The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  The recipe for Henley’s regeneration worked well. Smart money moved there. A neo-Gothic stately home with 120 rooms, Friar Park, was built on the edge of town close to Badgemore. Sir Frank Crisp (1843–1919), a hugely successful solicitor who lived there from 1889, designed many of its singular features. Crisp was also a microscopist10 who studied those creatures (he would have called them “infusoria”) too small to be included in my inventory of Grim’s Dyke Wood. His house is famous on several counts. Horticulturalists know it for its astounding rockery, built to resemble the Matterhorn. Jackie went to a primary school there run by nuns of the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco when the building was no longer owner-occupied. She recalls light switches made in the likeness of friars’ noses that had to be tweaked every time they were turned on or off. The house was dotted with anti-clerical jokes, which the nuns apparently did not resent at all. There were mysterious grottoes, even underground lakes (out of bounds). The remarkably elaborate house is most illustrious, however, as the home of the Beatle George Harrison, who bought it in 1970, and lovingly restored it. His widow still lives there. Only modern pop aristocracy could afford to maintain such a fantastical monster. I regret that I have never had a chance to see it for myself.

  While the Stapleton family lingered on at Greys Court in charge of our wood, there was change at Fawley Court. Although it is a digression, I have to mention Hugh Edwin Strickland, a renowned geologist and naturalist who spent his formative years at Henley Park, more or less opposite Lambridge Wood on the northern side of the Fair Mile. The house was part of the Fawley Park estate, and still stands today; it was originally the dower house for the mansion of Fawley Court by the Thames.11 During the 1820s, between the ages of eleven and seventeen Hugh learned the rudiments of the natural history that would become his life. He was already a prodigious collector. Strickland Freeman, the nephew of Sambrooke Freeman, who then owned and lived in Fawley Court, was himself an equine anatomist and botanist, and would surely have encouraged the young enthusiast. There is no way to prove that Hugh wandered through Grim’s Dyke Wood, but what budding naturalist would not thoroughly explore the woods within a mile of his home territory? He made notes on the snails around Henley that would one day be the subject of a scientific publication.

  I cannot help but identify myself at the same age with young Strickland—a time when it is possible to know everything: all the flowers, birds, moths, fungi, stones; even the very microbes. Young naturalists are probably a curious sport of nature, like musicians with perfect pitch, and they do conform to type in their essentials. I suppose now they would be called “nature nerds,” but there is something heroic about such enthusiasm to tackle the impossible. There is simply too much diversity in the world for a single head. Strickland had a good try: he published extensively on birds, geology and many other aspects of natural history, and helped set down the “rules” for scientific naming of animals that we still use today. Another small connection I can’t pass over: a fossil brachiopod named for him Stricklandia was a contemporary of my “own” animals, the trilobites. Hugh Edwin Strickland met a tragic end in 1853, killed by a train as he examined a rock section alongside the tracks near Hull. His watch had stopped at twenty-nine minutes past four.

  In the same year as the naturalist’s untimely death, the Fawley estate passed from the Freeman family and their relatives—itself a process not without complications—into the ownership of the Scottish railway entrepreneur Edward Mackenzie, brother of the brilliant civil engineer William Mackenzie. Trains inevitably seem to dominate our story for a while. The new owner was installed in time to see the Great Western Railway transform his new home town just a few years later. The Mackenzies were largely self-made: theirs was new money for new times. Edward’s son Colonel William Dalziel Mackenzie inherited the estate in 1880; I have already mentioned his purchase of the land right up to the edge of Lambridge Wood. On the Fair Mile he donated land for the creation of an isolation hospital, financed by W. H. Smith, the stationer, who now owned the Hambleden estate (yet more smart money). Nothing illustrates the difference between the Freemans and the Mackenzies better than their family mausoleums in the graveyard of the old parish church at Fawley. The Freemans’ is classically modelled in Jurassic stone topped with a cupola; the Mackenzies’ an austere, dark, oblong granite construction engineered to last.

  The seal on Henley’s revival in the age of steam was the Royal Regatta. It is still the signature of the town. A regatta course is possible because the Thames is unusually straight between Temple Island and the bridge, like a Fair Mile on the water. The first Oxford vs. Cambridge boat race was held on this stretch of river in 1829, presumably because it was both suitable and accessible to eights from each university. Although the race moved on to London, the regatta tradition stayed in Henley. By 1839, an event comprising several races overlooked by grandstands and with peripheral entertainments attracted a notably fashionable crowd, especially the nobility dutifully recorded in the Oxford Journal. Stewards were appointed to oversee the events, as they do today, including—of course—Lord Camoys. Prince Albert was solicited for royal patronage in 1851, and Henley Royal Regatta was established. The railway brought the crowds six years later. The Prince of Wales and the Kings of Denmark and Greece arrived in 1887. Thirty-four thousand people attended over three days in 1895. The coaching days had never seen such a throng. Emily Climenson called it “the world’s water picnic”: “All sorts and conditions of men and women resort to it in thousands, many not caring a straw for the races, but for the charms of the scenery, the kaleidoscopic glow of colour and form represented by every variety of craft.”

  Henley Regatta, 1896.

  It remains much the same today, with as much jollity as serious spectating inside the enclosures set up alongside the course, and many festive small boats pottering about on the far side of the water. Champagne corks pop, young people fall in the water. Old boys in brilliantly striped blazers greet one another to celebrate survival for another season. Nonetheless, Henley hosted Olympic events in 1908 and 1948, and has been a famous place for international crews to test their relative strengths ever since. The Leander Club on the far side of the bridge is the leading rowing organisation just about anywhere, and home to Britain’s best competitors: it boasts more Olympic medals than any other club in the world. The only problem is that there are no longer enough local hotels since the nineteenth-century “slump.” Henley residents host crews for the Royal Regatta, so for one week our house is full of muscular giants from Cambridge University. Pasta consumption quadruples to supply slow-burning carbs.

  The meaning of the landscape around Henley was changing. The annual Regatta shindig had no interest in woods as a productive resource, but rather as one component of an attractive setting. Train services to London meant a new class of commuters could work in the city and return at the end of the day to comfortable villas on the south side of town. Sir Frank Crisp could receive his clients at home. The connection to London that had been important since before medieval times now had nothing to do with exchange of goods, but rather with the direct transfer of money and people. The Civil Parish of Henley was redrawn to accommodate new housing and eliminate part of the ancient “strip” of Rotherfield Greys that ran down from the hills to ensure river frontage in feudal times. Old affinities were irrevocably severed. Not for much longer were the many ancient paths that crossed the landscape the arteries of daily employment, although they were still there to be reinvented for recreation. Our wood was set to acquire a new role—but not before some dramatic interruptions.

  Snow

  Overnight, several inches of snow have settled in the wood. A slow, steady fall of big flakes has left every holly leaf with a burden of white icing. The tiered branches of the small yews, usually so discreet and dark, are suddenly blatantly arrayed for a winter festival. The tops of even the smallest horizontal beech twigs have been decorated with a snowy crust; it is as if they have been created anew as black-and-white. Beech
trunks have snow plastered on one side, making ad hoc cascades, or shuffled ripples or pressed-on beards. The boles of some trees wear white trousers, and they peel off slightly at the top, as if rolled over.

  It is supremely quiet. Where lumps of snow have tumbled from above on to the blanketed wood floor beneath they have made one of those white-on-white abstract paintings that hang in Tate Modern. Our footprints are the first human ones, but others have gone before us. A hare (could it be the same one?) has lolloped through the wood making pairs of flat ski-prints with its long back limbs, and dints ahead of them.12 Neat lines of paw-marks must be those of a fox after wood mice. In the time I have owned the wood I have never set eyes on Mr. Fox himself; his town cousins are far less cautious. A scuffle under the King Tree has cleared away the snow and revealed the leaves—is this evidence of his search for prey? I have heard mice at work under the nearby holly trees in the autumn. Split-toed muntjac deer prints track across the clearing—in search of any green shoot, I imagine. All these shy creatures are more easily seen from the tracks they have left than met face-to-face. On the snowy wood floor we mammals are all joined together in the democracy of our footprints: pad, paw, hoof and wellington boot, each diagnostic of our species.

  “Argh!” Jackie cries, pointing. “There it is! The orange stuff!”

  She gestures towards an ash trunk. One side of it appears to have been painted bright orange, a shade rendered almost garish in contrast to today’s snowy background. There is more of it elsewhere in our wood, but particularly in the patch of Lambridge Wood adjacent to our own, where it gaudily decorates beech trunks over several yards. “I don’t like it…there is something sinister about it,” Jackie mutters. “I’m sure there’s more of it than there used to be.” The patches are clearly organic, so my first thought is that they must be produced by some kind of lichen. Now that we have been made aware of the orange thing, whatever it is, it does seem to be common. Hardly a country stroll is possible without my wife protesting about it taking over. “See!” she cries, as if it is somehow my fault. “There it is again.” Microscopic examination proves that it comprises yellow algal threads. It is a species called Trentipohlia abietina, common as one of the partners in the lichen symbiotic association, but perfectly happy to live on its own. As so often in nature, the yellow pigment is a carotenoid, and probably protects the alga from solar radiation, which is why it can live in such open positions. I shall have to add a small piece of this stained bark to the collection. I cannot find a particular reason to find it more sinister than, say, the green alga Desmococcus olivaceum, which I often find as a bright, dusty-looking crust on the shady side of the boles of our beech trees. That species looks as if somebody spilled some of the old-fashioned green powder paint we used in school.

  Trentipohlia is assuredly more noticeable. My wife is not alone in her conviction. Several naturalists have gone online to point out a similar phenomenon in their patch; it is extraordinary how the Internet allows observations to be shared so quickly. The orange paint may well be spreading. My algal friends are not sure why. It may be that Trentipohlia—like some lichens—is becoming more common as sulphur air pollution declines, or possibly it is encouraged by those unseen sources of nitrogen which are proving bad for fungi. I dread the thought of all our smooth and shining beech trunks becoming robed in unsubtle orange.

  As we leave the wood, a small rodent, probably a bank vole, scuttles desperately along the road in front of us before apparently diving into a snowdrift. It is the only living creature we have seen today. My wife says it is probably running away from the orange invasion.

  11

  February

  The Moss Man Cometh

  Beech trees and holly bushes are suddenly full of small birds. Long-tailed tits signal to one another with sibilant whistles, blue tits chatter wheezily, and I spot finches somewhere in the mix as well. They all flit restlessly from branch to branch, bobbing acrobatically, possibly in pursuit of hardy midges that have appeared with warmer temperatures. Hanging together must increase their chances of foraging success. The ambient light is as bright as it could possibly be, and although there is no sign of any fattening buds, an intangible message is passing through the trees that winter will not last forever. Lengthening days signal to dormant plants, stirring them into action. Teams of fat wood pigeons work together through damp leaf litter under the trees. For once, they are living up to their name; the prevalence of these birds on my own vegetable patch suggests they should have been dubbed “garden pigeons.” They have an air of plump self-satisfaction about them—a puffed-up busyness—that makes me want to take them down a peg or two, and not solely in revenge for my broccoli plants. Their white ring of neck feathers like a clerical collar increases my irritation, giving them a holier-than-thou gloss. Yet when I walk towards them, they rise as one bird and flap away with short wingbeats to a part of Lambridge Wood where they will not be further disturbed. They are as smart as they look. I wonder what they seek: possibly a few beechnuts missed in the autumn feeding frenzy. On the fields beyond the wood, grey fieldfares all the way from Scandinavia peck at tiny seeds to help see them through the toughest time of the year. In this season it does not pay to be too fussy.

  Winter branches, Grim’s Dyke Wood.

  Much of the wood still sleeps through the winter, but for some of its inhabitants the top season of the year is right now. Ridges of earth thrown up next to ruts, larger flints lying on the edge of Grim’s Dyke, bare soil, boles of trees and many of the higher parts of the trunks are decked out with green patches in a dozen subtly different shades. Feathery yellow-green whiskers climb up the stems of ash saplings. Crisp little shoots run over the surfaces of the old pine woodpile, and their tips shine almost silvery in this light. A round cushion of deep green offers a tempting seat by the wayside, but I know from experience that actually sitting on it will soak my backside. Mosses thrive everywhere, rejoicing in the abundant winter light freely given to them while the beech trees are dormant. In hot summer they are often no more than crispy patches, easily overlooked. But now they cannot be ignored, and it is obvious that there are many different species. In my naïve enthusiasm for the Grim’s Dyke project, I thought I could identify them for myself, and requested as my February birthday present a thick handbook of all the British species, published by the British Bryological Society. I soon found myself floundering; there are a lot of different mosses, and most of their differences are subtle. I need help.

  Peter Creed knows all about mosses and liverworts. As befits his specialism, he is a gentle soul. He moves through the wood with that special kind of intense concentration I have seen in so many naturalists. I imagine the same stance adopted by Aboriginal trackers in the Australian outback, able to spot the signs that a goanna had passed by two days previously. Liverworts are little more than creeping, branching, photosynthesising pads; many botanists believe that something rather like a liverwort made the first colonisation of land from the waters more than four hundred million years ago. I am used to seeing relatively flamboyant, crimped species growing along damp banks, but Peter points them out to me in my own patch, where I had missed them completely. Creeping over damp surfaces of the rotting pine pile, a green film resolves under my lens into flat shoots a few millimetres wide with “leaves” on either side—I am told this is crestwort (Lophocolea heterophylla).

  I can forgive myself for missing this pretty little species, but I have a harder time to pardon my failure to spot liverworts on the trunks of beech trees. Peter finds one tree on the edge of the clearing with lots of pale-green patches closely pressed on the trunk—my hand lens reveals most of them to be made of flat, almost seaweed-like, forking strips, the yellow-green thalli of forked veilwort (Metzgeria furcata). A flatter-looking scalewort (Radula complanata) is growing on the same tree, like a series of tiny overlapping green tiles. Then, higher on the tree, what looks hardly more than a cobweb is the smallest plant I have ever seen, with shoots a few millimetres long, but with rou
nd “leaves” on either side of the midrib which must be about a quarter of a millimetre in diameter, like a string of minuscule peridots. If Peter had not pointed out this plant to me, I would have passed it by forever. “Fairy beads,” he tells me. “Microlejeunea ulicina. Generally more typical of the wetter western parts of Britain.” So that makes three species of liverwort on one tree, and I had missed them all! The surprise is that they seem to be able to grow even where there are no mosses, as trailblazers on tree trunks. I had thought that liverworts were inhabitants of damp corners. They are more adaptable than I realised.

  We move on to look at old tree stumps, which are richly decorated with enough moss to turn them into upholstered stools. Rough-stalked feather moss (Brachythecium rutabulum) is the commonest decorator here, thickly covering the surface almost like shag-pile, with pointy tips of the growing shoots much paler, bordering on silver. This species is mixed in with the commonest moss in the wood, which, thanks to the guidance of my kindly moss man, I now observe growing just about everywhere, even climbing along twigs near the ground: common feather moss (Kindbergia praelonga) has shoots that resemble miniature, delicate fern fronds. Peter tells me to check the differing shapes of the minute leaves on stem and branches with my hand lens. Some of the patches of this moss bear capsules that carry the spores; they rise on slender red stalks from the sides of the shoots, looking very much like elegant swans’ heads, complete with bill. A third moss is almost as common, cypress-leaved plait-moss (Hypnum cupressiforme), which does resemble tiny matted shoots of cypress foliage, as its Latin name helpfully suggests.