by Roger Deakin
Such massive mushroom bollings are called desmocho by the Basques in the beech and oak woods of the western Pyrenees around San Sebastián. But they have two ways of pollarding, and the other is called trasmocho, in which the four-foot stumps of three or four of the original main lateral branches form a composite bolling. But already, as pollarding goes out of fashion, desmocho has been lost from the language and all pollards are called trasmocho. The Basques always synchronize their pollarding with the waning phase of the moon. My friend Helen Reed, who grew up in Thrandeston, has travelled all over Europe in search of pollard trees. Wherever she found them, she studied the techniques of their culture and harvesting, and, as in the case of the Basque pollards in the steep woods of Aiako Harria and the Forêt de Sare, recorded the vocabulary of the craft. Helen discovered two main uses for pollard trees on the continent of Europe: the supply of fodder and fuel, mainly in the form of charcoal. The cutting of leafy branches for browse wood goes back to prehistoric times. I have done it myself to feed goats, as others did in my village, mostly with elm before the last ravaging by disease. It is highly nutritious and herbivores relish it. The remains of several old elm pollards are still gently decaying in my hedges, but new trees are rising again from the roots.
On the Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland, Helen found some 7,000 ash and elm pollards, all between one and two hundred years old, still being harvested for their browse wood. Using an axe or billhook, the islanders cut the new shoots on a one-or two-year rotation when they are in full leaf. They bind them into bundles and hang them on the fences to dry like hay. The eight-foot pollards are set out in wood pasture so that the patches of meadow between them measure twice their height. The farmers store the dried bundles in their barns and feed them to the cattle in winter. Once the cows have eaten the leaves, the branches are fed to the rabbits, which strip the bark for its sugars. The bare sticks then dry out thoroughly and are made into faggots to fuel the bread ovens. The islanders always cut with a sharp blade in preference to a saw, because the teeth may spread infection in the sawdust that clings to the teeth. Neighbouring Sweden probably once had as many as four million pollards, now reduced to about 70,000. The most productive possible use of grazing land, says Helen, is to grow pollards for winter fodder and to graze the sward beneath them.
The bollings of pollards in England were generally the property of the landlord, but the tenant farmer was entitled to harvest the pollard wood. Firewood was always being stolen in the country. Most woods were gated and padlocked against carts, and the manorial court records show frequent instances of fines for stealing under-wood. Poor people in the country had few comforts and, desperate for the warmth of a fire in winter, often stole fuel from the hedges and were beaten for it. Oliver Rackham has uncovered evidence of a wood-poaching crime wave, and harsh beatings meted out by the courts, during the bitter winters of the decade from 1590 to 1600.
I live beneath the protective boughs of a sheltering ash. The tree springs up as a single trunk of nine-foot girth for five feet and then divides into three, each of its branched trunks four feet in girth arching high above me. I love its natural flamboyance and energy, and the swooping habit of its branches: the way they plunge towards the earth, then upturn, tracing the trajectory of a diver entering the water and surfacing. In March the tree is a candelabra, each bud emerging cautiously, like the black snout of a badger, at the tip of every branch. Sometimes an ash will send out its branches in florid, Baroque spirals for no apparent reason except exuberance. On his way from Tintern Abbey to Ross on 16 June 1866, descending a steep lane to the River Wye, Gerard Manley Hopkins saw such a tree: ‘Then the fields rose high on each side, one crowned with beautiful trees (there was particularly an ash with you could not tell how many contradictory supple curvings in the boughs).’ Fraxinus excelsior captures the majestic essence of the tree very well. I look out from my desk window to a stand of tall ashes in whose bare waving tops dozens of fieldfares perch for hours and roost each winter. When the November winds blow, the elastic branches rattle against each other, and all that is left on the big tree by the house are bunches of the winged ash keys that fill the gutters.
Now the roof of the ash bower is folded down on itself, ready to bud and thrust into new life in spring once the sap stirs in the roots and surges up through the hinges of bent sinews that lead into this maze. There is something practical about the way ash goes about healing itself: the way the bark curls over the starburst of radial cracks in a half-severed stem at the heel of a pleacher, just like a human scar. All over Europe, people have always believed in the healing powers of the ash. Writing in 1916 in his Dartmoor classic Small Talk at Wreyland, Cecil Torr gives this account of the healing of a child in his tiny hamlet on the edge of Dartmoor:
A child was born here on 20 November 1902, and had a rupture. Some while afterwards I asked the father how the child was getting on, and the answer was – ‘Oh, it be a sight better since us put’n through a tree.’ And I found that they had carried out the ancient rite. The father had split an ash-tree on the hill behind his house, and had wedged the hole open with two chunks of oak. Then he and his wife took the child up there at day-break; and, as the sun rose, they passed it three times through the tree, from east to west. The mother then took the child home, and the father pulled out the chunks of oak, and bandaged up the tree. As the tree-trunk healed, so would the rupture heal also. I asked him why he did it, and he seemed surprised at the question, and said – ‘Why, all folk do it.’ I then asked him whether he thought it really did much good, and the reply was – ‘Well, as much good as sloppin’ water over’n in church.’
Rolling itself into a neat rustic architrave around a wound, the ash tree, in its workmanlike resilience, foreshadows its practical virtues as a timber. William Cobbett characteristically values the utility of ash over its beauty:
Laying aside this nonsense, however, of poets and painters, we have no tree of such various and extensive use as the Ash. It gives us boards; materials for making instruments of husbandry; and contributes towards the making of tools of almost all sorts. We could not well have a wagon, a cart, a coach or 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; and assists to supply the Irish and West Indians with hoops for their pork barrels and sugar hogsheads. It therefore demands our particular attention; and from me, that attention it shall have.
Ash is remarkably pliable and tough. Coopers made the hoops Cobbett refers to by cleaving coppice ash in two and bending the flat side round the barrel or washing tub. I have made one more ash folly a few yards away from the bower, bending three slender ten-foot coppice poles into a spiral, lashing them to ash stakes driven into the ground to hold them in position until, as I hope, the tree adapts and eventually grows into a corkscrew. I question myself as I do such things. Is this too much like getting circus animals to jump through hoops? I reason that I’ve done the tree no harm, and in time it will grow into something beautiful as ash always does, the badger-noses on the new shoots leading the way. It doesn’t need me to teach it to dance; it is naturally playful, a contortionist with ancestral memories of tumbling with the hedger’s no less wilful strength. When the bower eventually comes of age long after I am gone, the wooden spinning top might still be going round too.
Forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton, October 2008
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
Roger Deakin
For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world, whether it be observing the teeming ecosystem that was Walnut Tree Farm, thinking about the wider environment, walking in his fields, on Mellis Common or on his travels at home, or contemplating his past and his present life.
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm collects the very best
of these writings, capturing Roger’s extraordinary, restless curiosity about the natural and human worlds, his love of literature and music, his knack for making unusual and apposite connections, and of course his distinct and subversive charm and humour. Together they cohere to present a passionate, engaged and – in spite of the worst pressures of contemporary life – optimistic view of our changing world.
THE BEGINNING
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2007
Published in Penguin Books 2008
Text copyright © The Estate of Roger Deakin, 2007
Illustrations copyright © David Holmes, David Nash, Mary Newcomb, 2007
Original chapter illustrations throughout by David Holmes, excluding illustration on p. 151 by David Nash and illustration on p. 179 by Mary Newcomb
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
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ISBN: 978-0-141-90051-3
