Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  Between them, the family would gather one or two tons of nuts in the course of the season, and in a really bounteous year, as much as five tons. Some of the woodlanders would even stay on until the end of November.

  We circled back, turning for home at a hilltop crossroads of the green lanes marked by an ancient walnut tree, presiding over travellers as an old oak might do in similar places in parts of Wales or England. Riders with bulging panniers of walnuts passed us on the holloway that plunged downhill and slowed their horses to converse with us as they went. In every camp we passed, harvesters were upending sacks into green mounds of the day’s nuts, ready to be husked and spread out on the ground to dry in pools of pale brown. I felt moved and elated by the universally cordial atmosphere that suffused the forest: we shook hands with everyone we met, so that the black stain of the walnut juice became a badge of friendship and hospitality in this place. Everyone gave us walnuts, always carefully choosing their very best. Our pockets swelled, our hands blackened. The sound of autumn leaves, scuffed or falling on to the leaf mould, deep and crisp and uneven, lisped through the trees.

  The Forestry Department maintained a dacha as a hostel at one end of the village for visiting workers and students of the forester’s art. Kaspar and some of his fellow woodfolk entertained us to dinner there. We ate wild pistachios, followed by plov, a rice pilaf of meat and vegetables cooked in the kazan. As is the custom, we all shared the same pan. Kaspar had gone off on horseback through the woods that afternoon on another of his ethnographic expeditions among the hill farmers. I had been amazed at the sheer numbers of people we saw living and working in the forest. It was like stepping into the Middle Ages, or into the pages of The Woodlanders. Kaspar said 10,000 people were camped out in the Ferghana Valley for the walnuts just now. The harvest was an essential feature of their lives, economically and culturally. Besides picking walnuts, they gather wild apples and cherry plums for jam, and all manner of berries and medicinal herbs.

  Kaspar explained how things work here. There are almost 12,500 acres of walnut forest around Ortok producing at least 350 tons of nuts most years. But walnuts are susceptible to late-spring frosts, which wither their buds and flowers, and a bumper crop comes only about once every five years. The wild apples, cherry plums and berries of the forest generally render a really good crop every three years. By talking to farmers in the villages surrounding the forest, Kaspar was trying to work out how it could be saved from the increasing human pressure that was already damaging and reducing it and could eventually erode it out of existence. The main problem, he said, was cattle grazing and haymaking, both of which were officially forbidden in the forest, but had been widespread ever since the relative anarchy and poverty that came with independence and the end of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s. By grazing the sapling walnuts, livestock prevent the forest from regenerating naturally, and the haymakers’ scythes have a similar effect. Grazing and haymaking both hamper plant conservation.

  But the gathering of nuts and fruits also disturbs the natural process of forest renewal by depriving it of seeds. Increased hunting has further depleted the wild life of the forest. All these difficulties arise from the huge growth in the population of the Ferghana Valley over the past twenty years. The hamlets that surround the forest have suddenly mushroomed into densely populated settlements of 5,000 to 8,000 people, most of them keeping livestock, and sixty to seventy per cent of them unemployed. Everyone needs fuel wood, and gathers wild fruit and nuts, and the high value of walnut as timber tempts some to illegal tree-felling.

  Walnut timber has always been highly valued, and there is plenty of evidence of past depredations to the Ferghana Valley forests. During 1882 alone, records show over 30,000 bullock carts of walnut timber sold in the great Uzbek bazaar of Margilan. Over the past eighty years the forests of southern Kyrgyzstan haven’t altered much in extent, but during the period between the first forest survey of 1894–7 and 1926, the forests were widely clear-felled for timber, or to provide more arable land, and their area reduced by half. French and English timber merchants came prospecting for walnut burrs to manufacture veneer. They are extremely valuable, and at the time the price of a pound of burr was equivalent to the price of a pound of silver. You can still see the scars on some of the older trees where these European timber dealers cut off burrs and left the trees standing. From 1896 to 1926 some 500 tonnes of walnut burr were exported from the Kyrgyz forests to England and France. During the Second World War walnuts were again felled to provide gunstocks for the Russian Army: 140,000 cubic metres of timber between 1938 and 1942, in fact. The Soviets kept precise records.

  They also cared enough about the value and interest of the forests to send two scientific expeditions to the region. N. I. Vavilov, leader of the first of these in 1935, believed, correctly, that all the world’s walnuts originated in these forests and those of the mountains of Afghanistan and China. He concluded that since the Central Asian wild fruit forests contained a genetic fund of international significance, their conservation would be of far greater long-term value than any short-term benefits from economic exploitation. The 1945 expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences was led by the eminent scientist Vladimir Nikolaevitch Sukachev and comprised no fewer than three academicians, twelve doctors and professors, twenty-four professional scientific assistants and 152 other scientific employees. Its findings led to the creation of the Southern Kyrgyz Fruit Reserve, covering all the forests in the Ferghana Valley. Cattle grazing, haymaking, tree-cutting and hunting were all prohibited in the forests, and the gathering of walnuts regulated. These conservation measures seem to have worked well enough under the Soviet regime, but the foresters have experienced increasing difficulty enforcing them since independence in 1991.

  In all the twenty-five or thirty thousand years since the forest first developed, it has probably never been under such pressure. So many of the questions we discussed that night seemed to be universal dilemmas for nature conservation everywhere. The walnut forests were, after all, a kind of commons in which ordinary local people could reasonably feel they should have a share. Their needs are immediate: food, the harvest work and its modest wages, subsistence for their livestock, and what we would call in Britain ‘air and exercise’ – a more urgent version of the need for a change of scenery that we would call a holiday, camping or an allotment. Only a couple of generations ago, until the 1920s, the local Kyrgyz people were nomads or transhumant herders, accustomed to moving uphill into the mountains for the summer grazing and living under the stars. The Uzbeks were small farmers who had always supplemented their modest economy by foraging and grazing animals in the wild forest.

  Yet these wild walnut and fruit forests comprise no fewer than 183 different tree and shrub species, 34 of which exist only in Central Asia, with 16 endemic to southern Kyrgyzstan. In turn, there is a huge variety of flowering plants and medicinal herbs, and a fauna that includes brown bears, snow leopards, wild boar, roe-deer, badgers, marmots, porcupines, golden eagles and a great number of other birds. A number of the forests’ species are now thought to be at risk of extinction. Four of the beautiful, delicate wild roses could be lost, along with their exotic names: Rosa webbiana, Rosa laxa, Rosa wasilczenkoi and Rosa beggeriana. Also becoming worryingly scarce are seven of the wild honeysuckles that clamber about the woods, two species of wild pear, and five of the many different willows. I seemed to have heard this story before.

  Beyond its undoubted conservation value, the forest performs a vital geographical function in acting as a giant sponge to absorb the rains and even out the flow of water through the many mountain rivers. Without the forest roots to hold the soil together, and trees to take up and contain water, landslides, mudslides and floods would all increase in winter. The climate of the whole valley would alter too, deprived of the humidity of the woods and the leaves of walnuts precipitating dew and rain.

  At bedtime I fished out walnuts from every pocket like a squirrel and stashed them at the b
edside. Then I put the wild apple pips from my trouser pocket in a labelled plastic bag. I thought I might try sowing them in a corner of my vegetable garden in Suffolk and raise an orchard. Gena, with whom I shared the room, had a sack of walnuts to show for his afternoon’s work, although he claimed to have eaten more than he kept. Walking home up the side of the valley in the dark, we had passed cattle asleep in the middle of the caked mud road. As we crossed the farmyard, a puppy approached us, uncertain whether to be fierce or friendly. The turkeys roosting in the big walnut tree by the house were silhouetted in the moonlight. Somewhere up in the village, a donkey creaked dolorously into voice. Buruma brought warm water, and I washed off the dust of the day at the post and cistern, then lay on a hard mattress under a beautiful floral quilt. A small dog barked across the valley, and the farm cockerel sounded as if it was bursting into tears. The cool mountain air drifting in through the open bedroom window reminded me that we were 6,000 feet up. Drugged by a million walnut leaves, I slept well.

  I was sad to leave Ortok and all its woodlanders. Buruma gave me a jar of her superb walnuts in syrup. She had picked them while they were still soft and green, before the shell began to form, boiled them in syrup and bottled them. We had eaten them at breakfast each morning, and I wasn’t sure I could live without them. Gena fed the turkeys a few parting crusts, and we all shook hands with the deaf ninety-year-old grandmother on her chair under the apple tree. Up in the village, we met Kaspar and trooped past the lupins in the front garden into the foresters’ cottage to find the radio operator wearing headphones the size of coconuts in front of an elaborate bank of amplifiers and tuning devices, fiddling with the controls. He was picking up interference, he said, and I wondered if it might be the starlings on the aerial outside. No, he said, it was the Americans flying troop planes out of Bishkek into Kabul. We sent a radio message to Zakir back in Jalal-Abad telling him to expect us later in the day.

  Turning to wave goodbye to our hosts as we drove away in Gena’s jeep, we found them already obscured by the plume of dust. We seemed to bounce down the mountainside in no time, past walnuts, past apples and wild blackcurrant bushes, past mud barns and haystacks, half-hidden yurts in the trees, scampering turkeys and waving men in kalpaks, men stripping bark off poplar spars to make the rafters of a barn, schoolchildren dressed in white, all the way to the valley of the glistening Kork-Art whose wavelets galloped over its wide pebble bed. Under a brilliant sun, we drove between round, yellow hills with rosy pink earth showing through in the threadbare places and the cattle paths. We passed old Soviet chicken farms, now rows of derelict sheds, and the old jam factory the Soviets built to utilize the wild apples and cherry plums. In the valley, where the rice is grown, I discovered why it sometimes tasted gritty. Some farmers were busy winnowing the crop on the road, coning off one side of it for a fifty-yard stretch with an infant sat down at either end, presumably calculating that, although drivers would certainly run over cones, they might just think twice about children.

  At the walnut market in Jalal-Abad boys played billiards at dozens of green baize tables in open-sided, tin-roofed sheds while men and women emptied sacks of walnuts on to piles in the concrete yard. A man with a giant set of scales weighed the sacks and deals were struck in some obscure way. Gena said the best walnuts were fetching 27 som a kilo, but if they were merely average, you would only get 20 to 23 som. People were also trading expensive shelled walnut kernels, and wholesale quantities of the sweet wild hawthorn fruit of Crataegus ponticus. Everywhere, black, stained hands gestured as the haggling connoisseurs bustled round each new heap of nuts.

  Shaydan and Arslanbob

  The road up to Shaydan was even rougher than the Ortok road. This time we had Zakir with us as we headed up the valley of the wild Kara Unkur River, past fields of fluffy ripe cotton full of women in bright headscarves harvesting. Cotton has to be watered five times before it is gathered in, and the four million tons of it grown each year in Uzbekistan has contributed to the drying up of the Aral Sea at the other end of the great SurDarya River that rises here from its mountain tributaries. Even little Kyrgyzstan grows 76,000 tons of cotton a year, and its heavy demand for water, in contrast to crops like sunflowers, often leads to strife among farmers in the fields. Higher up, we passed through hills dense with wild pistachios, the male trees bare by now, the females still in full leaf. We stopped in a village to buy nan from women at the roadside, and onions, potatoes, cabbage, garlic and rice from a bazaar for cooking plov in Gena’s kazan later.

  At last we found ourselves in a high, rocky valley full of wild apples and almonds, dog-roses and berberis bushes, with the great snow-covered peak of Balbash-Ata and its neighbouring mountains rising behind it. Innumerable rivers came rushing down. We crossed over one of them, the Karangul, then turned off the track, crossed an alpine meadow and forded the racing Shaydansay River. Beside it, a boy was scrubbing a carpet on the grass, drenching it with buckets of mountain water. We were never far from the hissing or tumbling of rivers here as we roamed the valleys, and I relished the sound of their names too, as we went: the Yassy, Kara-Alma, Kyzyl-Ungur, Arslanbob-Yarodar, Kazan-Mazar, Alash-Sai and Maili-Suu.

  At the end of a lane through planted orchards of apple and walnut, we passed a farmhouse with tiers of beehives set on a hillock behind it, and came to a long wooden dacha looking out across the valley. A millstream, diverted from the main river, danced along a channel in the orchard behind it. A pair of Uyzes, old Russian jeep versions of the Dormobile, were parked outside, armoured and jacked up on high wheels as if once designed for use as landing craft. A group of forestry students from the university in Jalal-Abad were here with their teachers for some fieldwork. The wooden lodge, nearly 4,000 feet up, was maintained by the Forestry Department as a base in the mountains for experimental research work in forestry, chiefly the culture of walnuts and apples.

  The university teachers were Zakir’s old friends and welcomed us warmly. We heard shouts and the slap of hands on flesh. The young male foresters were down on the meadow before the lodge, stripped to the waist for an informal wrestling tournament. A circle of admiring young women formed an audience. The students were impressively strong and skilled, their wrestling full blooded and spectacular. Seeing the fierce determination in their narrowed eyes, I couldn’t help imagining the army of Genghis Khan, which passed this way and must have amused itself in similar ways, encamped on summer evenings. We were quartered in dormitories in the lodge, which, being miles from anywhere, was lit by electricity generated by an ingenious waterwheel in the millstream. It was improvised from the back wheel hubs, axle and transmission shaft of an old lorry. Steel paddles had been welded on to the wheels, thirty-two on each, which were mounted under the spouts of two steeply inclined twenty-foot steel tubes, the stream having been split in two and funnelled into them from the concrete mill-race ten feet above. The resulting pair of powerful jets spun the wheels at high velocity, and the whirring transmission shaft turned a pulley and belt-drive running up to a dynamo mounted in a protective box astride the stream. Wires on poles led back to the lodge. So intent was I on examining this machine that I lost my sunglasses in the mill-race, where they were instantly flipped and minced in the waterwheels, as sardines are by dolphins. Inside the lodge, they could tell if it had rained in the mountains by the waxing or waning of the electric lights. In late summer, when the stream’s flow is relatively low, the lights are dim, but everyone eats outside and goes to bed early anyway.

  Zakir took us on a tour of the orchards, full of beehives for the summer. As the snows melt in spring and the spectacular flowers of the alpine meadows come into bloom, the beekeepers move up the valley with their hives. Zakir, who knows these hills and meadows intimately, has listed well over 150 different flowering plants contributing nectar to the Shaydan honey, which he says is generally reckoned the very best in all Kyrgyzstan. I was reminded of the fine feta from the Vlach village of Samarina, whose sheep enjoy the highest, most variegated wild flower g
razing in Greece. The cheese is so good that Vlachs come from as far away as New York to buy supplies of it.

  Passing over the fact that all beehives are monarchies, the industrious habits and efficiency of bees must have appealed to the communists. Honey would always have featured strongly among the peasant farmers of Russia, but among the nomads and trans-humant herders and shepherds of Kyrgyzstan it is likely that beekeeping was introduced as part of the Soviet de-nomadization programme that began in the 1920s. In the Soviet Union as a whole, beekeeping was a significant part of agriculture. The records for 1986, for example, show 40,000 tons of it harvested in the main Soviet countries and another 21,000 tons harvested in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria.