Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Now, when everyone wants to travel everywhere and do everything from pottery to writing, trees stand for rootedness. They stay in one place, and we return to them.

  28th June

  The middle field is like a painting just now, an Impressionist, Pointillist painting. Looking out from the shepherd’s hut window there are pools of pink grasses, pools of yellow buttercups, pools of deep green sedges, and the spires of orchids visible here and there, or the dark blue of self-heal, or the white dots of ox-eye daisies.

  I am standing in the ash tunnel, which is now in full growth, or regrowth, again. The sun is filtered through chlorophyll into the green shade of the tunnel interior – the leaves are like green sunglasses, filtering sunlight and UV. When I pleach the ash tree, I have to wound it, and the tree fights back from the wound and forms a callous to heal itself, and the callous grows, cells divide, and it becomes the point of union between two trees, or even three at a time. Over time, these joints become stronger, and the cambium of one tree, and thus its xylem and phloem, begins to grow into another, until the trees are no longer separate organisms but a single being with shared sap and circulation. There are no longer eight separate trees but a single one.

  The average family throws out six trees of paper a year!

  My grandfather literally came up out of the mine and climbed on to the higher level of time-keeping clerk; he then rose still further by becoming a civil servant. His rise was through the class or status system, and the metaphor was his elevation from the social depths of the Walsall and Rugeley Mine.

  (Joe Deakin [Roger’s great-uncle] also was freed to a degree through his incarceration in Parkhurst. Paradox reigns.)

  I indulge my cat – I let her loll all over my notebook, creasing the pages outrageously as she purrs. Because she blesses the page by her complete disregard for literature, so has she completely achieved the present.

  Bib of white, and four white feet,

  Forepaws curled in repose

  Your gloves are on.

  Now an interruption of the reverie

  To attend to some whim of grooming.

  Blessing my words with your bliss,

  Mistress of simple pleasures.

  Dainty dancer and disrespecter of

  Kitchen surfaces, skip from floor

  To breakfast table to work table

  To chest of drawers beside the window,

  And we both peer

  At nature in the garden.

  I have always felt a special allegiance to the skylark, because it gave its name to the first magazine ever to publish my work: our school magazine. Whoever named it must have had in mind that the bird, as it soars and sings, spreads joy and hope everywhere. Recently, the numbers of skylarks have taken a steep dive, and the very mention of the bird, even its song, brings on in me a sense of deep gloom and anxiety about the fate of the wild. There is something pathetic about the few skylarks.

  My very earliest memories are of lying as a baby, underneath leaves with sunlight filtering through because my mother believed that leaves filtered sunlight, allowing the most beneficial of its rays to pass through and nourish me with Vitamin D. ‘Brown as a berry’ was the expression she used to describe the desired effect on my tiny body.

  With plants and trees in woods abroad – say, Kyrgyzstan – I had the feeling you get when you’re in a late-night bus, and you encounter a group of friends you don’t know at all – total strangers – and think you would like to know them; you feel some immediate sense of kinship, that they are ‘your sort’. It is like falling in love with a whole group of people at once.

  Later, once you’ve got to know them by talking, you introduce yourselves (cf. Kavanagh’s poem ‘We were in love before we were introduced’). And it is love.

  I can’t bear to mow my lawn because it would mean mowing all the blueness out of it, the vanishing blues of self-heal, bugle and germander speedwell. They are worth more to me than the neatness of a mown lawn; in truth, I have loathed neatness ever since school – and uniform, and collars and ties, and haircuts.

  A gentle tinkling as the lantern brushes against the ball grass-tops on my way across the hay meadow to the railway wagon at midnight. The dancing shadows in the grass. The deeper darkness inside the wagon.

  July

  Both cats have their special places in the house: particular haunts where they curl up, inside or out in the garden or the fields.

  Millie favours the shelf behind the Aga, or on top of the amplifier on my hi-fi. Alfie makes a beeline for an old cane chair at the kitchen table, or a rug over a big leather sofa that once stood in the Garrick Club.

  Out on the lawn, Alfie has a nest in the long grass, now a perfectly round hollow, and Millie occupies the car bonnet or the iron manhole cover.

  5th July

  Last night, at a quarter past midnight, I was woken by the fox barking continuously, remorselessly, just the other side of the moat in the moat meadow. I could just hear another fox replying in a distant field, or perhaps in Thornham Wood. No sign of tracks this morning. I find that in the recent rain the seed pods of the common vetch have all burst open, revealing what I at first glance took to be jay feathers, but found were the striped insides of the seed pods. They curl open in a spiral and spin the seeds away. Hence the circular pools of vetches in the meadows.

  I encourage them because of their beauty, but also because they fix nitrogen back into the soil through nodules of bacteria that form on their roots. The bacteria are nitrogen-fixing organisms that take the nitrogen from the air and put it in the soil.

  I wear brown corduroy trousers: the nearest thing to the bark of a tree, just short of an out-and-out suit of Lincoln green.

  6th July

  Last night I went into Barn Meadow and picked the seed pods of tufted vetch for Terence and Angela [Sykes] for half an hour. I put them in a brown paper bag and left it on the kitchen table and could hear the pods exploding as they dried out in the warm of the kitchen. I left some on my desk and the same thing happened.

  The twisted pods of tufted vetch on a white sheet of paper on my desk – they twist more as they dry.

  Blackcaps on the roses this morning early. I seem to be one big bruise just now – a huge nine-inch bruise on my thigh where I fell down the barn steps.

  I’m standing in the home meadow in the long grass, listening to the vetch pods cracking open in the sunlight and warmth after a rainy night. The rain has softened them, then the sun has blackened and hardened them, and the stresses in the cells have caused the pods to snap open like little springs and fling out the seeds as they twist into a spiral.

  Everything is going to seed now, including the orchids, and the butterflies have emerged and are flying all over the meadows. Meadow browns, ringlets (lots of them) and commas. Also red admiral and cabbage white, common blue and tortoiseshell. Orange-tips flew earlier. By now there are more meadow browns than ringlets – the reverse of last week’s position.

  Long grass is more mysterious than mown grass. You could be looking straight at a skylark’s nest or a field mouse, a frog or a dormouse nest, and not know it. It is a jungle in miniature.

  I really do want people to come home to a real fire. A nation without the flames of a fire in the hearth, and birds singing outside the open window, has lost its soul. To have an ancient carboniferous forest brought to life at the centre of your home, its flames budding and shooting up like young trees, is a work of magic.

  8th July

  Sunny morning after rain. I find a pale blue self-heal in Cowpasture Meadow. Thistles are in flower, and bees setting up a real hum in the pools of white clover.

  I pick the blackened pods of creeping vetch and crack them open to release the seed, which I sow in the hedge.

  4 p.m. A flower bramble. A bramble in full flower is a great joy to see. The bramble I’m observing is in one corner of my garden, and its flowers are pale pink. It belongs to the tribe of silver-backed leaves, and the joy of it is the great multitude of i
nsects it attracts. There’s a party, a feast, going on here.

  Dozens of butterflies skip about from flower to flower. Apart from the occasional comma, they are all meadow browns and ringlets. The ringlets, dusky-winged and eyed around the borders, open and shut their wings as if to wink. Bumblebees and hoverflies of every kind are humming and busying themselves from flower to flower, the bees rummaging amongst the stamens at a great rate, working with urgent efficiency. The whole bramble bush hums and pulsates with its insects. Behind it, in the denseness of the hedge, a pair of blackbirds fret and cluck over my presence. The coquettish ringlets hardly open their wings except to fly, folding them tightly shut the second they land, only occasionally relaxing them in the ecstasy of nectar.

  A tiny spider drops out of the leaves and walks purposefully across my page. Not one of these insects wastes a moment on squabbling over a flower or jostling for position; instead there’s a kind of dance as each forager gives way to the other. ‘After you’, they seem to say. A blackcap sings sweetly somewhere offstage. And the infuriating, unhappy, neurotic dogs across the field, cooped up in a cage all day, bark incessantly, miserably.

  The six eyes of the ringlet and the single eye of the meadow brown are all camouflage, like the fearsome-looking black and yellow stripes of the hoverflies, mimicking the wasps that should be on this blossom too, but aren’t. Wasps have become a rarity round here. Only hornets are relatively plentiful. Some of the hoverflies even gyrate their abdomens sexily, as if itching to sting. I spot hive bees and at least three or four different kinds of bumblebee.

  All along the hedges of Cowpasture Meadow I hear chiffchaffs, grasshoppers in the field, wind in the tops of the ash, elm and crab apples.

  The shed where the foxes live is completely hidden by a towering bramble, a castle really, animated all over this afternoon in the sunshine by butterflies, bees and hoverflies feasting and ravishing its recently opened pink blossom.

  Within each flower, in the exploding crown of stamens at the centre of its five pink petals, is a little colony of tiny black shiny beetles, pollen beetles, all busy feeding themselves stupid, their iridescent wing cases glinting blue, green and purple-black in the sun. All round each open flower a dozen more buds are balled up in tight fists, ready to open any day now. The foxes are probably asleep inside this citadel, for all I know.

  Foxes love to lie out on patches of soft sheep’s fescue (Festuca ovina). A long-bodied ichneumon fly explores the bramble patch. Sturdy green seed pods of bee orchids. Bundled webs full of infant spiders.

  It is a Saturday afternoon, and because it’s so dull I’m working in my study with the lights on. I have just written the word ‘dragonfly’ in my e-mail to Rob Macfarlane. (Not enough of them to eat the horseflies. An emperor dragonfly can eat 2,000 flies a day.) A moment later, a real emperor dragonfly sails into the room, buzzes right round it and approaches the light. I switch it off, and the dragonfly zooms out again.

  I’m not lonely here because I feel so connected to the trees, the house, the meadows, the birds, the insects. I also feel connected to my friends. But I believe that so many people are so cut off from all the other things, the trees, etc., that it is good to make a small compensating gesture in my life and relate to them if I can.

  I was seventeen when a policeman came to our door and told me my father was dead. Well, actually what happened was that my father didn’t come home on his usual train and my mother was already worried, pacing the kitchen, filling the house with foreboding.

  The policeman said, ‘May I come in?’ There were two of them, for solidarity, I suppose, on a difficult mission. My father had been found, dead, on a Bakerloo Line tube train at Euston Square Station. He died less than a mile from where my great-uncle Joe had been arrested in the Tottenham Court Road in 1892. Both policemen took off their helmets and turned them round and round by the brim as they spoke. Their overwhelming dark blue bulk filled the sitting room of our tiny bungalow, displacing something, making my mother and me feel very small and insignificant. I was sent to identify the body at the coroner’s office across the churchyard of the little church at St Pancras behind the station. When I got there, the kindly coroner’s assistant spared me the experience, so I never saw my father dead. He just went out that morning and disappeared out of my life. It felt odd, as well as sad. After a couple of days at home making awkward efforts to support my mother, I returned to school still wearing a black armband, as people did in 1960, and my embarrassed friends avoided my eye. It was almost as though I myself had died, so ghostly, so invisible, did I feel.

  Thus did I acquire my sense of loss – a deep-seated feeling that has followed me around all my life and that I’ve never shaken off.

  Last Sunday I counted twenty angels in the roof of Southwold Church and thought today of Skelton’s ‘Ware the Hawk’, and how the rector caught one of his flock flying his hawk in the rafters of his church, amongst the angels and the Green Men.

  Driving home from Southwold, I passed four live hedgehogs and one dead one, just killed on the road. I stopped to let one pass, switching off my lights to prevent its being dazzled. Two or three hares too, along the road from Bramfield to Walpole, eyes extra big at night, loping into the darkness.

  The amazing hedge along the road that runs direct from Walpole to Blyford like a railway narrow-gauge line, which cuts into the bank of the Blythe River in its headwaters. Stunning mix of elm, oak, holly, hornbeam, like a wine glass flattened, like a plant pressed in a book, from years of hedge-laying.

  We mutilate these trees and still they come back looking ever more beautiful.

  The elms are returning everywhere–and ancient oaks on the lanes around Foals Green. Yellow bedstraw, agrimony, purple loosestrife, rosebay willowherb, in all the hedgerow banks.

  10th July

  Last night I watched a newt trekking across the rugs on my study floor, pausing now and again, as if playing Grand-mother’s Footsteps, freezing in mid-stride, poised. It crawled in a straight line, and I left it alone: it seemed to know what it was doing. It is only just July, but the newts are already out of the water and taking up winter quarters. The nights are getting shorter. The newt is a realist.

  My house was once an acorn.

  It is the hottest night of the year so far, and I sit here in my study with the door and all the windows thrown open to the garden. It is 10 p.m. and darkness has just fallen, yet hardly a moth or beetle flies in towards the bright lights on my desk. Twenty years ago there would have been hordes of them. Is it too early for crickets? Perhaps it is, but there is a silence outside that I don’t seem to recognize as I look ‘out into the surrounding night of nature’, as Platonov says.

  Rufus and Emily [Deakin, Roger’s daughter-in-law] drove over from Bristol. Rufus and I walked out over the common close to the house in the evening after the hay had been turned and baled.

  Magpies and crows flew up as we appeared, and we found dead and dying frogs, and live ones too, jumping towards the perimeter of the common. Also dozens of froglets, and toadlets all hopping in the grass, suddenly exposed and very vulnerable.

  Black slugs, rather smart ones with fluted abdomens, were gliding about on the hay left over on the grass stubs.

  If the grass-cutters hadn’t been set so close to the ground, fewer frogs would have been killed.

  All this shows how important the line of trees is in keeping the sun off that part of the common and keeping it damp for amphibians.

  I’ve put some waterweed and duckweed from the moat into my al fresco outside bath, and I’m observing the water creatures in it. It’s surprising how sprightly the water snails are, almost skipping about between fragments of duckweed as they feed on little microbes of algae.

  12th July

  The Give and Take Lawn – mow round circles of white clover for the bees. In a single disc of clover ten feet wide, at least a dozen to twenty bumblebees, nearly all orange-bummed Bombus lapidarius, working in the sunshine.

  I have been cat-scra
tched so many times by brambles that I ought to hate them, but instead I love them. The brambles must have drawn gallons of blood from me in my lifetime, all in drops oozing from the vicious barb-wounds that heal up and scab in no time, so you hardly think about it.

  In fact, I always think about the passage in Little Big Man where Jack Crabb describes the initiation of the young Cheyenne braves. Brambles are hooked on to their thighs by the barbs and weighted with logs, so they had to wade about the camp towing the laden bramble-ropes, gritting their teeth as the thorns tore into their flesh and ripped their legs to scar tissue.

  People ask how a writer connects with the land. The answer is through work. Look at John Clare, working on the land, knowing it by working on it and being in it for years from earliest childhood. Look at Alice Oswald, working as a gardener for six years, living in Devon and not owning a car, so she walks and bicycles everywhere. Look at Ted Hughes or Henry Williamson, both farming and living with animals.

  And when we work on the land, what is our connection with it? Tools, and especially hand tools. Much can be learnt about the land from the seat of a tractor, the older and more exposed the better, but to observe the detail, you must work with hand tools.

  Millie. You’re a passionate little person – you sit on my table, and when I speak kind words to you, you purr. When I stroke you with kind words, you purr even louder than when I stroke you with my fingertips. And when a train goes by at the end of the fields, or a magpie calls, your ears swivel and focus all on their own, each ear moving independently. So one ear listens to a wood pigeon and another to the slight whirring of the fridge.