And as I made a clearing in the wood so also I made a clearing in my mind with regard to timber. As I began to bestow order and tidy up the confusion in front of me, so I began to sort out my odd bits of knowledge about forestry. That is generally my method of advance in matters of this kind. I cannot see, I cannot actualize for myself any department of work unless I have taken part in it myself. I do not possess the politician’s and the sociologist’s imagination to grasp the actuality without participation. I have to get in touch with it first through work. For me it is first the tool, then the book. I could not take down the word Forestry from its hiding-place in my head and relate it to the world I know.
My first question was naturally very relevant to the work in hand – What is ash used for by man? The answer is that it supplied the material for most of the instruments of husbandry. Perhaps slightly less so now than formerly. An early nineteenth-century farmer declared, ‘We could not well have a wagon, a cart, a coach, a wheelbarrow, a plough, a harrow, a spade, an axe or a hammer if we had no ash. It gives us poles for our hops; hurdle gates wherewith to pen in our sheep; and hoops for our washing tubs.’ Today neither harrows nor ploughs owe much to wood, but we still need it for the other things.
So already an ash ceased to be ‘only’ an ash tree in my eyes. And henceforth, when I look across any wood like this I shall see more than trees, I shall see their translation into the familiar objects of the farm and the garden. I shall also see tennis-rackets, golf-sticks, and cricket-bats. Above all – walking-sticks. During some days I had a craze for making walking-sticks myself. The method was so pleasant. Having cut down a tree and observing that it possessed some nice straight branches not too thick for a walking-stick, I cut one off just above the junction of a tributary branch and then cut off the latter a few inches below the terminus. That gave me my handle. Then I measured the stick in my hand against my thigh and made a final cut at the bottom according to my needs – and there was my stick. When I had finished off with a penknife I often had an excellent stick.
2 The Floor of Flowers
Apart from any utilitarian considerations, I have always been particularly attracted by the ash whose witch-like fingers with black nails claw the winter sky, and by the aristocratic manner in which the leaves are the last to come and the first to go. The larch, the sycamore, and the horse-chestnut will be in rich leaf without the slightest sign from the ash; the maple, the white-beam, the hazel, and even the elm, the beech, and the oak are often well away while still the ash remains quite bare as if there were nothing doing this year.
An eighteenth-century forester named Gilpin called the ash ‘the Venus of the Woods’. Few would subscribe to this if we think in terms of leaves, since it cannot compare with the glories of the beech or the chestnut; but if we are thinking of a naked winter tree then the ash may well claim to be the Venus of the woods. Its branches are at the top of the tree – a crown – in marked contrast with the oak or the chestnut. Thus you can see a long way into an ash plantation and be fascinated by the beauty of the barks. This lack of low branches and late arrival of leaves provided a further advantage for me – a very important one. I could work in the sun till well into May. Furthermore, the amount of light which ash trees let into a wood promotes a fine floor of flowers. How vastly different is the other extreme! – a pinewood floor. I used to take a walk occasionally to a little pine wood a short distance away, and look into its daily darkness where nothing grew and no bird sang. In my ash wood the common wild flowers were abundant. They arrived punctually according to the well-known schedule. First the primroses in March – when I began work. Then the violets, soon to be overtaken by the anemones who in turn gave way to the bluebells, while the ground-ivy and bugle also appeared; though dog’s mercury provided almost the main floor of the entire wood.
We call wild flowers common because of their quantity. But this is just where we strike the great difference between the productions of Nature and the productions of Man. When we produce many samples of the same thing they are of poor quality and we speak of them as mass-produced. The mass productions of Nature do not fail at all in terms of quality. Take the bluebell. There indeed is quantity. Yet every single year we are freshly struck by their quality. Only a flower-snob could fail to see that any one of those bells on the uplifted belfry is as delicate a construction as any tulip or any rose. I will not say more beautiful, or less, for in this realm of flowers we actually are in the presence of abundant examples of – perfection. I think that perfection is the key to the emotion that flowers cause in us. When a thing is perfect the problem of its existence is solved. Gazing at flowers in a wood an unexpected signal seems to go up; we feel a movement of happiness and hope about everything, there is a suggestion that all is really well, all is right with the world, regardless of the geographical situation of the Deity. It is because of this that all men, even ruffians, feel attracted to flowers. For they do intimate to us that, in spite of everything, all is well. Undoubtedly that is what they ‘say’ to us, and why it cheers us up to look at them. Philosophers say that all the ultimate problems – freedom, immortality, beauty, development – are presented and solved in plants. ‘The flora does not only raise, but also answers, all the problems which the human spirit may propound,’ said Count Keyserling. ‘For anyone who could understand plants perfectly, life would no longer hold any secrets. And the plants surrender themselves so ingenuously to man. No being could be more sincere than they are, more truthful, more genuine. They perhaps of all the world’s creatures represent themselves precisely as they are . . . these blessed, pure creatures are never subject to evil moods, and always mirror the very core of their beings.’
Maybe it was because of this that the Sage who sat under the Bo-tree wanted to make plants of men: and we must admit that a Buddha resembles a plant more than anything else. Certainly flowers inspire us: they hold up before us the image of the Ideal. What we would be, could we be true, they are. Ripeness is all. We know that. We see it in the flowers, they are the mirror in which is glassed that goal. But our greatest problem is our unfolding: in nearly every case something goes wrong at one stage or another. We fall. There is no fall of flowers.
3 The Tree-shed and the Tools
Every day before I went home I put my tools away in my shed. It had been built for me solely by Nature. I discovered a fairly full-grown ash tree whose trunk was hollow inside at the base for about four feet upwards. There was an opening large enough for me to put my tools through it. Here I placed them every evening, knowing they would remain dry and quite safe since it would be hard to imagine a better camouflage for a tool-house.
In spite of being rotten inside, this tree was in fairly good condition. A tree is not useful to man, of course, as timber, if internally decayed either by disease or the tooth of time; but its own health is not affected if the outer sheaths of the trunk are all right, because the life of a tree resides in and receives reinforcement at its circumference and not its centre. Thus many an Old Village Tree while presenting a magnificent foliage in summer, also provides a huge hollow at the base of its trunk, equally fit as a shelter from storms or a tryst for lovers. Once I saw Mount Etna in full volcanic eruption. It was a sight which held my attention. But at the bottom of the mountain there was another manifestation almost as fascinating – the Chestnut Tree of the Hundred Horses which is said to be the largest tree in the world. Thirty men holding hands do not quite succeed in surrounding it, while a hundred horsemen can find ample room beneath its foliage, as indeed was actually proved when Joan, Queen of Aragon, was caught in a storm nearby and took shelter there with her enormous retinue. And at the bottom of this tree a hole runs straight through, wide enough to admit two carriages abreast. It still yields a good crop of chestnuts.
On my arrival in the wood I took out what tools I needed for the day from this tree-shed of mine. Very often I contented myself simply with the axe and the bill-hook. These are two delightful instruments. There are not many agricultural impleme
nts one would speak of in such terms – certainly not of the hoe or the saw. But all good men love an axe; and all Prime Ministers and Literary Prophets in their old age are discovered by the visitor using an axe in the garden. Tolstoy regarded axe-work as a religious discipline. Bernard Shaw declares that it keeps him sane. And it was the axe that inspired Gladstone to say to the messenger who came with the news of his recall to office – ‘My mission is to solve the Irish Problem.’
I do not know whether there is any absolutely official method of handling the axe. I have no doubt that my own methods leave room for improvement, but I think I must have done the obvious things since in the end my results were good. In cutting down a tree you need to cut low on the stool and to cut clean. A battered, slashed-up stump not only looks unsightly but promotes arboreal disease. Experience taught me to strike down and then strike up, never horizontal, thus carving out a < shape. When I was nearly through I very often went to the other side and with one blow finished the job, or administered a second while the tree was falling over. If the stump then displayed any ragged edges I cleaned it up with my bill-hook. After sufficient practice my wood presented clean stumps and stools instead of a series of wooden clefts and cliffs such as are found whenever a company of schoolboys have been on a job of this kind. I soon learnt not to dash at the thing with undue speed and not to hurl the whole force of my body at the tree, as it were. My technique was somewhat golfer-like. I kept my eye steadfastly on the spot I intended to strike, kept my left arm straight, did not lurch after the axe with my body and only exerted full force at the last minute when also I did some good wrist-work. (Thus I grandly write about my method, and should have done it that way, and possibly, on occasion, even did do so.) I certainly think that the secret of a good cut, especially when dealing with a medium-sized hazel bush, is in that last golfer-flick of the wrist. I was once held up for a considerable time by a ticket-collector at South Kensington Underground Station who explained to me that his particular and striking ability as a boxer was due to the fact that he didn’t put out his strength till the final second of a blow. He was not a big man and he insisted the success in boxing went to the most intelligent, to men like himself who realized that force should be reserved till the last second. ‘I box from here,’ he kept repeating, and tapped his forehead to indicate the seat of his weightiest weapon in the ring. This unexpected pugilistic tutorial stuck in my mind, and I carried it over with some degree of success into the realm of forestry.
The great thing is to keep the axe sharp. Much depends upon the strength of mind to do this, for it saves much expense of body and spirit. I found out before it was too late (though late enough), that it is an illusion to suppose that one must take an axe to a grindstone with wheel and water complete. The ordinary hand-stone will serve if applied frequently and with a level pressure that does not merely grind the edge but the space before the edge. I used to tell myself to aim at never touching the very edge at all with the stone, but to grind down the rise behind. Given a big stone – not one broken in half – one can sharpen an axe all right and be independent of the elaborate wheel which requires two people to be on the job. For comfort with axe-work, then, I beg to prescribe a sharp edge. And secondly a good axe. That is to say an axe that is neither too heavy nor too light. This is not so simple as it sounds. There are many absurdly balanced axes about: axes with monstrously heavy blades and handles that do not balance them. I bought an axe with a fair-sized blade and a well-balanced shaft, and used it with pleasure for some time, till I was offered the use of a heavier axe. At first I thought the latter much better, and when I took up my own it seemed ridiculously light, and on using it I completely missed my aim. But I found that I couldn’t possibly keep the heavy one sharp and it became temper-losingly blunt. So I went back to my old axe, and soon it gained in the weight it seemed to have lost, and I never changed again. (Have I any hint regarding a method of sharpening with the stone? Yes, take a stick, lay it on the ground, kneel down and grind away at the blade the edge of which is kept free of the ground by means of the stick.)
Here as in all these matters, to do your job properly and get pleasure from it, you need the good tool. This is equally true of the bill-book. For a long time I was content with a light, blunt, rattling affair – thinking it all right. But one day I went out and bought a heavier one, a beauty – the gain in speed of work, cleanness of cut, and pleasure in execution being far in excess of the cash value. I generally learn this sort of thing too late, and I learnt this too late since two-thirds of my job was done before I got rid of the old bill-hook. I hadn’t realized the difference it would make. The fact is we have in the bill-hook an even more delightful tool than the axe. Especially if you are thinning. You cut down a tree, after which it is necessary to clean it, that is knock off the branches and thus produce a clear pole to be taken away for firewood or any of the other purposes. This is the time when a sharp bill-hook is a joy: a single back-handed slash will generally sever the small branches, while with one or two strokes you can dispatch the larger branches; and if your pole is not too thick and you wish to cut it in half, you can still use your bill-hook for this if it is good and sharp, holding the pole in the left hand and coming down with a back-hand stroke with the right hand. This is an exercise that engages the whole body. It is difficult to think of a more delightful job than this, stripped to the waist in the sun, and thus enabled for a few too briefly passing hours to step aside from the inanities of our repellent civilization. I am writing this account while finishing off this forestry work, and since I am very near the end of the wood the thought of possibly never using a bill-hook again in a big way is very depressing. No doubt I shall be able to use an axe from time to time, and even a plough; but when shall I ever again have a whole wood to thin?
But before passing on I must mention one peculiarity about bill-hooks. They have a way of disappearing. This experience is shared by all woodmen. You are always changing over from axe to bill-hook and vice versa. You put the bill-hook down, take up the axe, and having done what you want it for, reach for the bill-hook again. It has disappeared. Often it is impossible to find it without an irritating search. True, one gets wary at last about this peculiarity and one automatically plans a conspicuous place for putting it down. But, once a more than usually strange disappearance trick was played on me. Near the end of the day’s work a shower came on, and leaving my bill-hook I went a certain distance away where there was good shelter. On returning I could not find my bill-hook. In this case there were only ten square yards where it could be, an area not overgrown with anything. I searched minutely and scientifically within that given area. To no avail. It was not there. At last I went home, hoping that on the morrow it would have returned. And sure enough there it was in the morning in the middle of the space I had gone over again and again while searching for it.
4 Meditation on the Struggle for Life
During my work of clearing there was one thing which gave me particular satisfaction. This was the cutting away of the honeysuckle. Belonging to the parasitic company of plants that engage trees for climbing up instead of rising on their own accord, they often provide grim spectacles in the woods of merciless throttling and strangulation. Ascending from the bottom of the trunk they spiral their way upwards, clinging tightly to the bark. This hinders the sap, the tree’s circulation, and after a year or two the young trunk itself becomes a spiral-shaded pole, bulging out in a remarkable manner as if an erect rubber tube full of air had been tightly wound with cord in spiral formation so that it bulged out between the cord (though in the case of the victimized tree or branch the bulge appears at the cord of honeysuckle). The tree struggles to live in spite of the stranglehold, but generally in vain. It is apt to die and rot and bend over, a parched ruin upon which the honeysuckle thrives, spurning the base degrees by which it did ascend. I have come upon portions of the wood where honeysuckle had practically taken over: the captive, the twisted, the mutilated, the dying, the dead ash trees stood hopel
essly entangled in the network of ropes, pulleys, nooses, loops, ligatures, lassos which outwardly appeared as lifeless themselves as pieces of cord, but were centrally bursting with life and power, ready and willing to pull down the wood.
Mr Aldous Huxley once suggested that if Wordsworth had lived in the tropics he would not have written about Nature in the way he did. This is pretty obvious. Such speculations are not very fruitful; we cannot move in these hypothetical fields with any profundity. In the tropics Wordsworth would not have written his known work, and perhaps none at all; but that does not mean that men who are native to that clime may not find an approach to a total vision of the Absolute. It also begs the question that if Wordsworth had not been capable of total truth, Nature, in England, as elsewhere, provides ample opportunity for the half-truth. The king of the half-vision is that other lordly and everlasting bard, Thomas Hardy. In one of his forest descriptions in The Woodlanders, after speaking of Nature’s merciless battles, he adds – ‘Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.’ I came across the same sort of thing every day in my wood. It could make me silent and it could make me sad, but personally I cannot see the spectacle in terms of unfulfilled intention save superficially. What I see is – an almost liquid surging up of life. I see that life as a massive unity, moving and flowering under the influence of Fire – the air itself taking visible shape in the plants. Some of it does not get up, all of it cannot get up. But if one tree succeeds, one baby survives, I applaud.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 31
