The Wood Page 7

  The wind bends the ash branches back and forth, like oars on a skiff.

  5 MARCH: The elder leaves are out, the first deciduous frondescence; they stink of poison gas. In the old time the elder was planted at the back door, to keep evil spirits and other negative influences from entering the home. William Coles, in The Art of Simpling (1656), noted that the ‘common people’ gathered elder leaves ‘upon the last day of Aprill, which to disappoint the Charmes of Witches, they had affixed to their Doores and Windowes’.

  The aroma exuded by the elder’s leaves certainly repelled flies, and bunches of leaves were hung in livestock barns, and attached to horses’ harnesses. Elder leaf, like elder bark, is full of cyanogenic glucosides. The leaf also contains the mind-bending neurotoxic alkaloids sambugrine and conicine, which might explain why one meets the king of the elves when sleeping under an elder tree.

  I go gathering scarlet elf cups from logs emeralded with moss, then some Jew’s ears from the elder. Both mushrooms have small taste; instead they absorb the flavour of other foods. The trick with these mushrooms is to shred them, thus piercing any pockets of water, otherwise they spit when cooked.

  Besides its use in the kitchen, Jew’s ear has a role to play in the chemist’s cupboard. The Chinese have long valued it as a cleanser of the lungs, stomach and intestines, while modern Western medicine reports the fungus as having significant anti-blood-clotting characteristics, and of likely therapeutic use in combating coronary disease. There is also evidence that Jew’s ear has antibiotic and antiviral qualities. In the medieval ‘doctrine of signatures’ (which held, essentially, that if a plant looked like a human organ it would cure an ailment of the organ), gargles of Jew’s ears were made for complaints of the ear.

  When we injure woods, we injure ourselves.

  Thai-style chicken and Jew’s ear soup

  My recipe.

  Every Jewish grandmother knows that chicken soup cures all ills; every Asian grandmother knows that ginger boosts the immune system. This Thai-inspired broth recipe is a double whammy.

  1½ tbsp cooking oil

  2 in ginger, peeled and sliced into slivers

  1 shallot, diced

  5 large Jew’s ears

  1 skinless and boneless chicken breast, cut into thin strips

  1 tsp oyster sauce

  1½ tsp shoyu

  1 tsp cane sugar

  2 tbsp water

  Heat up the cooking oil in a wok and stir-fry the ginger slivers. Add in the shallot and Jew’s ears and stir. Add the chicken strips. Stir-fry the chicken meat until browned, then add in oyster sauce, shoyu and sugar. Stir all ingredients together before adding the water. Stir several times. Serve with hot white rice.

  11 MARCH: Ivy swims up the ash in the dingle, swarming wooden eels. (Ivy is not a parasite, but uses tree trunks for support, to gain height.) Under widow’s clouds I feed ivy to the sheep on the ride – they gorge on it, so keen they crowd around me.

  I know, I know. Who would believe that ivy is fodder for sheep? It is, except for the berries. Welcome to old-style hard-time farming.

  I am trying to learn the music of the inscrutable trees, not just the wind through the branches but the notes of the trunks. I put my ear to a bole of ash; after the seashell noise of the cupped ear, I hear the moaning of a cello.

  I look down into the dingle, with its cacophony of dead trees. Dead trees move us, with their truncated majesty, their long, slow decay. At the end of the Great War, the composer Edward Elgar entered a period of disillusion. The values of the Edwardian era had been swept away in the deluge, and his wife, his greatest support, was ill. He himself entertained ‘intimations of mortality’, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth. Elgar’s last major works, including the Cello Concerto, show this. Billy Reed, the violinist and good friend of Elgar’s, recorded that a grove of dead trees near Brinkwells, the Elgars’ cottage in Sussex, imprinted the composer strongly at this time:

  A favourite short walk from the house up through the woods brought one clean out of the everyday world to a region prosaically called Flexham Park, which might have been the Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz. The strangeness of the place was created by a group of dead trees which had very gnarled and twisted branches stretching out in an eerie manner as if beckoning one to come nearer. To walk up there in the evening when it was just getting dark was to get ‘the creeps’ … the air of sadness in the quartet, like the wind sighing in those dead trees – I can see it all whenever I play any of these works, or hear them played. Elgar was such a nature-lover and had such an impressionable mind that he could not fail to be influenced by such surroundings.

  Lady Elgar referred to these late chamber works as ‘wood magic’, and she made direct reference to the dead trees as having an influence on the Quintet. The trees had been struck by lightning (an exterior force) and not died naturally. Just like the young men of the Great War. Elgar made music of England’s landscape. ‘This is what I hear all day,’ he wrote to his friend A. J. Jaager. ‘The trees are singing my music – or have I sung theirs?’

  My current favourite word: psithurism, n., meaning the sound of rustling leaves on trees, adapted from Ancient Greek ψίθυρος (psithuros, ‘whispering’, ‘slanderous’).

  Go shooting at dusk, while the blackbirds spink; a wood is half wild, half tame. To connect with the wild side I take the little .410 and become a hunter.

  The fierce-eyed pigeons avoid me. I walk through the larch, and in the half-light it is walking on air; I can’t see the floor. Not like at night when one feels the floor. In this sort of light one floats.

  12 MARCH: Glades of sunlight; the silk-rip of a raven overhead. Primroses leaking spots of sun out of the earth.

  A buzzard in the top of a larch mews pathetically. I scuff at some old leaf matter at the top of the wood, and expose corpses of shotgun cartridges. As recently as the 1970s, to judge by the cartridges, Cockshutt was part of a shoot.

  I walk back past the pool; frogs are croaking, and the water tremors in ecstasy as they consort, hidden in reeds which now sword the water.

  13 MARCH: Hawthorn leaves out, the buds big enough to eat.

  I spend an hour up an ash tree cutting ivy for the sheep with a sickle; I feel like Getafix in tales of Asterix and Obelix. But I can smell spring.

  Another sure sign of spring: the sheep refuse to eat hay, wanting juicy green stuff instead.

  Wreaths from ivy vines were used to decorate the heads of traitors. Such was the fate of the last Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, whose severed head was presented to King Edward I on a salver, mockingly crowned with a circlet of ivy. In later years a similar wreath, worn by the living, was said to prevent baldness. Now there is a thought.

  14 MARCH: A treecreeper walks along the underside of a branch above my head, as upside-down sticky as a fly on a ceiling. In a wood one’s eyes naturally focus on thirty to forty yards forward on the ground; but one needs to look up. One has to train oneself to do it.

  As I wander through the wood the pigeons are always a move ahead, clattering out of the trees, resiled by the invisible bow waves of my being.

  Despite my earlier certitude that trees are not Ents, I look for faces in the oak bark; the only ones I find are the visages of scary old men. The wind gets up. Things crash, fall apart.

  On the coffee-water pool, a sudden sequence of disappearing rings. Made by what?

  15 MARCH: On the silt around the pond: the triangle toes of pheasant feet, broad-arrow prink of a moorhen’s foot, and the half-ring of badger toes.

  The badger lives a half-mile away in Moors Wood; this is only the second sign of him rambling in Cockshutt this year. Badger, brock or bawson, call him what you will, he makes me nervous. I have cattle. Badgers are vectors for bovine TB.

  Birch sap can be ‘tapped’ (collected), and used to make a sweet wine.

  To tap a silver birch in spring, when the sap begins to rise (as signalled by the development of leaf buds; they should be tight and small), firs
t find a birch tree with a diameter of at least twenty-five centimetres; any less than that, and the tree might be too puny to spare its lifeblood. Drill a hole in the trunk a metre up and at a thirty-degree angle, just penetrating below the bark and no bigger than the plastic tubing you need to stick in the tree to siphon off the sap; the other end of the tubing goes into a demi-john or large mineral-water bottle at ground level. Sap should start collecting in the receptacle immediately; a gallon in twenty-four hours is not uncommon, and take no more than one gallon per tree.

  As well as a country wine, birch sap can be drunk as a spring tonic, or boiled down to make syrup.

  Writing in 1718 Ned Ward, author of The London Spy, described birch wine as ‘almost like mead, and makes a man’s mouth smell of honey’.

  Sycamore sap also rises vigorously in the spring and can be tapped, as a source of sugar and to make beer.

  17 MARCH: The chiffchaff arrives in his familiar wood, a day later than last year. True, his piercing, two-tone chiff-chaff song is hardly pretty. But it is immortal, and important; it announces the coming-in of spring. As Sir Edward Grey, master ornithologist (and the Liberal foreign secretary who took us into the Great War), remarked in his The Charm of Birds, the chiff-chaff is ‘the forerunner of the rush of songbirds that is on its way to us and will arrive in April, and thereafter enrich our woods, meadows, and gardens with still further variety and quality of song. That is why the first hearing of a chiffchaff moves us so each spring. He is a symbol, a promise, an assurance of what is to come.’

  The chiffchaff hops around a willow, moth-like. How could something so small, such a scrap of bird, manage to fly here? It can barely battle a breeze. Is there not something miraculous in a tiny bird travelling all the way from Africa to Britain to spend spring and summer with us?

  How pleased the trees must be to hear him.

  18 MARCH: A nuthatch pipes in the oaks, and below, the first wood anemone, white and resplendent.

  Legend waxes lyrical about the anemone as a love flower. Mortally wounded by a boar, Adonis lay in the bloodstained grass where he was found by Venus; overcome with grief she swore her lover should live for ever as a flower, and anemones sprang up where her tears fell.

  The myth is rather ruined by the anemone’s pong; the plant contains proto-anemonin and is poisonous.

  But the anemone is beautiful. Traditionally, the first wood anemones of the year were picked and sewn into one’s coat; it was assumed that a flower as exquisite, as pure, as the anemone would, by its sheer goodness, ward off the plague. Some country folk called the anemone ‘Candlemas cap’, Candlemas being 2 February, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin.

  A blackbird begins making a nest in a low fork of elm beside the ride. The elm, which has a hawthorn girding it, reaches into the sky. Even at a mere thirty feet it is the tallest elm I know of.

  Elms were one of our defining English trees, regular fixtures in the hedgerow, because the farmer valued them for their shade. Elms grew so rapidly in the west of England they were known as the ‘Wiltshire weed’ but within a decade, between the 1970s and 1980s, almost all English elms above the size of a shrub were eliminated by Dutch elm disease (caused by a fungus of the genus Ophiostoma and carried by various bark beetles), one of the most dramatic extinctions of modern times. Poor elms: for the main part they are clones, and so suffer all the vulnerability of genetic incest.

  Elms die when they are teenagers, but are replaced by suckers, the classic elm method of regeneration. Elm had a good reputation as coffin wood.

  My elm is merely a small echo of the elms that John Clare knew.

  The Shepherd’s Tree

  Huge elm, with rifted trunk all notched and scarred,

  Like to a warrior’s destiny! I love

  To stretch me often on thy shadowed sward,

  And hear the laugh of summer leaves above;

  Or on thy buttressed roots to sit, and lean

  In careless attitude, and there reflect

  On times and deeds and darings that have been –

  Old castaways, now swallowed in neglect, –

  While thou art towering in thy strength of heart,

  Stirring the soul to vain imaginings

  In which life’s sordid being hath no part.

  The wind of that eternal ditty sings,

  Humming of future things, that burn the mind

  To leave some fragment of itself behind.

  John Clare

  19 MARCH: Through the druid’s grove of alder. Over the stile, struggling with the sack of cattle cake on my left shoulder. Although they are derived from woodland animals, it is estimated that in a totally forested area one square mile of browsing might support only twenty to thirty head of cattle. By simple division the two-plus acres of Cockshutt cannot wholly support four beeves. Ipso facto they require supplementary feeding, hay and a handful of wheat concentrate or ‘cake’. Farming: it’s all about maths and margins.

  The sack weighs me down, so I walk lurched over. A farmboy Quasimodo. From the far top of the wood comes the trumpeting of a cow. Repeated, and insistent.

  I could have driven round to the cows as I did this morning, but who does not want the excuse to walk through a wood on a mid-March evening? When the unbearable heaviness of winter has lifted. When the days are lighter, longer.

  There is an old farming adage: ‘March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.’ It is a truth my grandfather taught me. Today, out of the wind, in the shelter of the trees … you can actually feel a new, baby tenderness in the air.

  Spring is here, and there is a spring in my step as I follow the pale path through the trees.

  For me, for you, every step along this woodland path is yard-stoned by the mild English culture of arboreality: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Winnie-the-Pooh; The Animals of Farthing Wood; The Chronicles of Narnia; and, of course, Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

  The Germans have Black Forests, and Grimm tales. They can keep them. The folk tales collected and written down in the nineteenth century by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, in the spirit of high Romanticism, codified the forest as pure nature in contrast to the urbane, urban civilization of Germany. In 1876 in Bayreuth Richard Wagner premiered his sixteen-hour operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. Inevitably, most scenes took place in a forest. Inevitably, the Nazis were bewitched by the Hochwald, the high forest, with its ranks upon ranks of standing, regular pine trees. The Nuremburg rallies were the forest made flesh. Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering, no less, declared from his forest hunting lodge: ‘We have become used to seeing the German nation as eternal. There is no better symbol for us than the forest, which has been and always will be eternal.’

  The Anglo-Saxons, on fleeing Germany for England, merely continued the local tradition of cutting down the wildwood to let in the light.

  The Other (excerpt)

  The forest ended. Glad I was

  To feel the light, and hear the hum

  Of bees, and smell the drying grass

  And the sweet mint, because I had come

  To an end of forest, and because

  Here was both road and inn, the sum

  Of what’s not forest …

  Edward Thomas

  I came late to the love of woodland, even to a love of books about woods. I think I was twelve when I read Brendon Chase, BB’s adventure story about the three Hensman boys, Robin (fifteen), John (thirteen), Harold (twelve), who flee the ‘petticoat government’ of Aunt Ellen to live feral in a wood.

  It was Brendon Chase that first introduced me to life in a wood, the possibility of adventure in its secluded spaces. I’m still that boy. I cannot walk through a wood without a sense of wonder.

  And there is a relaxing privacy to a wood. As BB understood, a wood is a desert island – but of solitude, and plumb in the middle of rural England. A wood is an escape.

  I have digressed in thought, but not work. I’m halfway through the wood. That
cow is still trumpeting, a siren call, leading me on.

  The woodland floor is illuminated by flowers. The black mud trapped in the alders’ roots is lit by marsh marigolds, the blooms as bright yellow as any sun a child will draw. (The marsh marigold: a true native, it grew on English soil before the Ice Age.)

  Everywhere, the delicate wood anemones are grouped in hamlets of white lights.

  The sycamore is in leaf; also the elder. And it is now a month since the first Arum maculatum, lords and ladies, pierced the woodland floor in bottle-green shards to begin the killing of winter.

  Although birdsong has not reached its spring crescendo, there is a steady anticipatory hum, such as you get in an auditorium as it fills with people, and the orchestra tunes up. The greater spotted woodpecker, dressed in his pied and red avant-garde clothing, is drumming out his love song on the skeletal remains of an elm. His rapid rattle, as though his beak has been wound up with an elastic band and let go, is an invitation to females to come breed with him. It is also a warning to other males to keep off his manor. He can be heard a mile away.

  From the high ash the cock song thrush pours in his fluty, reflective melodies. How correct Robert Browning was to write in ‘Home Thoughts’:

  That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

  Lest you should think he never could recapture

  The first fine careless rapture!

  Tennyson described the voice of the song thrush, mimicking the call of the bird:

  ‘Summer is coming, summer is coming.

  I know it, I know it, I know it.

  Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’

  Yes, my wild little Poet.

  There is insect music too. Bees are about, huzzing. The wood is in motion.

  At the pond a peacock butterfly flitters over the water, casting a precise facsimile of itself.