathers do best for this.

  My favourite two pens are my Rotring Art Pen, and the Lamy, whatever that means, bought for me as a present at Melbourne Airport.