Thus, even when we are feeling gloomy, philosophy will keep breaking in, with its happy, glancing gleam.
The spectacle in my wood which fascinated me most, and encouraged me most, was – decomposition. As I hacked my way through the undergrowth I came upon many fallen trees which had been lying on the ground for years. They lay there presenting every variety of rotting trunk and bough, in every stage of transition as they slowly burnt their way back into the ashes from which the Phoenix of Life rises up again. I would take my bill-hook and cut into a trunk lying covered with moss. It would go in deep as easily as into a lump of cake, until it struck abruptly the inner part not yet decayed. I would take out slices, letting them crumble in my hand and fall to the ground – as humus. Once a seed, then a sapling, then a great hard tree, now softly turning into earth. I found them, I say, in every shape and style, lying in the silent shades in a melancholy mightier than beauty. At a touch a branch would fall, already dust. Under my feet a weeping clod of wood damply squelched like wet paper. Deep, soft, dark green moss covered nearly every limb, like velvet on old discarded furniture. Age or storm had laid these low, but there were also stumps where full-grown trees had once been sawn off. I was never tired of testing their present status with my boots. Some were still hard as a table, with perhaps a large fungus growing on them, nearly the size, colour, and shape of an elephant’s ear. Others, enmossed inches deep, were as springy to stand or sit on as an armchair. Some had almost wholly conformed to the law of return and scarcely differed in appearance or material from the earth around. Others made magnificent portals and main entrances to rabbits’ burrows.
Sometimes I knelt down beside one of the most ancient trunks, and peered under the bark and into the caves and recesses and cups that marked the erosion of time; and there I found colonies of insects building their Jerusalem in these countries of decay which must represent for them the acme of perfection. And there also fungi, like jellyfish, like sponges, like rubber flowers, took life-giving elixir from the burning bark. And as I sat and leaned and looked upon these lands it seemed to me that here too was blessedness and peace, and glory though it did not shine, and innocence untainted as the new-born babe. Here might the weary and the sick come and lay them down; and without anguish, and without misgiving, fall back and return to the ashes that never die.
5 The Virtues of Hazel
As I advanced, the terms ‘hard-wood’ and ‘soft-wood’ began to mean something definite to me now, for the difference in resistance to the axe was decisive. There were a few spruce trees at the edge and my axe sank into that wood very easily. The extreme softness of young oak surprised me. The hazel was by no means as hard as the ash. All the same I was puzzled by these terms; for we all know how hard the oak is when seasoned, and the spruce becomes excellent, I understand, for rafters and boarding, ladders, props, and packing-cases. That miserable tree, the elder, which occasionally I came across, can be cut without effort, but seems to become harder even than any of the others. The axe makes a different sound against each species of tree, and a skilled woodman ought to be able to tell from a distance whether, say, an ash or a hazel is being cut down.
It is easier to get your axe into a hazel than an ash; but it is much harder to get at the hazel. It gave me little pleasure to come upon a row of hazel bushes to be cut down and laid. The hazel does not aspire. A dozen shoots from an ash-stool will seek the perpendicular, and the most favourably placed amongst them will stand up straight and high. But the shoots, fifty or more sometimes, from the hazel-stool, while they start straight, later begin to fan out, and even the one at the centre makes no attempt to grow straight, and all the branches intertwine tremendously. In short the hazel is a bush, not a tree; and a bush is a tree whose shoots thrive in concert and together make the unit. The hazels’ quick growth, abundance, flexibility, and thinness make them one of the most valuable of all timber crops, since they can be twisted so easily into fences and hurdles, while their tributary twigs are the very thing for bean-stakes.
I imagine that they are also excellent for fishing-rods. I do not know whether this is officially right but I think it must be, because certain branches that I handled were fishing-rods. While at work I caught fish with them in my own peculiar way. When you cut down hazel you do not clean it for firewood or poles (unless the bush is hugely overgrown with shoots the size of small trees). You lay the branches on the ground all facing one way, placing each branch behind and half over the previous one, so that when you are dealing with many bushes you make a long line of sloping hazel branches like a kind of hedge which is called a drift. It is pleasant to transform the tangle into drifts running parallel through the cleaned-up wood. But to lay them thus is not very easy. The numerous tributary twigs of hazel bushes are so intertwined that when you start to extract the branch you have just cut off, it is no easy matter getting it free from the main clump; and if you have left anything within reach on the ground, say a coat or a hat or a handkerchief, then often the terminal twigs of the extracted branch, bending down, will tend to scoop up your property. Once when struggling to lay a long flexible rod beside the other branches on the ground, I hooked up my hat exactly as if it were a special kind of fish. I mention this trivia because it is my only fishing story, and it would seem to suggest that here is the perfect material for the complete fisherman’s rod.
It serves another purpose which also may not be official. It is splendid for the amateur chimney-sweep. Nowadays if one wants anything done one must do it oneself. To be my own plumber is quite beyond me, and when my only tap – a short one from the rain-tub to the copper – split in a frost, I never had even that one tap to use. But having once set my chimney on fire I saw that in future I must keep it swept. So taking a tip from a countryman who is full of ways and wiles, I did my own sweeping. The tip was to select a long hazel-rod of fair strength and much flexibility and take it home. Then tie a number of sprigs of holly round the thin end. This was the sweeping-brush. It was too long to fit into the room, so one just let it in from the door or window and then curved it up the chimney. Such a rod easily reached to the top of my chimney. As I cleaned lower and lower I cut the rod, thus greatly facilitating the thoroughness of the brushing. By this means the soot came down perfectly. Half-an-hour’s job. And having taken the precaution of wearing gloves, an old hat, and mackintosh, I did not emerge from it in the least grimed. I do not say that this would work in a big house, but it is the chimney-sweeping solution for anyone with a cottage in the country; and so I think we must definitely give such brushes a prominent place on the list of the hazel tree’s gifts to mankind.
6 In the Primeval Chase
The atmosphere of the wood was entirely altered by my intervention. It became a different place: not the same place altered, but as different as if on going down a lane to see a certain wood in a given country, you came upon another landscape. There was now no disorder, the trees were visible, and (before I had done) you could look for a long way in all directions through a small forest, whereas before you could only see a few yards. Space and light and orderliness had been introduced. It now seemed more alive, happy, and beautiful – from the view-point of man (who sticks on the labels). And since we do stick on labels it is a sad ineptitude to suppose that Nature cannot be improved upon from a ‘beauty’ point of view, by man. The idea that ‘every prospect pleases, while only man is vile’ is not the whole truth. Man has added to the beauty of Nature in as measurable a degree as, say, between an area of uneven, tufted, coarse grass and a well-tended lawn margined by geraniums.
I often used to think of this when I strayed beyond my wood into further forest-land, especially one portion which seemed to have been neglected for centuries. It was a gloomy place at most times of the year. The trees were chiefly oak with some silver birch. It was like walking at the bottom of the ocean and continually finding some wrecked vessel. Or again, like coming upon the scene of a battle waged long ago: huge corpses of tree-trunks sprawled on the ground, their limbs l
ike the broken arms of giant men lying where they fell. From some ancient oaks, a great branch, through weight of years, violence of storm, or stroke of lightning, had cracked at the fork and the branch leaned to the ground – a giant arm with fingers gripping the earth. Often it seemed as if I had visited the place of some terrible calamity long since closed in the withered page of history, and now made ghostly by the ever-reigning silence which I dared not break. I could see little of the greenery above, but walked submerged down there amongst the dereliction and dismay of lost causes and abandoned hope. How different all this would look, I pondered, if it were taken in hand by man.
The silver birch were not doing well amongst the oak trees. Many of them were dead – blasted poles erect in the foliage of other trees. Some, still in feeble leaf, had begun to fall over, and remained on the slant, upheld by surrounding branches, looking as if they had fainted but were just caught in time. A number of trunks lay about on the ground, short pieces nearly covered over by the dog’s mercury. One of these had a hole in it which ramified in several directions, at the entrance of which was a damp, round fungus; or so I thought, till I noticed it was breathing, and saw it was a large slug. This old trunk lay at the foot of an erect log – I cannot call it a tree for the trunk had broken off about ten feet from the ground. There it stood now, immensely lichened and mossed, a shaky column with one exceptional feature – it had steps placed in spiral-shaped form going up. They were small steps but very attractive in their wonderful colour congruity with the weather-washed, old, white-patched bark of the birch. Had they been firm enough they would have served me admirably for climbing up to examine the top of the column. But they could hardly hold me since they were made of fungus. Nevertheless I have never seen more definite and attractive steps than those upon that tottering tower.
It is not surprising that there was an ancient atmosphere about this place, for I was working in the middle of Cranbourne Chase. At one time it had a perimeter of over eighty miles, from Shaftesbury to Salisbury on the north, and encircled by the Stour and the Avon at the other sides. Now it is shrunk to a small oasis of wild country. But that oasis has changed little in the course of centuries. It remains, as Thomas Hardy has written, ‘a truly venerable track of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe is still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew trees, not planted by the hand of man, grow as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows’. Wandering here I could well feel that if the world is too much with my fellows it was not too much with me. In the strange days in which we live I could actually say farewell to the world far more effectually among these shades and natural debris than on any island in the Pacific Ocean.
I decided that if ever I were a fugitive from the Law this is where I would hide. But I learn that this decision of mine is not strikingly original. In fact, before 1830, the Chase had become so popular as a smuggler resort, and so sought after by thieves, murderers, and criminals of every grade no less than by poachers, blackmailers, tramps, and vagabonds, that in the end it was treated as a covert for crime, and was disafforested.
7 Bracken
You have to keep your eyes open in the country if you want to see the spring before it is all over. This is borne in on me every year. The whole affair is so swift and so variegated that unless we are careful we miss half of it. During some months of summer and some of winter the casual eye sees little change, but during April and May the speed of appearance and disappearance is almost on a par with the cinema. One wants to see the show through again at once, and get the order of things right. Nothing requires more deliberate intellectual exertion than to follow the unfolding closely, nothing more time-eating. I found it much easier just to get on with my job of thinning, and I often put off looking at something until ‘later’ – by which time it was gone. Luckily the flowers do not all appear quite at once. The primrose path has time to make an impression before it becomes the property of bugle and ground-ivy; the celandines, the anemones, and the violets have fallen before the bluebells rise to spread their gospel and then yield to the aristocracy of the foxglove.
In this wood it always seemed to me at one period, near the end of May, that everything would have to give way to the empire of dog’s mercury. But of course this was reckoning without the bracken which steps in and takes control from June onwards. Here indeed is a case in which you must keep awake if you are not to be surprised at almost an apparition. For the unfurling of these fern-flags from their unnoticed beginnings to great thickness and height is one of the swiftest of all the transactions. The leaves are packed in a roll very much like those things you find in Christmas crackers and blow out. And they unroll so swiftly that their internal chemical apparatus might seem to have the force of steam. Unlike ordinary ferns and all the other plants around, they continue to grow higher and higher until six or eight feet is not uncommon. A miniature forest has suddenly appeared in which a child might get lost.
Farmers can very seldom enjoy aesthetically what they deplore agriculturally, and since bracken has a very bad reputation as a particularly injurious weed, we seldom hear anything good of it. But a philosophic mind, uninstructed in the claims of agriculture, might well conceive the frond in a favourable light. For it is a direct descendant of those Tree-Ferns that once covered the whole land of Europe before bird, quadruped, or man appeared. The atmosphere was then unbreathable, containing in suspension in the state of poisonous gas, the huge mass of carbon which has since become coal. The tree-ferns cleansed it. They subtracted the carbon, storing it in their leaves and stems. They continued this atmospheric purification for generations, and when at last they died their buried remnants became coal in which even today we can find many leaves and stems wonderfully preserved, archives in which we may read ‘the history of this ancient vegetation which has given us an atmosphere that we can breathe and has stored up for us in the bowels of the earth those strata of coal which are the wealth of nations’. Fabre, from whom I quote those words, traces bracken as descending from that noble line, and states that ‘the stem of our common Bracken reproduces in its bundles of blackish, lignous tissue, the rather sketchy design of a two-headed, heraldic eagle as though to blazen the nobility of its ancient race.’
And should the man of philosophic mind, while contemplating these things, fall into a less elevated mood and inquire whether it was really worthwhile for the ferns to cleanse the air of carbon poison gas if we, the inheritors of their bounty, prepare a poison gas of our own to destroy ourselves, he may still reflect that Necessity, so aptly called the mother of invention and discovery, has in these latter days found uses for bracken unsuspected by our ancestors. Thus the Glasgow Research Station finds that silage can be made from it. Mr Ronald Duncan cooks it as a kind of asparagus. Dr Krebs of Sheffield University claims that yeast can be made out of it. The Germans make petrol from it. Silage for stock, petrol for machines, yeast and salad for men – not bad for a weed.
Not bad; and a hopeful sign of the times with regard to the future. A new principle is beginning to be advanced – that of each country making use of its own resources before dashing off to the ends of the earth for new materials. Hitherto we have tapped our own resources only to a small extent, and when we saw something in a far country we built a ship and went and got it from there. Other nations have followed suit, all trying at once to procure the rare substance from the far place, and claiming ‘equal right’ to do so. That was called Imperialism. Today a new possibility opens. Science steps forward demonstrating in a remarkably concrete way that since all things are all things, almost anything can be made from anything. Before our astonished gaze they turn wood into jumpers, milk into buttons, maize into mud-guards, glass into shirts, bracken into petrol. The dream of the old alchemists is surpassed and transmutation becomes the order of the day. No longer shall Imperialism be necessary. No longer shall men, in the name of trade, in the name of religion, in the name of civilization go to Persia,
to India, to Honolulu in order to steal away some local treasure. They shall stoop down and find it at their feet.
In the meanwhile I am more content to regard bracken as bracken, and not as petrol or anything else. Indeed I fear that if I am right about future developments, men will look at phenomena even less than they do today. To look at the object, at any object, and see it in its own right is the key to a fuller apprehension of the mystery and significance of life. But there is no money in this, and so people do not bother to use their eyes in that way. Perhaps in the future they may look at the object more closely – but only with the motive of turning it into something else.
Let me look at my bracken here, I said to myself, without ulterior motive or agricultural disgust, and watch it spring up mushroom-like before my very eyes. Most of the flowers have already faded and now they are disappearing beneath the ferns, and the great kingdom of dog’s mercury no longer usurps the scene. And as I gaze at it I gaze back across the years of my life and see again the tall bracken in the lonely glen on the Wicklow Mountains through which deer and stags leap with amazing speed.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 32
