The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Leaves have spiracles that allow air to get in; a leaf is made from sunlight and wind.

  On my walk, I disturb the moorhen, which makes a low, leg-dangly flight over the water, scarring it.

  A sudden yelp of greater spotted woodpecker. Some birds drop song; this woodpecker always sends its call along a lateral line, because it sings as it flies.

  In the colour tide of the woodland floor: the blue-bells are at their peak, their pomp, their majesty; the wood anemones’ heads droop in acceptance. Only a single anemone is upright, a Canute flower.

  Spruce are the enemy of the bluebell. The latter only grow under trees which let in light; even the larch and beech do this. I propose a ‘euphoria’ as the collective noun for bluebells. I float on mauve air going through them, and their delicate honey smell. Gerard Manley Hopkins looked into a bluebell and saw nothing less than ‘the beauty of Our Lord’. Always the dab hand at neologism, Hopkins invented the word inscape for ‘God’s utterance of Himself outside Himself’.

  A wood pigeon has fashioned a nest by the pig gate; such a jejune, sticks-every-which-way affair, my heart goes out to its maker, as a father’s does to a child setting up home.

  In the old time, people would go ‘a-maying’ today, and bring spring greenery into the home, a declaration that humans and nature should co-exist. John Stow, the Tudor antiquarian, recorded: ‘In the moneth of May, namely on May day in the morning, every man (except impediment) would walke into the sweet meadowes and greene woods, there to rejoice their spirites with the beauty and savour of sweete flowers, and with the noyce of birdes, praising God in their kinde.’

  May Day festivities often turned carnal. Sap rising, and all that. The anonymous pen behind ‘A Pleasant Countrey Maying Song’, c. 1629, versed:

  Thus the Robin and the Thrush,

  Musicke make in every bush.

  While they charme theor pretty notes

  Young men hurle up maidens cotes.

  2 MAY: There is a new sound in the wood, that of rain on full-fledged leaves; it is the shield-beating of Saxon warriors.

  3 MAY: A new sight in the wood. Cuckoos are reclusive birds, but today at dawn-break one flies above my head, close enough for me to see the barred chest. It called (they sing on the wing) as it clipped through the beech grove. And I wonder: how much longer will the cuckoo be the signaller of the English spring? Since the early 1980s cuckoo numbers have dropped by 65 per cent.

  Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

  4 MAY: The cuckoo does not stay.

  But, I thank God, the blackcap arrives, detected instantly by its signature pebble-click call, though I look and fail to see it.

  Under the larch is a pheasant’s egg, pear-shaped and olive – but holed by the beak of a predator.

  In the evening, eleven black swifts rush through the air: small, vociferous crossbows. The swifts are back from Africa, screaming their delight at being here. Welcome home.

  The wood is filling with birdlife. Almost every hollow or rotten-limbed, ivy-covered tree has its nest of blue tits, woodpecker, chaffinch.

  Collect tender oak leaves for oak-leaf wine. Leaves of the oak; quite wrought, ornate, for such a hard-case tree. Like the best of things, the oak has delicacy and strength.

  I once dedicated a book to my son as my ‘English oak’ precisely because, as his eighty-five-year-old great-great-grandmother observed, holding his baby form, ‘He’s strong, but in a nice way.’ She knew what she spoke of. The great-great-grandmother, Margaret, was a farmer’s wife; more, she was herself the female tip of farm stock dating back directly, with no deviations, to the thirteenth century.

  In the avian tower block there are five baby wrens.

  6 MAY: I’ve a meeting in London, so start farmwork at 4.30am. Check the cattle and sheep. Give the lambs some ‘creep’ (wheat concentrate, largely to tame them). Load five sacks of sow rolls (again, wheat concentrate) into the Land Rover, then drive across to Cockshutt, unload, fill the pig troughs. Unappreciative, the pigs snore on.

  I look at my watch. I can risk ten minutes (anyway, I do not care: to be in the wood is my priority) and walk into Cockshutt.

  The joy of dawn in a wood. Bushes are sculpted by imagination and the trickery of mist into creatures: a bear rearing, a tiger pouncing.

  Sun rises to cancel the mist; in the forensic light the trees become reassuringly hard, solid. Friendly.

  Evening, home again, and pass by Cockshutt: the trees revert to shadow, insubstantiality.

  7 MAY: A busman’s holiday, a visit to Nupend Wood, Fownhope, purchased for Herefordshire and Radnorshire Wildlife Trust in 1973 with money raised in memory of Dr A. W. Beech.

  Nupend is the perfect wood; the template, the paradigm. I know it from childhood.

  On this day of sun and rain, Penny and I take the Wye Valley Walk and swing into the top of the wood, where the conifers grow.

  A red helium balloon, blown in from a party, is suspended from a branch and sucks the attention, in the exact same manner of the red buoy in J. M. W. Turner’s ‘Helvoetsluys’.

  Nupend hangs either side of a limestone spine. Parts of the wood were once quarried, giving the affected ground a mesmerizing, convulsed aspect. The last time I saw earth like this was the war-pocked Hill 40, at Ypres. To nature, what difference the shovel or the artillery shell?

  But this is mostly lovely olde woodland, principally of ash and oak, and then giant yews on the ridge, left stranded from pagan-time flood. The yew (Taxus baccata) is, with the Scots pine, our only native tree-conifer. Poor juniper is only a shrub.

  I touch the yews’ peculiar, time-smoothed trunks. On the fingertips they are sea-saturated driftwood.

  Shall we be honest? Woods can be boring, with a claustrophobic, samey, wraparound view. The trees, the trees! Nupend raises the curtain on fresh scene-upon-scene, like in a play: towering oaks, meadow glades crammed with bluebells, firs used by thrushes as minarets, squinting slopes down to the River Wye. The earth sings notes of fox, fungus and fern.

  Under spangles of faerie green-light there are wild strawberries. Pale clay paths radiate off, beckoning. Mud is embossed by deer hooves. Woodpeckers faintly tap the drum of the immense, aged silence. There are early purple orchids; the habitat supports stinking iris: we see its gladioli leaves by the side of the track. (Gladioli, aka gladwyn, Old English for sword.) The track back down to the car is pick-axed deep into the limestone, which forms escorts of crumbling slab walls. I push my fingers into the grey stone, and rip back time: two cockley fossils consecrate the place as truly ancient.

  8 MAY: Dawn chorus in Cockshutt. One five-hundred-year-old folk verse proclaims, ‘In summer when the shaws be sheen/And leaves be large and long/Full merry it is in fair forest/To hear the fowles song.’

  But why do birds sing?

  Orwell, in 1984, asked the same question, when Winston listens to a song thrush with Julia, somewhere in the Home Counties: ‘For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of that lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? … But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculation out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.’

  You see, Orwell was a naturalist. In ‘Why I Write’ he stated his list of loved things hadn’t changed since childhood and these included ‘the surface of the earth’.

  Orwell was never really a socialist. He was a Tory anarchist, the label he himself gave to Swift. In 1984 the proof is there: Winston and Julia are free only in the deep English countryside, outside the reach of the Party and city socialism.

  10 MAY: Raining: Spirograph circles on the pool. Fairy bubbles. Quite musical, with tings, liquid pings. The aniseed smell of ground elder.

  The pool is a luxurious, oily-shimmery Rococo painting.

  I find a broken mallard egg; the low music of breezed lapping water.

  11 MAY:
Dawn chorus II: starts with robin, then blackbird, song thrush, chiffchaff, willow warbler, wood warbler. They merge into a stream of song; I cannot distinguish their individual voices. They sing as one.

  Emily Dickinson: ‘I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.’

  Heat, which releases flies as if they have been thawed from ice. By 1pm very hot, bright, sunny. Butterfly time: peacock, cabbage white, meadow brown all on the wing. A green shield bug settles on a nettle, a blackfly settles on my piece of paper.

  I gawp, actually gawp, at the fairyland beauty, the splashes of sun on the bluebells, all the tones of green.

  A treecreeper, insect in beak, searches the sallow for another. Keeps flying over my head to its nest in the avian tower block. Where exactly? Takes me an hour to locate the spot. The old hobby of egg collecting at least required patience, skill, observation, time. The eggs, six, white with rust splatters.

  Two red kites pass over; in the eclipse the wood coldens. Fantastically, when the kites have flown on, willow warblers sing in the willows. I throw a stick at a cat heading towards the moorhen nest – and raise a pheasant.

  12 MAY: Beltane, in the Old Style calendar. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, of the parish of Clyro (which I can almost see from up a tree in Cockshutt), noted in his diary for 1870: ‘This evening … I ought to have put some birch and wittan [mountain ash] over the door to keep out the “old witch”. But I was too lazy to go out and get it. Let us hope the old witch will not come in during the night. The young witches are welcome.’

  13 MAY: Dawn chorus III.

  4.16am. Still dark, jackdaws over the hill jack.

  4.19. After a stuttering tic-tic a robin, halfway up a hawthorn, performs full phrases.

  4.22. Blackbird and wood pigeon greet the light.

  4.30. Song thrush, willow warbler, blackcap.

  5.00. Chaffinch, chiffchaff, great tit and wrens join in. Crescendo.

  On average, grassland has seventy pairs of breeding birds per hundred acres, a wood four hundred. In a wood at 5am in May one can drown warmly in birdsong.

  The song gradually drains away, leaving only a single stranded wood pigeon, and bluebells glistening in dawn’s amniotic fluid.

  In the evening: chiffchaff in alder, chaffinch in hazel. Both grate on my nerves with piercing two-note calls.

  Bluebells: a dance troupe of ghosts in the evening light; wisps, distant when near. Some have seed heads forming. How quickly nature proceeds.

  Cobbles of light and shade. The trees fatten every day; leaves take time to grow and swell, like the wings of a butterfly. The green of May trees sharpens the blue of the sky; after May, when the leaves are darker, the trees are complement rather than intensification.

  Jew’s ears shrivelled by the sun.

  Gnats wurlitzer two feet above the pool, which is scummy.

  An optimistic buzzard attacks four mallard walking through the wood. A gang of four magpies up to no good in the larch.

  14 MAY: A drop in temperature, especially under the cover of the trees: always take a jumper to a wood till May is out. An orange tip butterfly colours the edge of the pool. Ditto the first red campion of the season. The rosebay willow herb beside the ride has reached a foot in height. Moorhens call from the security of the reeds, though the hen has taken up tenancy of the poolside briar patch for her nest. She shares the thorn fortress with rabbits.

  The cold sun spotlights a dock leaf, to reveal it as skin, with arteries and veins.

  A wind gets up, and the song thrush in the alder sings wild gobbled notes.

  15 MAY: All the trees in full fig, except for the ash; the hawthorn ‘heaped with may’. What a weight of leaves the trees support.

  On the pool, mayflies mating on the wing.

  The anemones gone, finished, as though they had never been.

  In the cracks of an oak’s skin, the caught red hairs of passing cattle. (Not the lustrous hairs of summer, but the rough fluff of the winter ‘rug’.) A great tit descends for them.

  17 MAY: In by the stile, past the so-elegant sweet chestnut, which is a piece of furniture as much as it is a tree. Then the imposingness of beech; a particular atmosphere, orientalist, minimalist. Beech has more presence than any other tree, even oak.

  Golden tails hang from sycamores, sweetly fragrant, and tempting bees with their nectaries.

  18 MAY: Sitting at the bottom of the Wishbone Oak, in the green shade; under a tree is always a place to philosophize. Ask the Buddha. Or John Stewart Collis: ‘In the company of flowers we know happiness. In the company of trees we are able to think, they foster meditation. Trees are very intellectual. There is nowhere on earth we can think so well as in a thin wood resting against a tree.’

  A thought: no one goes to a wood for conviviality. (No, not even lovers; they want privacy. In the lyric line of Keane, ‘Somewhere only we know’.) A wood is a place for solitude, sanctuary. In a wood the only things you should meet are abundant nature and antique tranquillity, the present and the past tenses combined.

  Up in the ash, a woodpecker taps away, as is his nature, and that of his forebears. In Cockshutt Wood. In Cockshutt Wood.

  All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks

  Are life eternal: and in silence they

  Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;

  There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay

  Is the green life of change; to pass away

  And come again in blooms revivified.

  Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,

  And with the sun and moon shall still abide

  Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

  John Clare

  19 MAY: Campions out; the gean still in white flower. From Orcop Hill, Cockshutt appears to contain chimneys billowing smoke. In a wood the gean grows in a lofty column, as opposed to the familiar bulb shape in the garden.

  The oak puts up its high green roof. Primitive myth-makers conceived of trees as the link between earth and sky – and how right they were. Trees draw in water from the ground, and carbon dioxide and sunlight from the air.

  I cut hawthorn, and hazel saplings as fodder for sheep. An ancient rite, hence the multiplicity of ‘Spring Wood’ around Britain.

  Crab-apple trees: the two of them have bridesmaid’s grace, with their long, flowery arms. The wild trees never fail to bloom and fruit.

  Gloriously sunny, the low bright piercing sun through the canopy of dark trees. ‘Shivelights’ was Gerard Manley Hopkins’ neologism for the sharp lances of sunshine through trees.

  20 MAY: Kingcups; flowers gone, the seed heads formed, perfect medieval jesters’ caps.

  On a rotten oak half buried by time (equals: leaf litter) there is an eruption of Mycena inclinata, commonly known as the clustered bonnet or the oak-stump bonnet cap mushroom.

  21 MAY: Rain: a squirrel heads down an ivied sycamore with a fledgling in its mouth.

  The rain and the wind batter the ash leaves, so they shoal, pale belly up. The rain and the wind batter the pool, create shoaling pale waves.

  23 MAY: A cuckoo calls in Hole Wood, once, once only. The resulting silence is as eloquent as any statistic. (In this entire spring in the Wormelow Hundred I hear two cuckoos; a century ago, my forebears would have heard a hundred.) Does anyone still write to The Times to claim the first cuckoo?

  A glimpse of the fox cubs in the evening; their fur changing from brown to the familiar red-orange, and their eye colour from blue to yellow. The vixen now takes them hunting by night. By October their adult life will have begun.

  24 MAY: Lords and ladies coming into flower, a piece of woodland drama. A green sail emerges from the leaf, which unfolds to reveal an erect purple spike. As the season progresses this spike begins to stink like meat, and the tasty odour attracts tiny flies called owl midges. The midges fall through a ring of bristly hairs into the ‘kettle’ beneath the spike, and are trapped because of the hairs. In the kettle are the true male and female flower
s. The midges bring pollen to the female flowers from other lords and ladies, and pick up pollen from the kettle’s male flowers. Eventually the bristles wither and the midges escape to carry the pollen to the next lords and ladies. Arum maculatum was memorably described by Thomas Hardy in Far from the Madding Crowd as ‘like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite’.

  3pm. I scream down the M4 to Daunt’s, Marylebone, to be interviewed by the novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison, in front of a bookshop crowd. We get off to a good if funny start, since neither of us describes ourself as billed, as a ‘nature writer’, she because the term is so broad as to lack meaning, me because I consider myself a countryside writer. Me: ‘My shtick is, I think, obvious. I give the view of the countryside from someone who works there.’

  25 MAY: The sun livens the insects; a greenfly lands on me. I go to snub it out, but what is its offence really? That it tickled? It is not reason enough any more.

  There are now no views through the deciduous trees, due to the inflating of the greenery. Cockshutt is stacked with bird sound.

  Of all the woods in all England, the migrant birds chose this wood, and they blessed it. And me.

  Gobs of cuckoo spit, mostly on nettles but also on the brambles. Yellow flags in the reeds.

  On the way out of the wood I perform the evening check of the pigs, still confined to the paddock.

  I lean on the gate, real yokel style. Pigs have the big-bum, stiff-back-leg walk of hippos. Sly eyes, some of the boars. I’m with Walt Whitman:

  I think I could turn and live with animals,

  they are so placid and self-contain’d,

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  26 MAY: Yesterday I ran six of our red poll through the top of the wood, around the oaks, partly to allow the cows some ‘browse’, partly so they would crap everywhere. How to increase invertebrate numbers in a wood? Send in the aurochs.

  This evening a wood warbler flies off a perch in the oak to catch an insect rising from the cow dung. There are two pairs of wood warblers in Cockshutt, both in the oak grove.

  The Victorian naturalist W. H. Hudson described their quivery song in the leaves as ‘long and passionate … the woodland sound that is like no other’. They are a greener hue than the other leaf warblers, with a bright yellow beak.