by Roger Deakin
Roger Deakin
WILDWOOD
A Journey Through Trees
Contents
Introduction
Part One Roots
Staying Put
The House-sheds: Camping
Study
Part Two Sapwood
The Bluebell Picnic
The Rookery
The Moth Wood
Living in the Woods
The New Forest Revisited
Oak Apple Day
Willow
Shelter
The Sacred Groves of Devon
The Forest of Dean and the Wye
Among Jaguars
David Nash
East Anglian Coast
Mary Newcomb
Driftwood
Part Three Driftwood
The Woods and the Water
Pyrenees
Wild Horses
The Bieszczady Woods
Cockatoo
Utopia
At Leatherarse Gully
The Pilliga Forest
East to Eden
South to the Walnut Forests
Shaydan and Arslanbob
Part Four Heartwood
Suffolk Trees
A New-laid Hedge
Coppicing
Tools and Workshops
Ash
Follow Penguin
Wildwood
Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the River Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in his book. Waterlog, the predecessor to Wildwood, recounts his swimming adventures and has been hailed as a classic of nature writing.
A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are. Mine is to promote a feeling for the importance of trees through a greater understanding of them, so that people don’t just think of ‘trees’ as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.
Roger Deakin
Praise for Waterlog
‘A simply wonderful book … A delightfully eccentric masterpiece’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
‘A delicious, cleansing, funny, wise and joyful book, so wonderfully full of energy and life. I love it’ Jane Gardam
‘Deakin’s evocation of place is superb’ Robert McCrum
‘A triumph of topographical and naturalist writing … to weave environmental and cultural concerns so deftly together in this enchanting and original travel book is a real achievement’ Independent
For Alison
Introduction
For a year I travelled amphibiously about the country, swimming in the wild, literally immersing myself in the landscape and in the elements, in particular the primal element of water, in an attempt to discover for myself that ‘third thing’ D. H. Lawrence puzzled about in his poem of that title. Water, he wrote, is something more than the sum of its parts, something more than two parts hydrogen and one of oxygen. In writing Waterlog, the account of my meanderings, swimming was a metaphor for what Keats called ‘taking part in the existence of things’.
Now it seemed logical to plunge into what Edward Thomas called ‘the fifth element’: the element of wood. Swimming in the Helford River, where the oaks stretch out their branches level with the water to dip into it at high tide, or on Dartmoor, going against the current with the running salmon in the steeply wooded Dart, I realized the logic of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s superb Between the Woods and the Water. In the woods, there is a strong sense of immersion in the dancing shadow play of the leafy depths, and the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon.
It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives.
To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword in the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees. In As You Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes to live in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood, and in Midsummer Night’s Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood ‘outside Athens’ that is quite obviously an English wood, full of the faeries and Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.
Pinned on my study wall is a still from Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage. It shows Victor, the feral boy, clambering through the tangle of branches of the dense deciduous woods of the Aveyron. The film remains one of my touchstones for thinking about our relations with the natural world: a reminder that we are not so far away as we like to think from our cousins the gibbons, who swing like angels through the forest canopy, at such headlong speed that they almost fly like the tropical birds they envy and emulate in the music of their marriage-songs at dawn in the treetops. To begin where I began, my mother’s name was Wood. The third of my father’s three Christian names was Greenwood: Alvan Marshall Greenwood Deakin. My great-grandfather had the timber yard in Walsall: Wood’s of Walsall. So I am one of the Wood tribe, and, although I have read Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders many times over, the story of Marty South, Giles Winterbourne and Grace Melbury always moves me more than anything else I know. I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins. My great-uncle on my father’s side was Joseph Deakin, framed and imprisoned at the age of twenty by Lord Salisbury’s government in 1892 as one of the Walsall Anarchists. He became Librarian at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where he continued his self-education with the help of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other early socialists. He was a true defender of the greenwood spirit of democratic freedom, and I always think of him as belonging to the outlaw tradition of Robin Hood.
In Suffolk, where I live, I have begun to coppice the wood I planted twenty years ago. It is now home to a family of foxes, deer lie up in it, and this year I was proud to discover some discreetly set rabbit snares: I had my first poachers. The wood has come of age. An ancient green lane and a mile of old hedgerows surround my fields. When I first came to Suffolk thirty years ago, I found my Tudor oak-framed farmhouse and spent a year rebuilding it myself. The house was so ruinous that I camped in the garden while I worked, and when I eventually moved in, the creatures and plants that had grown used to wandering in and out through all the holes in the walls just carried on as usual. Swallows still nest in the chimney, bats fly through the upstairs bedrooms on summer nights when the windows are flung open, and a leg count of the household spiders would run into hundreds. At the time of rebuilding, I even had a timber-framed car, the ash-framed Morgan Plus Four. Then I constructed the wooden barn, using oak beams and pegs and no nails. I have a lathe and a workshop in there where I sometimes make furniture and turn wood, mostly into bowls. I once made a living by making and mending chairs, selling them on a stall in the Portobello Road. Later, I worked for Friends of the Earth, campaigning for whales, woods and rainforests, and founded Common Ground, which still champions old orchards and the 6,000 varieties of apple recorded in our land.
The Chinese count wood as the fifth element, and Jung considered trees an archetype. Nothing can compete with these larger-than-life organisms f
or signalling the changes in the natural world. They are our barometers of the weather and the changing seasons. We tell the time of year by them. Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and to connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through the winter. I know of nothing quite as elemental as the log fire glowing in my hearth, nothing that excites the imagination and the passions quite as much as its flames. To Keats, the gentle cracklings of the fire were whisperings of the household gods ‘that keep/A gentle empire o’er fraternal souls’. Most of the world still cooks on wood fires, and the vast majority of the world’s wood is used as firewood. In so far as ‘Western’ people have forgotten how to lay a wood fire, or its fossil equivalent in coal, they have lost touch with nature. Aldous Huxley wrote of D. H. Lawrence that ‘He could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient woodcutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them and a floor after he had scrubbed it was thoroughly clean.’ As it burns, wood releases the energies of the earth, water and sunshine that grew it. Each species expresses its character in its distinctive habits of combustion. Willow burns as it grows, very fast, spitting like a firecracker. Oak glows reliably, hard and long. A wood fire in the hearth is a little household sun.
When Auden wrote, ‘A culture is no better than its woods’, he knew that, having carelessly lost more of their woods than any other country in Europe, the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left. Woods, like water, have been suppressed by motorways and the modern world, and have come to look like the subconscious of the landscape. They have become the guardians of our dreams of greenwood liberty, of our wildwood, feral, childhood selves, of Richmal Crompton’s Just William and his outlaws. They hold the merriness of Merry England, of yew longbows, of Robin Hood and his outlaw band. But they are also repositories of the ancient stories, of the Icelandic myths of Ygdrasil the Tree of Life, Robert Graves’s ‘The Battle of the Trees’ and the myths of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough. The enemies of woods are always the enemies of culture and humanity.
Wildwood is a quest for the residual magic of trees and wood that still touches most of us not far beneath the surface of our daily lives.
Human beings depend on trees quite as much as on rivers and the sea. Our intimate relationship with trees is physical as well as cultural and spiritual: literally an exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen. Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything. Woods have their own rich ecology, and their own people, woodlanders, living and working in and around them. A tree itself is a river of sap: through roots that wave about underwater like sea anemones, the willow pollard at one end of the moat where I swim in Suffolk draws gallons of water into the leaf-tips of its topmost branches every day; released as vapour into the summer air, this water then rises invisibly to join the clouds, and the falling raindrops ripple out into every tree ring.
Part One
ROOTS
Staying Put
While the rest of the world has been playing musical chairs all around me, I have stayed put in the same house for more than half my life. It’s not that I don’t like to wander, but somehow I feel easier in my freewheeling knowing that this place is here, a fixed point. I am located by it, just as Donne’s lovers are the twin points of compasses in his poem A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning:
Thy firmness draws my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The adventures of my mother’s family, the Woods, all nine of them, were the stuff of my bedtime stories. My mother never seemed to read to me but recounted instead the many tales of the Wood tribe. I grew up in a strictly oral tradition of home-grown folklore peopled almost entirely by my mother’s siblings. Welsh Grandma Jones, silver-haired Grandpa Wood, with his one left hand and a steel hook for his right, two dashing uncles and four aunts. My grandparents had upheld our sylvan traditions by christening two of them Ivy Wood and Violet Wood. My mother was always thankful nobody had thought of Primrose.
Wood family history is ingrained in me, just as memory and history are ingrained into the timbers of Walnut Tree Farm. Each post and beam has its own particular story and once grew free. If you take a cross-section of any beam, close study of the pattern of its annual rings by a dendrochronologist would reveal exactly when it grew up from the acorn or the coppice stool, and exactly when it was cut down.
The house sits at a dizzy 174 feet above sea level, enough to keep my patch islanded when the promised flood comes. But I am part-islanded already by a moat and a round cattle pond that juts out into the common, one of twenty-four that are strung around it and connected by an ancient system of moats and drains. The jungled hedges that surround my four meadows comprise a necessary rampart to the winds that cut across the open wheat prairies beyond. They have vaulted the ditches, creating a secret leaf-mould world of ferny tunnels. There’s a little wood too, and an old droving road that flanks the land to the west.
All of this lies on the shores of a great inland sea of rippling grasses that rises like a tide towards haymaking in July, obscuring my neighbour’s farm on its far side. It stretches a mile to the west of this place, the biggest grazing common in Suffolk. So, although the sea is twenty-five miles due east at Walberswick, I can still enjoy some of the pleasures of living beside it: the big skies and wide, dramatic sunsets. In Suffolk we have daydream mountains too: the volcanic cumulus clouds of harvest time.
Why have I stayed so long? Not because I was born here or have Suffolk roots, but because of all the hard work, and the accumulated history. I mean my own, mixed up with the people I love. For three years I taught English at the old grammar school in Diss, putting more roots down among the local students and families who became my friends. There is no more intimate way of getting to know your neighbours than by teaching their children. Then there were the Barsham Fairs and the Waveney Clarion, the community newspaper of the Waveney Valley, which I helped write, plan and distribute, as a whole extended family of us quasi-hippies did, from Diss to Bungay to Beccles to Lowestoft. The rural culture we built together then during the 1970s and early 1980s, based firmly on the values of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Friends of the Earth, Cobbett’s Cottage Economy and John Seymour’s The Fat of the Land, flushed out all the pioneer immigrants busy settling in Suffolk – rough carpenters, dirt farmers, musicians, poets, ditchdiggers and drivers of timber-framed Morris Minor estate cars – and put us all to work together building what for a golden moment became a grand tradition of Suffolk fairs, ephemeral, dreamlike, gypsyish shanty capitals in fields full of folk. Again, it was work – creative, bold, imaginative but at the same time hard, manual and physical – that drew us together. A shared experience of risk too: you never knew what the weather would do or if anyone would turn up at the gate and pay for it all. Dancing and music played a big part. We had our own local heroes, our own Suffolk Bob Dylans and Willie Nelsons, and any number of ceilidh bands sawing away in village halls on Friday nights.
The house was a ruin when I found it in 1969.I noticed a chimney rising just above the treetops of a spinney of ash, maple, hazel, elder, blackthorn, ivy and bramble, and what was left of a cottage orchard of walnut, greengage and apple. Like everyone else in the village, Arthur Cousins, the owner, clearly thought the house had crept away to hide itself and discreetly die, like an old cat. He lived across the fields at Cowpasture Farm with his daughters Beryl and Precious, keeping pigs in the old house downstairs, chickens upstairs. The roof was a patchwork of flapping corrugated iron, and the remaining damp, composting thatch was so verdant with grass and moss it could have been turf. I love ruins because they are always doing what everything really wants to do all the time: returning themselves to the earth, melting back into the landscape. And though it is long since I moved in, n
ature has refused to relinquish all kinds of ancient rights of way through the place.
For several weeks I paid court to Arthur at Cowpasture Farm, and eventually he consented to sell me the house and twelve acres. We went on to become the best of friends, even sharing Heather, a big-eyed Guernsey house-cow, whom we took turns to milk. Arthur was one of the last generation of the old Suffolk horse men. For most of his life he had been an independent timber-hauler with his own gang of heavy horses and carts, plying the roads between Norwich and Ipswich, hauling timber from the woods to the sawmills, timber yards and shippers. He worked hard, saved up and bought his farm before the war, when land was cheap. He still hung hagstones, Suffolk’s flint version of the evil eye, in his stables and cowsheds to ward off the nightmare who might disturb his animals as they slept in their stalls. He was my tutor in husbandry, animal lore and village politics.
Slowly, I stripped the house to its skeleton of oak, chestnut and ash, repairing it with oak timbers gleaned from a barn one of the local farmers had demolished. I lived in the back of a Volkswagen van for a while, then made a bivouac around the big central fireplace and slept beside a wood fire with two cats for company. The hearth became the most sacred, numinous place in the house. It lies at its centre, and is the only part that still opens to the skies. In spring, I moved upstairs into what felt like a tree house, sleeping under the stars as I repaired the open rafters in a perch with a canvas roof. Soon the wood-pigeons roosting in the ash tree at eye level grew used to me. The tree felt then, as it does now, like a guardian of the house, arching up over the roof in a kind of embrace, and I fought the council building inspector tooth and nail to retain it.
I found myself then, as I still do deep down, in love with the place as a ruin and therefore partly at odds with myself as its healer. I liked the way the wattle-and-daub walls, baked by the sun to a biscuit, were cratered all over where they faced south, like the peepholes of a Yemeni city, by nesting mason bees or solitary wasps. I appreciated the inquisitive tendrils of ivy that poked their heads in through the cracks in the rotted windows, fogged green with algae, patterned by questing snails. I welcomed the sparrows and starlings fidgeting in the thatch or under the tin, and the bats that later flitted through the tented open rafters as I lay dozing in bed, limbs aching sweetly from a long day’s labour. I wanted to repair the walls, but at the same time to foster the passepartout menagerie that refused to recognize them. Somehow, through the sum of minor inefficiencies in a handmade wood-framed house, I succeeded.