Near the foxglove are the bluebells. They have now dried into seeds. Every stalk is hung with a rattling belfry of seed pouches. These once green stalks are now dry, yellow, and very light. Each bell is a hard, closed pouch of seed. I pluck a whole stalk and open one of the pouches. I find an average of fifty seeds in each, and on each stalk there is an average of eight pouches. 8 x 50 = 400. There are ten stalks in every area of, say, my boots’ width and length – that is, room for 4,000 seeds. Looking round, one is impressed by the massive number of possible bluebells. It is impossible not to feel the sweep of Nature’s vitality. What is plainly seen is not death, but everlasting creation and life. Such a scene is as much revelation as the early garment of blue, it is as truly a sign of goodwill, and has in it as great a promise. There is no need to reconcile oneself to the scene. A very small proportion of those seeds will succeed in their struggle for birth, and after birth not all will succeed in getting up. But what of it? It’s worth the candle, isn’t it? It is better than a void, surely. But if the Beginner of life could do what He has done, why could He not have done better, it may be complained; why could He not have eliminated the seamy side? Evidently He couldn’t.
19 Each Its Hour
In the woods, as elsewhere, it is generally wrong to suppose that we often get the beginning of autumn in September, either in terms of temperature or colouring. I noticed no marked difference in the wood from what it was in the earlier month except that nothing now was due to have its hour. I have often used that phrase to myself, ‘have its hour’, with regard to woodland scenes; for it is interesting the way in which nearly everything has its particular hour when it, and perhaps it alone, catches the eye of the careless passer-by, though before that time, and again after it, there is nothing strikingly noticeable in that quarter.
Take the elder, for example. There, surely, is a miserable affair; a hopelessly plebeian plant. A bush posing as a tree, a tree failing to be a bush. It is impossible to praise its bark even when healthy, and when in decay it is an inch-thick pole of dirt, the nearest thing to real dirt to be found in Nature. Yet during a few weeks in July the elder has its hour. You actually pause to admire it. For then it is in flower; and those flowers are handed to you on a plate, as it were, or rather they are plates, beautifully decorated with the finest lace, held up before you. The same is true of the hawthorn. During the winter you hardly look at it, not to mention the unfriendly aspect of all armoured trees; but in spring first come the little round white buttons, and then the open flower turning half the tree to white against the blue sky, and giving out that scent which pronounces the spring and comes across to us less like a scent than a memory and a promise of happiness. More spectacular, though less rich, is the hour of that other bush, the blackthorn, which, being neglected through the months, as it were, seizes upon our attention in March by a special act – that of jumping the season of green and going straight to the flower, white first and green second: so that all eyes are drawn towards this one illumination. For at this time there is no green on bush or tree in all the countryside; only the fields are green – and then how lovely they look in their brown and almost black frames! Ah, then it is that the green fields of England shine. All else is dark but they are light. Then suddenly the darkest of all the hedges are lit by artificial snow, the blackthorn becomes the whitethorn, and the poor bush that was so humble is exalted, and its proud peers rebuked.
Speaking as a woodman, I am no friend of the privet; for not only is it very difficult to clean up, but it strays and straddles about without beauty to recommend it; but I am not blind to the fact that in July it also comes into its own and looks positively pretty. Still less do I care for the honeysuckle; but I cannot deny that when those pieces of ‘twine’ show the green leaf and then the flower, they become the opium of the woods.
Life being what it is, we cannot say that everything has its great hour, though all have their hours of youth, even the evergreens, which though green for ever, put up new leaves every year. And some have two hours: the most striking example being the larch which is seen, when you survey from a rise some stretch of woodland still unleafed, to be the exception – a deep rich meadow-green amidst all the surrounding unopened twigs: and again in autumn it is often so fantastically striking in its decay that that which was dead seems alive again. The imperious hours of the laburnum, lilac, and chestnut need no recommendation from me; but the whitebeam holds our attention almost more than any of the others in spring when the grey sheen of the underleaf shines out, and later when in flower the whole tree is one of the aristocrats of the forest.
Some trees prefer to take their hour in winter. I would put in a claim here for the oak, though possibly its real moment is in spring when in fresh leaf it out-greens everything else – even the beech. But there can be no two opinions that the plane trees come into their own properly in winter when they hold up their little balls before the gaze of the Londoner. And the same is the tale of the elm. It is a question of tracery. The tracery of plane trees and elms is scripture. Could we read that writing, we feel we would have our answer, we would solve our problem, and be shielded from the dark sorrows of our weakness.
It is the elm that knows how to take the sunset better than any other tree. I have been made to pause in my path many a time by elm-tree tracery hung across the dusky winter sky. As I write these words, I recall, so clearly, how having gone up the stairs to the top floor of a high building at Rugby School, I stopped in the passage leading to the classroom. From the window I could see a marvellous sunset behind a line of elm trees. I stood there for some time fixed by the sight. I came in late to that lesson and may have been reprimanded, I don’t remember. Nor do I remember the lesson that day, nor the master, though I think it was G F Bradby. But now recalling that hour, I venture to praise the boy, who must have been capable of learning something from the stolen tuition, otherwise he would not have paused to take it. The child is father to the man, we say. Let me then praise my father, even salute him: for he stood there without any ulterior motive, furtively gazing into heaven: he didn’t make a song about it, didn’t dream of writing it up as a poem to be praised and admired – just stood and gaped!
20 Planting; The Head Woodman; The Fable
During the autumn I did some planting. My thinning process left plenty of room for useful underplanting. There are certain trees which grow best in their early years under shade, and amongst these are beech. Rolf decided to underplant the section of the wood that had been thinned, with beech. There had been a good deal of rain in September and thus the ground was all right for planting in October.
I have just been looking through two forestry manuals to find out what they said regarding Season for Planting. They said nothing. They talked about everything else. So I turned to William Cobbett’s manual, not thinking it likely that he would let me down. Nor did he. He says with his usual dogmatic clarity – ‘If the weather be open and dry, you may plant at any time between September and April.’ He then goes on to explain which are the very best times. I was interested to note that he says you should not plant in the rain, for I had often heard it so plausibly asserted that it was splendid to plant in the rain, since you are watering the roots as you plant. ‘A grand day for planting,’ said a forester to me one wet afternoon, adding how he had already planted five hundred trees that day. As he happened to be a particularly glib, plausible man, I was not a bit surprised to be faced with a totally opposite school of thought on the subject – ‘Never plant in wet weather, nor when the ground is wet, if you can possibly avoid it,’ says Cobbett again (as you see from the italics). ‘The ground never ought to be either moved, or walked upon, when it is wet at the top. But we are frequently compelled to do both, or to leave our work wholly undone. It is a very great error to suppose that plants take root quicker for being planted in wet weather. The contrary is the fact. One great thing is, to make the earth that goes close to the roots fine; and this you cannot do in wet weather. For this reason it is that I p
refer March and April for doing the work of planting: but, be it done at what season of the year it may, the ground ought not to be wet; for then it falls in about the roots in lumps, or in a sort of flakes, like mortar. It never gets close and compact about the roots; and if you tread it in it becomes, in dry weather, so hard as to actually pen up the roots of the tree as if they were in a vice.’
We did not plant in the rain, but we did plant in the autumn, for circumstances were such as to permit it, the head woodman being able to come along at that time with two boys and another woodman. This headman, whose name was Reggie Wyman, was not the same type as the woodman previously alluded to. He was only thirty-five, thus belonging to this generation, though not the last lap of it. If the new generation were composed of men like him (and there may be many such), then we need not feel too gloomy about the future. He hadn’t the rather over-serious virtues of the older race, but he had his own virtues, chief of which was – humanness. The great thing is to find a human being; that is, a person capable of friendship and affection, and not submerged beneath class-consciousness, or envy, or disappointment, or frustration, or general grudgingness – and possessing life and inner warmth. We are never markedly successful in our search in any quarter. As the working man emerged from his long helotism, his attitude towards the world was inevitably often obstructively self-defensive. Now it becomes unnecessary, while dignity and pride, unforced, are often substituted. Reggie was in possession of inner warmth, and he felt in no sense inferior to anyone anywhere (but not the ‘I’m-as-good-as-you’ attitude), nor his work of less value and importance to society than the highest in the land. He was too proud and too conscious of this; but in him even that was delightful. For one’s attitude towards a man, and his own attitude towards life for that matter, depends so much upon his personality – (history is governed nearly as much by this as by economic factors). Reggie had considerable personality, and of an attractive kind. Most working men look older than their arithmetical age. He looked younger. The most striking attribute of his slight wiry figure with its good-looking bronzed face, was his hair – a crop of apparently not-thinning, silky flaxen hair. Always conscious of his appearance, he never wore a hat or cap – again rare amongst working men. He fitted perfectly into the woodland surroundings, as he stood leaning against a tree – he was then the best-dressed man, in his ‘shabby’ workman’s clothes, that I have seen in the course of my life. Realizing this, he frequently draped himself against a tree while gossiping in his high-pitched voice.
He brought with him for this planting, three assistants – an old man and two boys. Boys, as is well known, ‘have no character’, so one can just say boys and be done with it, recognizing that the word boy denotes life as yet unquenched or tamed; and that the extraneous wrappings of our barbarian modernism, like any other garment, could be exchanged in a twinkling if and when there are leaders of the people ready to introduce new values. Over against these boys was the old man, small, faded, insignificant, and incredibly inoffensive and humble, with nothing to say and hardly ever saying anything – he just wanly smiled amiably.
The method of planting is straightforward enough. You take a spade and thrust it into the soil at a perpendicular angle, and then at right angles to the cut you strike across it: finally dig in again at the foot of the cross, and tilt the spade backwards – and there will be a hole in the centre into which you can place your plant. The main thing is to get it properly in, with its roots spread out and not bunched together – to which end it is good to pull it up a fraction at the last moment while you take away the spade and tread down the earth firmly around the little tree.
Taking a line each, we proceeded to underplant with beech trees a given acreage of the thinned ash wood. Reggie worked by fits and starts, urging the boys forward in his high voice for a period, after which he often paused for a gossip. Keen on music hall, he would outline the merits of various comedians then get down to some more planting before pausing again, to admit, perhaps, that he couldn’t do with BBC talks or classical music – which latter he described as ‘music which stops and then goes on again’. The Announcers also intrigued him, and he referred to a Yorkshire one who was at that time being tried out, as sounding ‘rather common’ – though this did not mean that he liked Stuart Hibberd, whom actually he couldn’t understand, could not follow. Then some more planting followed by a further extension of gossip, this time on the characteristics of a certain foreman of the estate, who had once, but once only, attempted to interfere in the affairs of the wood, and of that man’s ‘ignorance’ – i.e. manners – when he called at Reggie’s house and looked his wife up and down. More planting, and then likely enough a brief outline of the moral life of the village owing to the influx of the military when too many girls became a soldier’s relaxation. His tone on most matters was the normal one of cheerful scorn, but on this latter he was rather scandalized, for, though not in the least religious, he was very moral, and a great family man in love with his wife and daughter, proud of the way his daughter had him under her thumb and highly indignant with Beveridge for presuming to extend State Assistance towards her upkeep, for he could look after his own maid, thank you, he didn’t want no state assistance for his little maid . . . And thus between our spurts of planting we covered a good deal of ground in conversation. But I write these lines in sadness, for not then did I guess, nor he in any faint way glimpse, the tragedy close ahead that would shatter him.
I do not remember how many trees we planted per day. Not too many I hope – for I want to come and watch this wood from time to time. This is a job which, were I owner, I would not like to have had done in a hurry, and might even feel inclined to praise the man who had planted the least trees per day. Certainly it would be fatal to have it done by piece-workers.
It is said – is it not? – that some men have a special ‘touch’ when planting, and that the trees put in by them thrive better than others. Hardy represents Giles Winterbourne as such. One enjoys that sort of statement and swallows it. But we may well doubt whether it is really ever actually true. It would be interesting to adopt a severe scientific scepticism towards it and put it to the proof over a given number of acres for a given period of years (that is the scientific method) and see at the end if the magic-touch man really did better than Tom, Dick, and Harry, when they planted properly. Actually I asked the older men whether there was anything in this, and they didn’t see what I was getting at. That’s always my difficulty – meeting in real life an approximation to fictitious characters. Take another assertion from Thomas Hardy (no man loves re-reading him more than I) when he says of his woodlanders – ‘From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the trees whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind’s murmur through a bough, they could in like manner name its sort afar off.’ I did not strike lucky in coming across woodmen here, old or young, who would answer to that, any more than to Giles’ capacity to make a generalization such as ‘She’s been a bit of a charmer in her time, I believe, a body who has smiled where she has not loved, and loved where she has not married.’
Having planted our acreage, we fenced it in, since everything being food for something else, young barks are much appreciated by rabbits. But our fence was not high enough to keep out deer. I should add here that besides my thinning and planting I carried out systematic pruning over one portion of the wood. There are, of course, two schools of thought concerning the advisability of pruning trees – that is taking away all branches as high as you can reach in order to ensure a straight, thick pole. Since I did prune a portion I shall be able to compare results. Knocking away the rotten lower branches is not the same as pruning and is called ‘brashing’. This is a very enjoyable job when dealing with the fir variety of tree, for then a single slash with the back of the bill-hook knocks off a number of branches with a loud bang, and you get a clear space. A few more whacks and you see the straight trunk hitherto
completely hidden by the multitude of small branches.
Though I planted, thinned, pruned, and brashed I took no part in the final operation of felling. This takes place when the tree has reached ‘maturity’. Sometimes, at this stage trees look so well that owners have felt constrained to leave them standing. This is deplorable. It betrays uncertainty as to the purpose of life, which is commerce. We should always bear in mind the noble words of Mr C E Curtis who in his Practical Forestry writes – ‘If we visit the woods in any part of the country we see this – (trees which having attained maturity have not been touched) – and with regret, and attribute it either to ignorance or to love of the scenic rather than the commercial aspect of forestry on the part of the landowner.’
Joking apart, if a man does not cut down his trees at the proper time, it really means that he does not take the job seriously. That has been the case in England far too long. People want quick returns, and nothing is less quick than the returns of forestry – though if the whole thing is planned systematically there is a splendid ultimate return and continuous takings the whole time on faggots, firewood, stakes, spars, poles, fencing material, shaws, and hurdles. Unfortunately the general attitude towards planting trees is a feeling that only after one is dead will the rewards be coming in. We are reminded of Dr Johnson’s saying – ‘Most men when exhorted to plant a tree begin to think of dying.’ They are discouraged by the thought that they shall not live to see the pecuniary profit of their endeavour. A sad reflection, which only serves to make out a case for State Ownership in order to arrest the decay of British Forestry. Yet any man who is in a position to go in for it, is with absolute certainty carrying out noble work, supplying the material for countless things necessary to the life of mankind, work which also has a moral and beautiful aspect. Cobbett, who saw much profit in the business, proving it with facts and figures for his day at any rate, also reminds us of La Fontaine’s fable of The Old Man and The Three Young Men – ‘the wise, the generous, the noble sentiments of which ought to be implanted in every human breast . . . I beg those, who may happen not to understand French, to be pleased to receive, from my pen, the following statement of the mere prosaic meaning of these words, for this absolutely inimitable writer, who, in marks of simplicity the most pleasing that ever followed the movements of a pen, has, on numerous subjects, left, to ages unborn, philosophy the most profound and sentiments the most just and exalted.’ After which inimitable introduction Cobbett gives the following translation of La Fontaine’s fable.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 37
