The Wood Read online

  The dappled shade of birch on the dapples of the fallow deer, five of them. I have never realized before that the whitey daubs on the deer’s back are camouflage. Unfortunately, I instinctively slap a horsefly biting me, and the deer vanish into the thick, close air.

  In the Middle Ages the birch became a lucky tree. Crucifixes carved from birch wood were hung around the necks of livestock to ward off satanic enchantment.

  19 JUNE: The woodland edge; the ferns, the brambles, the grass, the flowers, the rambling rose, the honeysuckle. The demarcation between wood and edge is exact; one can, babyishly, step in, step out of the two worlds. There is no blending, only the absolutes of light and dark.

  Up towards Garway Hill, a lordly peacock crows, sound of another age.

  The honeysuckle bathes in the sun of the field, before winding clockwise around a hazel, deforming it. The purple loosestrife on the ride is out; in the ash a magpie hops up, peering and up to no good; he is the woodland’s Child-Catcher.

  One ash tree, just one, jiggles its leaves, making me wonder if it is ill, or perhaps ecstatic.

  At 7.21pm: the arrow-thwack of a swift flying past my head.

  21 JUNE: Birds heard at midnight at midsummer in the wood:

  Old Brown, the tawny owl, intermittently.

  A disturbed pheasant cok-coks then dozes again.

  A willow warbler.

  Robin, who is the king of the night-singers, serenades me from the silver birch.

  First light. Blackbird, wren, jackdaw.

  All night shrews pitter-patter.

  Moths clutter my face.

  The awake, and the asleep.

  Just before dawn the badger ambles to the pond, tortoise-extends his head and laps at the water. In motion badgers are shambolic rustics; in repose they are slinky expressionists.

  From the three-foot reeds, the moorhen snipes at old Mr Teddy.

  A Tree Song

  Of all the trees that grow so fair,

  Old England to adorn,

  Greater is none beneath the sun,

  Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

  Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

  (All of a Midsummer morn!)

  Surely we sing of no little thing,

  In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Oak of the Clay lived many a day,

  Or ever Aeneas began.

  Ash of the Loam was a Lady at home,

  When Brut was an outlaw man.

  Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town

  (From which was London born);

  Witness hereby the ancientry

  Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Yew that is old in churchyard-mould,

  He breedeth a mighty bow.

  Alder for shoes do wise men choose,

  And beech for cups also.

  But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,

  And your shoes are clean outworn,

  Back ye must speed for all that ye need,

  To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth

  Till every gust be laid,

  To drop a limb on the head of him

  That any way trusts her shade.

  But whether a lad be sober or sad,

  Or mellow with wine from the horn,

  He will take no wrong when he lieth along

  ’Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Oh, do not tell the priest our plight,

  Or he would call it a sin;

  But – we have been out in the woods all night,

  A-conjuring Summer in!

  And we bring you good news by word of mouth –

  Good news for cattle and corn –

  Now is the Sun come up from the south,

  With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

  (All of a Midsummer morn!)

  England shall bide till Judgement Tide,

  By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

  Rudyard Kipling

  24 JUNE: Strange days indeed: a grass snake swims across the pool, in whiplash Ss. His emerald-green skin is foreign, fit for the tropics or a glass case, on the brown-water pool, but then he reaches the herbage of the reeds, when and where he fits perfectly.

  We never become inured to the snake; he is always loathsome.

  A golden drop of resin emits from a pine; next to the larch is a decent display of foxgloves, which the bees have claimed as their new best friends.

  The foxglove is one of the most poisonous plants in flora, and yet its leaves contain a substance which is the source of one of the best-known and most widely used medicines in heart disease: digitalis. It was in the eighteenth century that William Withering, in Shropshire, investigated the folk-use of foxglove tea for curing dropsy (which is an accumulation of watery fluid in various body tissues and cavities). He guessed that it might have wider medical uses, and by 1799 – the year of his death – it was recognized as a valuable medicine in the treatment of heart complaints. There is a fox-glove carved on Withering’s tombstone in Edgbaston Old Church.

  Strange days indeed. The nine o’clock shadows are long, but the fields glow from the inside, like the Habitat paper lanterns in my student digs in the 1980s.

  Finally, the sun sinks below the rim of our world. Seeping through the wood, like friendly gas, is the fragrance of honeysuckle.

  Honeysuckle gets its name from the sweet nectar in its corollas which makes them so good to suck. Pepys called it the ‘trumpet flower’, whose ‘ivory bugles blow scent instead of sound’. In the Victorian language of flowers it stood for generous and devoted affection.

  26 JUNE: Our wood glimpsed from up the lane: a line of green cumulus cloud, or a massif seen from afar. The oaks puff out, in green mushroom clouds; oaks demand light, and the sphere is the most efficient way to catch light.

  28 JUNE: The summer wind, which rattles every one of the million million needles of spruce.

  Hazelnuts are attired in their Regency bonnets. And then a curiosity: there are mullein caterpillars on the hazel, which is not listed as a larval food plant for the species. Feeling rather scientific, practically professorial, I take two caterpillars, and a handful of hazel leaves home in my hand, and put them in a jam jar. Attach a paper top, stab for air holes.

  The mulleins, I can hereby certify for the record, do eat hazel leaves.

  29 JUNE: Rain, plus rain. The clouds axe trees off at their necks.

  The old log pile, which I made as a beetle-friendly habitat, has been ripped apart, the wood as rotten as tobacco. Whodunnit? A badger.

  Already at midsummer the nuts are formed on the beeches; the cases are Desperate Dan stubbly; sycamore seeds hang in their ‘horseshoes’; crab apples are berry-sized.

  I prise open a bluebell seed head with my thumb-nail: each pouch has an average of fifty seeds; there are eight bells per stalk. So each plant has four hundred seeds to propagate itself. Multiply by the number of bluebells in Cockshutt. It is impossible not to feel nature’s desire to maintain her bloodlines.

  The rain brings up tiny mushrooms, grey pinheads, in the leaf litter beside the pool. Troops of them.

  30 JUNE: Sprite light, and back in Cockshutt to one last load of tree hay.

  The treecreeper has some leggy insect in its beak. Abandoning my billhook I peek in at her nest, in a socket where a limb has died off; the chicks are sightless, naked, hideous. All they want is the death of some mite so they themselves might live.

  Such is nature.

  JULY

  In the Greenwood Tree

  Life in the top of an oak tree – tortrix caterpillars – oak nut galls – Robin Hood in the greenwood – the ‘insect hour’ – The wild perfume of honeysuckle – night in the wood – moths – the woodland birds stop their singing – what trees give the best shelter? – the redwood, the BFG – the eye of a woodman – the killing of a squirrel

  3 JULY: It is said that more than four hundred types of insects directly depend on the oak.
I can believe it.

  Up here in the Wishbone Oak, twenty-five feet above the ground, I’m sitting legs astride a curving bough. Holding on. A sailor up in the crow’s nest of a sailing ship in a galing sea would know the sensation. You do not know a wood until you have lived in its crown and looked down, as well as having stood on its floor and wondered upwards, or hid behind a tree and gazed upon deer …

  The vertical world; the view down. Life at treetop height; a wood is 3D – not a plane, like a field.

  I climbed up the tree using my dextrous fingers, which evolved precisely because our ancestors spent 80 million years up in the trees.

  Something tar-like lands on my face, and in wiping it away I brush a branch, and caterpillars rain into my lap. Green oak tortrix caterpillars are ‘loopers’ – they move by humping their back and bringing their tail forward to head in a jerky progression. I swipe them off my jeans and over into the abyss, but instead of falling they spin a silk lifeline, as fast as Spiderman does. For a moment twenty or more caterpillars are hanging by silk threads, then they start climbing back up. There is no getting rid of them.

  More spots of black tar land on my face. I now realize what it is; it is ‘frass’, or caterpillar excrement. The leaves above me are heaving with caterpillars. What I thought was the hiss of breeze in high leaves is actually the sound of millions of caterpillars eating and defecating.

  The average oak in Britain loses roughly half of its leaves each year to insects, with caterpillars sometimes taking almost all the first crop of spring leaves, whereupon the oak can respond with a second flush in May and June, known as ‘Lammas growth’. (A misnomer, as Lammas, meaning ‘loaf mass’, is the Christian festival that falls on 1 August.)

  The first half of the twentieth century saw the British countryside reach its maturity, based on the centuries of change needed for oaks to reach their veteran years. As the doyen of landscape historians, Oliver Rackham, pointed out, a single five-hundred-year oak is a whole ecosystem; ten thousand oaks aged two hundred years are not. We need trees to grow old, very old.

  Since the Second World War perhaps a third of the ancient hardwood woodlands have been grubbed up, or built on for houses, roads, shops.

  On the lower twigs of the Wishbone Oak, several oak nuts, galls caused by a tiny gall wasp, Andricus kollari. The wasp lays an egg in the leaf or twig, causing the oak to produce a chemical that forms a protective structure around the egg. The gall, russet-coloured, is nut-hard, and tough to crack. It takes a stone. Inside the gall there is a thick ring of dense honeycomb, and in a central hole, where a fruit stone should be, a larval, alien incubus.

  4 JULY: We come over the Scottish border at dawn, like the raiders of old. Cumbria is a Tolkien shadow-land until Penrith, when the power of light separates clouds from hills, and hills resolve into steep, walled green fields.

  My daughter, Freda, wakes up, programmed by an internal clock. The Lakes are one of her favourite landscapes. ‘I suppose,’ she says blearily, ‘this is how most people see the countryside. Out of a car or train window.’

  By Lancashire, she is asleep again. I jack up The Killers on the Saab’s CD player. Hey, it’s only middle-aged rock ’n’ roll but it keeps me awake. Not till we are twenty miles from home, on the M50 beside the languid River Wye, does she next open her eyes. ‘Of course,’ she adds seamlessly to her comment from five hours previously, ‘people don’t see the work it takes to make the countryside look beautiful.’

  Pulling up on the yard at home, she says, ‘I like our road trips,’ which is a divertingly lovely way of describing the eighteen-hour round trip I have undertaken for her in my guise as sole proprietor and driver of Dad’s Taxi.

  She goes into the house to pack for a holiday with friends in Cornwall. I drive to Cockshutt.

  High summer in Herefordshire. Off in the oaks of Cockshutt, the pigeons call drowsily. On the tarmac a pile of horse poo steams with small silvery flies.

  After checking the wheat I go into my familiar wood. The heat is stifling in the summer darkness. In a wood, this is the time of maximum light, maximum shade.

  The wood and the world seem to hold their breath, and lines from Clare come to me: ‘The breeze is stopt, the lazy bough/Hath not a leaf that dances now.’

  The climax of the year. We have reached the top of the hill.

  The writers of the old almanacs would have called this a dog day, after Sirius the Dog Star. Or maybe because of the heat which makes dogs, like the black Lab which accompanies me, pant.

  I try to calculate how many hours in the last year alone I spent working in the wood. Two hundred? Then the year before that, and the year before that, and before that. Then all the hours other men have toiled here.

  My mind could not take it in, all the hours of work down the ages to make the countryside look beautiful.

  7 JULY: Under the beech, with its wide fans of branches, there is depth of shadow, where a man might hide. You think of Robin Hood in the greenwood, the summer wood; Robin Hood in the winter wood would have been a poor, persecuted creature. Robin Hood only exists in the summer greenwood of historical imagination, a place of hope, where the rich are robbed for the poor.

  Who loves to lie with me,

  And turn his merry note

  Unto the sweet bird’s throat,

  Come hither, come hither, come hither:

  Here shall he see

  No enemy

  But winter and rough weather.

  Who doth ambition shun,

  And loves to live i’ the sun,

  Seeking the food he eats,

  And pleas’d with what he gets,

  Come hither, come hither, come hither:

  Here shall he see

  No enemy

  But winter and rough weather.

  Shakespeare, As You Like It

  Things fall down; the squirrel up in the wild cherry tree sends cherries and twigs crashing to the woodland floor. Cockshutt can accommodate a couple of squirrels. Six is too many. Something will have to be done.

  10 JULY: Into the greenwood to check the glades, now wildly, brightly aflower with buttercups, clover, ox-eye daisies, the yellow and the red and the white, to determine when I should let in the cows for a graze. The answer: not yet. I need the ox-eye daisy (aka the ‘sun daisy’ in recognition of its joyous, bright yellow centre) to be going to seed, so the trample of cattle will plant more ox-eye daisies.

  The morning is brightened by blood; the fox has left half a rabbit. Cherry stones on the woodland floor are bone balls, having gone through the digestive system of the birds.

  Going into the wood in the evening, for five minutes ‘me time’ as a break from haymaking, but I am stupidly wearing shorts. It is 8pm, thus the insect hour, and my legs get, as we say in rural Herefordshire, ‘bitten to buggery’.

  11 JULY: How jaded are the leaves in the hedge. Already the cow parsley is tawny. The song thrush is on her second brood.

  The wild perfume of honeysuckle, like other plants, is best in the evening, when one is relaxed and there is the touch of moisture to unlock smells.

  Night in the wood: Old Brown calls; rabbits come to the entrance of their burrow, sniff, and eventually become bold.

  How enjoyable the land is, when the sun has sunk below the rim of the known world, when other people have gone to bed, and there are stars over the dark, still oaks.

  Moths come from every ferny corner, as white as fairies, emissaries from the court of the Midsummer Queen. The fern’s lack of flower mystified country folk, who supposed the fern to have invisible seeds. If these could be harvested, it was believed the collector would be rendered invisible.

  12 JULY: Entering the high summer wood is like entering a parish church; the same ancient silence, the same filtered, numinous light, the same smell of rotting wood.

  The other way round, of course; entering a parish church is akin to entering a wood. The Gothic architects who made England’s churches drew inspiration from the trees. Look at a deciduous t
ree bearing a heavy branch; under the branch, where it joins the trunk, you will see the tree has grown extra, supporting mass. A corbel. To stand under the high oaks is to stand in a nave, architecture imitating arboreal life.

  Early Protestants, such as the Lollards, held services beneath the trees, and took trees as their pulpits.

  13 JULY: This morning a swift was attacked mid-air by a sparrowhawk. It was damp, hence the swift was low. You can anthropomorphize swallows and house martins as cheery neighbours; swifts are remote, gym-muscular overlords.

  In the wood at midday: swift-watching on a break from mowing hay. The swifts only hawk over the pool, and over the oaks, where the cattle were, thus confirming my hypothesis about the efficacy of cattle muck in increasing invertebrate life.

  Pick up a feather – a buzzard’s. The moorhen wanders along the far bank of the pool with her silly walk, as if jerked forward by her head, pushed by her tail.

  The state of the trees: alder – the leaves green leather, incredibly strong, supple, and the cones formed; hazel – nuts formed but shell green and soft; hawthorn – draped with beaded necklaces of green haws; apple – in the space of a fortnight the fruit has become a red orb.

  On the way out of the wood, the waist-high brambles are a mass of pink flower; the brambles smell grey when crushed as I wade through to check the treecreeper’s brood. Along the side of the ride, the rosebay willow herb flames in the clearing (the first flowered on 22 June). During the last century the plant underwent a genetic change which made it a more vigorous species.

  About 9pm. And that particular summer stillness when noises are single and precise; the cheep of nestlings; a train ten miles away, across golden fields; from an irksome, gnatty thing, the whine of a dentist’s drill.

  9.45pm. Swifts still feeding.

  10pm. Swifts stop feeding. There comes a time when they can’t see insects – they aim for their targets, rather than trawl like whales for krill.

  Swifts go to bed but their place in the sky is taken by bats, which whip in, out and around the alder, and circle the black glass pool, aerial sharks.

  All the white moths come out.