The Wood Page 9

  10 APRIL: The water of the pool locked into glassiness, utterly still except for the travelling silver wave of the moorhen’s progress, made from evening light.

  What bird do you identify with? It is a psychology test to outdo Rorschach. On this day I plump for the moorhen, the shy observer at the edge. You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties.

  Why, why are people so enraptured with raptors?

  By the pool a robin sings his heart out; further away blackbirds, and pigeons in pairs. In the dissolving distance a wood warbler.

  11 APRIL: During the Second World War John Stewart Collis cleared a fourteen-acre ash wood in Dorset (‘between Iwerne Minster and Tarrant Gunville’), neglected for eighteen years, where he could not ‘advance a single yard unimpeded’, not least for the ‘throttling ropes of that hangman’s noose called honeysuckle’.

  He found that the woodland spectacle ‘which fascinated me most, and encouraged me most, was decomposition’. The Renaissance had a motto Et in Arcadia ego – even in Arcadia, Death is present. Lord Tennyson saw it too:

  The woods decay and fall,

  The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.

  One of the pigs has escaped into the wood, and snouted out a rotten elder log; the moss-coated bark is still firm, but the inside is soft like moist sponge; the further my fingers probe and expose the labyrinth, the softer the wood is. There is a fairy castle of miniature white fungi, a mushroom Neuschwanstein, and then a brown centipede, and its two mini-me babies; it is impossible to think of centipedes as babies. And two woodlice.

  11 APRIL: The immutable, tidal waves of floor colour in an English wood: Green (dog’s mercury)>Yellow (constellations of lesser celandines)>White (wood anemones) >Mauve (bluebells).

  Sitting in my chair: the wind moves the goslings, the goat willow catkins, around the pool in a swirling Regency quadrille.

  Odd how willows have become associated with sadness and mourning. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia drowns near a willow tree. In biblical times willows were seen as trees of celebration.

  The wood burns well too.

  Up in the wild cherries there are posies and posies of blossom.

  The hazel joins the leafy parade.

  Against all odds, Willow the pony has fully recovered, and is officially signed off as a veterinary patient. This is not his first self-inflicted scrape with death. He is the pony with nine lives.

  We love him.

  13 APRIL: Wood pigeons mating; so preoccupied with their violent, neck-biting, dust-flying copulation in the larch that I walk to within three to four yards of them.

  Since the trees are not totally dressed I can see the small birds working them; a big identifying advantage compared to when the trees are in full leaf, and birds are flitting shapes and soundbites only. The wood warblers have reached Cockshutt. Wood warblers are the last visitors from Africa, and the biggest of the ‘leaf warblers’ (the others being the willow warbler and the chiffchaff). Gilbert White knew the wood warbler’s territorial song as a ‘sibilant shivering noise in the tops of tall woods’.

  The warblers are all carnivores, who come flying here for the spring hatch of insects. There are not many vegetarian birds in a wood.

  And I wonder, as I do every year, how Darwin’s cumbersome theory of evolution explains how the first warbler decided to fly five thousand miles to summer in Britain, then fly five thousand miles to Africa to summer there.

  Four swallows arrive at Pool Farm in the valley, but move on. Migration of the birds is not a constant traffic but an eddying (as they stop for food, water) and a flow.

  14 APRIL: First light. Dawn chorus in the wood begins with a pheasant, who stands in a lake of bluebells, the floral ‘pride of the woods’.

  Oak buds bursting, many of them extra plump because they contain both leaves and catkins. Ramsons (wild garlic) in the dingle stinking. The garlicky smell is potent enough to put hounds off the scent of a fox, should Reynard be cunning enough to run through a patch of them.

  Locally common throughout Britain, ramsons like shade, damp and neutral soil, hence its affinity for deciduous woodland and thickets. Superficially, the leaves of garlic are similar in appearance to the bluebell, but crush a leaf and if it smells of garlic then it is garlic.

  The wood-cutting season might be done, but a wood can still provide. In the kitchen, the ramsons’ leaves make a useful wrap, in the manner of vine leaves. Wild garlic is less fierce in flavour than the cultivated variety. The widespread dialect name ramsons is from the Old English hramsa. Ramsey in Essex and Ramsbottom in Lancashire are just two of the places which take their name from the locally prolific fruiting of the herb.

  Wild garlic dolmades

  80 wild garlic leaves

  1 onion, minced

  100g cooked risotto rice

  2 tsp mint/water mint

  olive oil

  4 tbsp water

  1 lemon

  1 tbsp tomato paste

  1–2 cups vegetable stock

  Blanch the wild garlic leaves by dipping into boiling water for 1 minute, strain and drain.

  Sweat the onion in olive oil until translucent. Turn off the heat, but add the rice and all the remaining ingredients except for the vegetable stock, and mix well.

  Put to one side.

  Take 3 wild garlic leaves and lay side by side, so they are slightly overlapping. Put a pudding spoonful of mixture in the centre, and shape it into a tube running across the leaves. Now tightly roll the wild garlic leaves over the mixture – trying as you go to tuck the outer leaves over the mixture so that a small wrapped parcel is the result. When rolled, pin with a cocktail stick. If you find this method too fiddly, try laying the wild garlic leaves in a cross and wrapping this over a spoonful of mixture. The art of dolmades-stuffing is old and mysterious, and not learned in a minute. So you will need patience.

  Continue making dolmades until all the mixture is used up. Using a large crock pot, or any pot with a lid, put the spare and discarded wild garlic leaves into the bottom as a lining. This is to stop the dolmades burning. Pack the dolmades in as tightly as possible, making double and even triple decks if necessary.

  Spoon in three or so tablespoons of oil and the vegetable stock. Cook on a low heat in the oven for about 30 minutes, by which time the stock should have been sucked up.

  The dolmades can be dished up with tzatziki as a starter, or placed on a bed of vegetables as a main course.

  The above ingredients are all optional. Experiment at will. Halloumi cheese makes for good binding, while beef/ lamb/pork mince is traditional.

  16 APRIL: Snow falls through oaks, in end-of-the-world desolation. This is what the nuclear winter will look like.

  Falling snow has an unexpected hiss.

  17 APRIL: The clouds are great continents above my head, replicating the movement of the terrestrial continents over the Earth’s crust in fast motion.

  A wood pigeon perches on a twiglet of hawthorn. Perfect balance; but is it because the twig is stronger than I think, or the wood pigeon lighter?

  On the pond a drake mallard takes off.

  A nuthatch gives me a secret service psst as I pass.

  Strings of greenish flowers dangle from sycamores. As an introduced plant, the sycamore has a relatively small associated insect fauna of about fifteen species. However, both male and female flowers produce abundant nectar, and the larvae of several species of moth use the leaves as a food source. The leaves additionally attract aphids, and then the hoverflies and ladybirds that feed on them.

  18 APRIL: Oak leaves in limey translucence.

  The geans, stolid straight poles, are flowerless until their tip exceeds adjacent trees of different breed.

  The crab apple is the sweetest of all the trees, with its cups of pink-and-white upturned blossoms. The boughs drip, sculpturally, back down to earth. Today the two trees make bowers of pinky white.

  Why are the tree flowers cream and white? So pollinators under canopy gloom can
sight them?

  Under one of the firs the smashed shell of a pigeon egg looks like white cracked china.

  The woodland air fades to TV-monotone grey. With all colour gone, there are only degrees of nuance, of insolidity. The wolf-light.

  When I creep to twenty yards from the earth, I see that the four cubs are up above ground. Rolling. Tumbling. Chasing. They are lovely in the evening sun, their fur glowing with the spring light.

  One night, I saw the vixen return with a rabbit; with true maternal consideration, she ripped the rabbit into four, giving each cub an equal share.

  I try to edge closer still, but a traitorous tendril of bramble scrapes my trousers loudly enough to startle the cubs. They look directly at me; their eyes appear colourized with topaz. The cubs show no fear, but their mother is wise and calls them in from their play.

  In April, the wood is the place to be.

  19 APRIL: First day of low-level insect hum in the wood proper (as opposed to the pool); low level as in low down, and as in background.

  The motion of the mallard on water: sliding magic.

  23 APRIL: Bloody swarms of St Mark’s fly in the wood, with their dangling legs, getting in the way. They are two days early, someone needs to tell them: St Mark’s Day is 25 April.

  24 APRIL: Evening going on nightfall, about 9pm. Sitting in my chair, tired from farmwork, bookwork, days which start at 5am. A hedgehog strolls past; I jump.

  The buzzards are building a nest in an alder down in the dingle. One flies over with a stick in its mouth.

  With a last gobful of mud from the pond margin, the house martin is blown back, rights herself, re-angles and flies on her predestined course: how does she know how to build? The mud house she was born in was made before her birth. Something in the DNA, or a secret coding in the universe the birds can tap into, and we cannot?

  There is a point in descending darkness when trees are as substantial as vapour.

  25 APRIL: Oak leaves out; beech leaves out. Beech, scientific name Fagus sylvatica, Fagus stemming from the Ancient Greek phegos, meaning ‘edible’, ‘for eating’, and this elegant tall tree that can reach over 120 feet also provides springtime lime-green leaves that may be popped into salads or soups. In the Second World War, Hitler’s regime tried drying the leaves as a substitute for tobacco.

  26 APRIL: Sunny. 10am. The floor of the wood becoming green, so Cockshutt is green below and above.

  The ash remains stubbornly unleaved. ‘Laggard to come, laggard to go’ as the country saying has it.

  Bird cherry by the pool in flower. The blossom has a distinctive smell; wet-dog lime.

  A solitary peacock butterfly warms itself on the dried clay of the path. Sitting with its wings open, it reveals its four eye spots – suddenly displayed, they can frighten a bird away. Butterflies are easier to identify in the morning while they are warming up.

  There is a nanosecond this day when a shaft of wisdom strikes: I am passing the beech, their sophisticated boles rising from brown ground, and I understand that they are a trope for another, alternative England. Different from the heartiness of oak.

  27 APRIL: Snow, but light, nothing really. Spent two hours clearing sycamore saplings to halt the invasion of sycamore and extend the bottommost glade.

  To kill a young animal – a puppy, kitten, piglet, foal – is a horror show; to take the life of an elderly beast is easier. It is the other way round with trees. I have no compunction about slashing the sycamore saplings to death, yet I – and likely you – would weep a little when felling a mature tree.

  But with the rising sap and the nesting birds, this is the last wood work for a while.

  In the afternoon: poke about in a dead tree. The holes and the cracks; I admire designs of bark, the twist in the bark of the sweet chestnut especially.

  On the copper pond, the reeds are now two feet high; the more they grow, the smaller the pool becomes.

  Along the ride the cock pheasant struts. The hen is on her nest in the bramble, which I came upon yesterday; she made a tiny movement of her head, which was enough to inform on her. She turned statue, and sat it out on her hot eggs.

  28 APRIL: One of the sheep has fallen in the ditch below the pool; the ditch is about six feet deep. She has broken both of her front legs, so I fetch the shotgun.

  Descending into the ditch is katabasis. The bottom of the ditch is an underworld of ferns, moss, slime, serpent ivy, the spine from some unrecognized animal. The coursing water booms off the walls.

  Fresh blood has a surprising scarlet fluorescence, so vivid, so unlike the flat ochre of meat in the butcher’s or on the supermarket shelf.

  Perhaps one needs a climb down into the depths to appreciate springtime. Looking up, for the way out, a brimstone butterfly, just out of hibernation, jauntily flutters and glides across the sky ceiling. So wholly yellow is the male brimstone that he gave his name to all species of the insect: ‘butterfly’.

  29 APRIL: Transfiguration. Cockshutt is restless with spring, hormones, mating, nest-building. Growing. The spring life force is unstoppable – proved by the plants forcing through, pushing aside even the hard earth of the path.

  The toing and froing of the birds: the woodpecker starts from a telegraph pole, squeaking like a rubber toy, and flies to the ash; the treecreeper is fast-mo back and forth across the end of the pool, etching an impression on the scene.

  The air has a presence, a softness, a lightness that did not exist even a fortnight ago. Winter is leaving into memory.

  At the top of the wood one of the cows is making a hell of a racket, trumpeting away. Then, from across the decades, the word bellocking plops into my head; it is the dialect term my grandfather would have used for the loud mooing of a cow.

  This single word, a plastic credit card slid into a lock, opens a door. Dialect words from childhood rush to my tongue. The running of cows is skelloping; a badger is Mr Teddy, a sparrow spadger. I find I can compose half-sentences, clauses in dialect: I’m being mithered by a jasper (bothered by a wasp); it’s black over Charlie’s mother’s (dark cloud harbinging a storm).

  In a fit of nostalgia I make a list of old Hereford words appropriate to woodland, picked from Winifred Leeds’ Herefordshire Speech and George Cornwall Lewis’ Old Herefordshire Words:

  BIRDS and ANIMALS

  Billy-ploughboy – pied wagtail

  Blue Isaac – dunnock

  Bottle tit – long-tailed tit

  Brock – badger

  Bud-bird – bullfinch

  Can-bottle/cannon-bottle – long-tailed tit (also for a skylark)

  Chooky pig – woodlouse

  Clover snapper – rabbit

  Crane – heron

  Devil’s screecher – swift

  Dishwasher – pied wagtail

  Felt – fieldfare

  Hickol – green woodpecker

  Hoop – bullfinch

  Kitty – whitethroat

  Lady cow – ladybird

  Maggoty pie – magpie

  Mavis – song thrush

  Mumruffin – long-tailed tit (also bottle tit)

  Nettle creeper – lesser whitethroat

  Pie-finch – chaffinch

  Quist/queest – wood pigeon

  Rail – moorhen

  Richard – pheasant

  Spadger – house sparrow

  Stare – starling

  Storm cock – mistle thrush (also thrustle)

  Toby – fox

  Writing lark – yellowhammer

  Yaffil – green woodpecker

  ARBOREAL

  Apple-headed – of a tree where the branches are growing low

  Arl, orl, orle – alder

  Asp – aspen

  Baby’s bottle – wild arum

  Bannut – walnut

  Beechen – made of beech

  Browse – hedge trimmings

  Cag – stump of a branch

  Chat – dead stick

  Cobnut – hazelnut

  Cockshutt – glade
where woodcock were netted

  Coppy – coppice

  Daddock – dead wood

  Devil’s snuffball – puffball

  Ellern, ellan – elderberry

  Ellern blos – elderberry blossom

  Ellum – elm

  Elves’ mittens – foxgloves

  Fearn, vearn – bracken

  Goslings – pussy willow

  Mad Meg – bryony

  Mauple – maple

  Maybush – hawthorn

  Oblionker tree – horse chestnut

  Pank – knock down, especially apples

  Pimrosen – primrose

  Rundel – pollarded tree

  Yimp – small twig

  30 APRIL: Alder trees host the alder gall mite (Eriophyes laevis) which produces tiny, spherical blisters on the upper side of the leaves, green at first, but redder with age. Each blister has a narrow opening on the underside of the leaf through which the mite will leave when mature in the autumn.

  The lower leaves of the paddock alder are poxy with the galls, which is good news for the smaller insect-eating birds, who have picked so many galls the leaves now sieve light.

  This is ‘May Eve’, when Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594–5) takes place; the fairies’ night.

  MAY

  Leaves

  Greenshade – tawny owl young – May Day festivities – cuckoo – Nupend Wood – dawn chorus – mayflies mating – a place to philosophize – the clustered bonnet mushroom – lords and ladies – send in the aurochs – Oak Apple Day – birdsong

  1 MAY: First proper day of greenshade. Buds and leaves bursting. The three tawny young are fluff balls in the ash, at first glance mistaken for rolled-up school socks. One falls to the crook of a lower branch; rescales the heights by climbing by the hook of his bill and the pleasingly homophonic crooks of his claws.

  Mayflies on the pond drop and die like tragic ballerinas. For two years the mayfly lives a grub’s life in the mud of the pond, then emerges for its brief hour of dancing glory, its hour on the stage.