by Roger Deakin
Apart from the occasional statuesque old pollard, ash seemed relatively scarce in Highbury Woods, but high up near the lime quarries we found an ash and a birch that had grafted themselves together, joined at the trunk, locked in an arboreal embrace. Deep in the heart of the woods we found an unusually tall hollow oak and the scorch mark of a small fire before it. This was quite likely a sign, we decided, of some Beltane fire-leaping ceremony before the oak. On my way over, I had received an account of the light-hearted rituals of the Cheltenham Pagan Gourmet Witches, a group of eight or nine self-confessed ‘lardy women of a certain age’, whose custom it is to go out into the woods and countryside of Gloucestershire and celebrate the old seasonal festivals, always provisioning themselves with a generous picnic of the choicest delicacies and fine wines. They are, of course, careful not to cause any damage, and do their Beltane fire-leaping, I was told, over a modest fire in a cake tin. George said he had occasionally encountered women in these woods during his nature rambles, sitting under trees playing flutes or recorders. According to my informant, these gatherings of the Cheltenham Ladies are entirely good-humoured occasions full of hilarity and not in the least secretive. She described a recent outing to the tall, creaking pines on May Hill outside the town, where the Gourmets danced to a recorded tape before arranging themselves into the shape of a star and lying together under the trees gazing up at the emerging night sky, keenly observed from the long grass of the ridge by an ill-concealed group of Borstal boys from the nearby institution.
I asked George what he thought of the assertion I had heard from a forester in Oxford a day or two earlier that none of our native trees would be able to survive in Britain by the end of the century because of the effects of climate change. The notion had also found its way into the Independent as the basis for a feature, the idea being that, far from planting our local varieties of trees, we had better start importing cultivars from the countries of Eastern Europe, where the trees are used to hot, dry summers and cold winters, or more southern versions of the oak or beech. George considered the whole notion complete nonsense. It ignored, he thought, the resilience of our trees and the past fluctuations in our climate they have successfully withstood.
Looking down towards the Wye, George talked about the way trees have influenced the course and history of rivers. Fallen trees form dams or riffles. Gravel and detritus accumulate around them to create shoals or pools, increasing the diversity of habitat in the river. Beavers used to do the same sort of work, but they were last recorded on the River Teifi in 1188 by Giraldus Cambrensis, and in Scotland, according to George. Dead or dying wood is a vital component of woodland ecology often missing in contemporary woods that are managed and cleared. There is simply too much management and not enough informed neglect. Of all the many species our natural woodland can potentially support, George thought about a fifth originally depended on dead or slowly dying wood or on the fungi that live in trees and dead wood: the beetles, woodlice, spiders, larvae and other invertebrates collectively termed saproxylics. Woodland ecologists now talk a great deal about the need for more of what they call Coarse Woody Debris. Francis Kilvert, writing his diary upriver at Clyro in April 1876, calls it ‘fallow wood’: ‘We came tumbling and plunging down the steep hillside of Moccas Park, slipping, tearing and sliding through oak and birch and fallow wood of which there seemed to be underfoot an accumulation of several feet, the gathering ruin and decay, probably of centuries.’ This kind of vintage rot, and the kind that spreads gradually into old living pollards, hollowing their trunks and crowns to the point where they are what Kilvert calls ‘dottards’, is particularly rich and valuable in a wood, because it contains older woodland species of wood-feeders, many of which have been rendered locally extinct by being literally tidied out of existence. Unlike birds or moths, these are animals which cannot easily spread from one wood to another, so once lost in a particular wood they cannot recolonize it and are gone for ever. This is yet another reason for the need for retaining and valuing ageing and ancient trees. Most healthy trees have dead branches by the time they reach 150, and by the time they reach 250 to 300 years of age it is perfectly normal for them to have developed the hollow trunks, boles and dead branches that are home to a rich world of fungi and invertebrate life.
In Natural Woodland, George Peterken has documented the extraordinary diversity of species that can be living in a forest or wood. The Bialowieza Forest in Poland is reported, he says, to contain 11,000 animal species, including 8,500 insects, 206 spiders and 226 species of birds. Animals greatly outnumber plants, but there are still 900 species of flowering plants, 254 mosses, 200 lichens and an estimated 1,000 species of the higher fungi. By comparison, the far smaller Monks Wood Nature Reserve in Huntingdonshire still contained, in 1973, 372 flowering plants, 97 mosses, 34 lichens and 337 fungi. Its 2,842 animal species, all but 149 of them invertebrates, also outnumbered the plants. These can only be approximate figures, because woodland conditions are changing all the time. So too is the understanding of fungi as more and more are identified, but their crucial role in the lives of woods and trees has yet to be fully revealed. Leaving trees to lie where they fall should they blow over is the least that foresters can do to help conserve a more natural balance and diversity of life in the woods.
As we scrambled downhill again, braking our descent by briefly hugging the trunk of each tree in our path, George talked about the year he and Sue spent in New England, and the Massachusetts woods of Thoreau. Everywhere in the woods there, they would come across ruined farmsteads and old stone field walls hidden in ivy and encrusted with moss. St Briavel’s Common, said George, is the only landscape like it in Britain, concealing everywhere within its woodland the signs of the old agricultural landscape.
In Hewelsfield churchyard further down the green lane, I squeezed inside the hollow of the thousand-year-old yew and looked up into the lantern of its twisted trunk, illuminated like the inside of a dovecot through the perforations where long-dead boughs once emerged. Yet the tree was in full foliage and blackbirds were sampling the first of its ripe pink berries.
Among Jaguars
It might have been a library, and the studious-looking people in white coats librarians or archivists moving bundles of old manuscripts about very carefully, leafing through them, or settling to pore over them at well-lit desks. At the Jaguar factory in Coventry, 160 cabinet-makers were at work in two shifts, day and night, selecting and cutting out the shapes of delicate walnut veneer for the dashboards and door panels of the higher animals – ‘cars’ seems too mundane a word – that have all evolved from the feral SS Jaguar 100 sports model of 1936, with its sweeping wings, wire wheels, knock-on chrome hubs and immense, dashing bonnet louvred like a cheese grater, a seemingly endless perspective, viewed from the driver’s cockpit.
These days the cars are full of plump upholstery and chubbier, like the well-fed executives or politicians who drive, or are driven, in them. Each new model advances gracefully along the production line like Tarzan in a suit and tie. Modern Jaguars still belong to what Roland Barthes calls ‘the bestiary of power’, but they have evolved from a primitive to a classical form, a process first described in Barthes’s essay on the new Citroën DS, written when it made its first dramatic appearance at the Paris Motor Show in 1955. He believes that modern cars are the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: ‘the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object’. Barthes sees that mythology is the key to understanding the world of cars: that, considered as objects, they are ‘messengers of a world above nature’. The new Jaguars on the production line were infinitely smoother and more luxurious than their ancestors in the company’s museum next door. The XJ120, introduced in 1948, brilliantly emulated the graceful wave-motion of the leaping Panthera onca in the forests of the Amazon. The impression it created was primarily animal, and yet, like its feline ment
or, it luxuriated in the possession of surplus reserves and the effortless elegance that went with them. Just to have been passed by one in the street as a schoolboy conferred a kind of benediction and a temporary rise in one’s status in the class. ‘I saw an XJ.’ ‘Golly! What colour? Can I sit next to you?’
In our less adventurous times, the appeal of a new Jaguar is more homely. ‘Inside the welcoming cabin of the XJ,’ says the brochure, ‘you’re cocooned in a heady mix of luxurious leather and polished walnut veneer’, and in the 3-litre XJ6 model and the XJ8, ‘Burr walnut veneer fascia and door trims are matched with the walnut and leather steering wheel and walnut gearknob.’
Why is ‘walnut’ such a potent word in the copywriter’s vocabulary? Its roots lie in the Old English Walhhnutu and the Old German Walhoz. That first syllable, wal, is related to the Old English wale, which evolved into weal, as in commonweal, and then became wealth, in the sense of well-being as much as possession. No doubt the well-being, in both body and pocket, referred originally to the benefits of the nuts. But walnut inside a car still denotes wealth. It also stands for a tradition of craftsmanship and, by extension, engineering. It looks back to the very best English cabinet-makers. Until the eighteenth century, walnut was the most prized of woods, sought for its hardness, its rich shades of brown and its intricate grain patterns, but during the early 1700s a run of bitterly cold winters spread across Europe, culminating in the winter of 1709, when temperatures sank below –20°C and walnut trees everywhere froze to death. Walnut timber had become so scarce by 1720 that the French banned all exports to conserve their depleted stocks. Faced with the crisis, the English furniture-makers turned to mahogany from the tropical colonies, and were so delighted with its fine grain, strength and resistance to decay that it soon caught on as the new fashion.
Walnut, however, remains the more beautiful wood, and the relative rarity of burr veneer also imparts a sense of individuality to the Jaguar owner. Burrs are found only on large, old trees, perhaps one in a thousand. They are like pearls in oysters. The veneer used in Jaguars comes from the old walnut orchards of the valley of the Sacramento River in California. The trees are Persian, or English walnuts, Juglans regia, grafted on to black walnut stock, Juglans nigra. A burr, if it grows, will tend to develop around the graft at the crown of the root and in the base of the trunk, swelling it like a sprained ankle. Walnuts have huge tap roots, and their confluence with other roots at the meeting with the trunk is like a tide line, where things change and struggle, and leave the signs. Trees with burrs at least sixty to seventy years old are uprooted, not felled, because the best of the burr, its finest, most intricately figured grain, is in the crown of the root where it becomes the trunk. Burrs will grow higher up the trunks of old trees too, like pot bellies. I had seen the scars left by the English burr-poachers who came to the Ferghana Valley in Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s. Like any trade in things of great value, the walnut-burr business is no stranger to skulduggery. Burrs, which are sold by weight, are sometimes covertly soaked in water to raise their apparent value. They vary so much that there are no standard prices. Each one must be haggled over, sometimes with great passion, often in remote places. Dave Condon and Brian Pearce, who showed me round the Veneer Manufacturing Centre at Jaguar, told me that in the past, buyers from Jaguar searching out burrs in California have had the occasional gun pulled on them in the course of their work.
Once uprooted, the burr log is scraped clean and weighed like the vegetable it is. Then it is boiled to prevent it splitting, rotated on a machine like a pencil-sharpener, and veneer half a millimetre thick comes peeling off the blade. The veneer is sliced off the burr, not sawn. Leaves of veneer three or four feet long and two or more wide are bound together in bundles of twenty-four in the same sequence as they were cut. Each one is barcoded in number order, so the grain can be exactly ‘mirror-matched’ inside each new car. In its raw state each leaf of veneer feels like suede, and the symmetry of the grain in the sequence in which they are ‘bookleaved’, as they say in the trade, is very striking.
In Oxford, Dr Peter Savill, who works on walnut in the Plant Sciences Department, had told me that a well-established firm of fine furniture-makers in Ipswich had recently bought a large walnut tree from the Queen’s Sandringham estate for £5,000. By the time it had been converted to veneer, the tree’s total value had increased to £50,000. It is not unusual for the uncut root boles of walnuts to change hands for anything up to £10,000. They can be enormous. One specimen, garnered in California in 1980, is reputed to have weighed 4,000 pounds and produced 12,000 square feet of veneer. Once cut, the leaves of veneer must be kept damp to prevent them cracking. As they move through the factory, you see people gently spraying them, like hairdressers, with purified water to keep them in condition.
The burr is an excrescence of would-be buds rising from somewhere deep inside the tree like a spring. When cut across the grain by the giant pencil-sharpener as the buds bubble towards the bark of the tree, their turbulence is displayed, with every little eddy and vortex held perfectly still. A burr may arise as a reaction to some itch in the tree, a kind of benign wood tumour. There is an outburst of mad cell division, and elephantiasis sets in. What begins as a disfigurement ends life as an opulent adornment. A frog is revealed as a princess. Cutting the light a thousand ways in its eyes and prisms, the veneer is a celebration of the tree’s pent-up energy in a whirling wood-dance.
The Jaguar veneer-cutters all sat under bright lights calculating, with the help of computers, how to make the most economical use of each leaf of veneer and match it with the grain of its twin, the next one in the bundle, to create a perfectly symmetrical pattern on the dashboard or the entire central console of a sports Jaguar. Watching these skilled people at work, I couldn’t help feeling that the mother tree had somehow given up a secret. I was witnessing a form of taxidermy. Whatever secret anguish had created the burr was now on display, coopted as a sign of the genius that created the car, part of the stage-set for some future performance of, say, the Monteverdi Vespers on the in-car stereo at 120 mph on the Autostrada.
Each car consumed six and a half square feet of the precious burr veneer. I watched as the car-shapes of walnut were bedded gently on foundations of three strata of poplar veneer, each laid with its grain at right angles to its neighbour. The wooden sandwiches were cunningly moulded under pressure to the metal contours of the dashboard, door panel or gear console in a press, and cooked at 140 °C for five minutes. Grinling Gibbons, the great woodcarver of the seventeenth century, would have been astonished. Now the veneered components were sanded, polished, varnished, sanded smooth again and fine-polished twice. ‘It is well known’, says Roland Barthes, ‘that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science fiction are made of unbroken metal.’
‘My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.’ I fought down the insistent thought of Alan Bennett’s lines in the sermon in Beyond the Fringe as I stood in the cathedral hush of the Jaguar assembly lines during the morning tea-break. Everything about these cars was the essence of smooth. Walnut is so close grained that it takes a high polish better than any other wood, imparting to the Jaguar cockpit the rich glow of a classic violin. There is even something nut-like about the neat way the doors open to admit the driver into a soundbox in which the roar of the engine has also been smoothed to a subtle purr. Deeply burnished, the dark-brown swirling smoke patterns of the veneer’s grain suggested an old master. I sat grandly in the cockpit, and was aware of more than a hint of walnut: it was a fashion statement. The expanse of it extending in perfect symmetry across the dashboard, with its bewildering array of dials, clocks and controls, and echoing in the turned walnut gear knob, and the walnut-and-leather steering wheel, reminded me of something subliminal I couldn’t quite pinpoint at the time.
Later, in the middle lane of the M42, it came to
me. It was the neat rows of sporting guns on parade in the sombre mahogany-panelled hush of James Purdy & Sons’ shop in South Audley Street. Walnut has always been the favoured wood for gunstocks. It is lightweight, flexible, doesn’t shrink or expand when wet, and is particularly shock-proof. It can be machined to very fine tolerances, so makes a good seating for metal parts. Gunsmiths favour it for all these reasons, and because of its intrinsic beauty. Purdy’s prefer Turkish walnut, others choose English or French, or even black. Walk into any gunsmith’s and you’ll encounter the unmistakable walnut vibe. It is mildly ironic that a tree whose nuts are celebrated as an elixir of long life should find itself reincarnated in guns, and that wars should always have increased demand for the wood. The role of walnut is to mediate between the machine and its owner. Like the wooden handle of my bread knife, or any other tool handle, it cushions the cold energy of the steel and is warm, comfortable and smooth to the touch. In the Jaguar factory, one of the cabinetmakers had improvised a screwdriver handle from a walnut gear knob.
Another result of walnut’s long-standing affair with engineering, craft and design is the laminated Lucifer propeller hub that sits on my desk. Most European manufacturers used walnut for their propellers, for its strength and even grain. Lamination increased strength and stability, made more economical use of the timber in the tree, and made cutting, drying and shaping easier. A good many of these propellers and wood-framed aircraft were made at Tibbenham’s Aircraft Company in Ipswich. During the First World War over a hundred women worked at the factory, and ninety men, experienced cabinet-makers, whose skills were most valued at home. In the propeller shop, rows of women in long overalls with their hair pinned into caps drew the paper patterns. The men, in waistcoats, white aprons, cloth caps and collars and ties, cut out the shapes of the blades on bandsaws from three-quarter-inch planks. Then they splayed them in decks of ten, like playing cards, and glued and clamped them into the laminated outlines of propellers. Working in teams on ten propellers at a time, the joiners planed and smoothed them into shape, using metal templates as guides. Then, in a long, airy upper room lit by skylights, the hand-fashioned blades were sandpapered smooth by women in long skirts, with spats over their heeled shoes. Hung up on the walls on a row of pegs, the eight-foot propellers dwarfed the workers. Meanwhile, both men and women bustled about a huge factory floor under wooden beams, jointing, assembling, gluing and fixing the wooden aircraft wings together on trestles. Finally, the propeller blades and tips were sheathed in doped fabric, varnished, packed in long wooden cases, and sent away on wagons driven by draymen in tweeds, waistcoats, caps and boots, drawn by Suffolk horses with names like Pegasus. Others, the timber-haulers and sawyers, delivered a constant supply of seasoned sawn English walnut trunks, stacked carefully in the yard in big concertinas, sticks separating every plank to keep the air flowing. Biggles and Algy called their planes ‘crates’ because that is more or less what they were. Almost every aeroplane of the Lucifer generation was constructed of wood, normally ash, covered in a taut skin of stiffened fabric, with one or more wooden propellers. Even by 1930 only five per cent of air-frames were metal, and as late as the Second World War one of the most successful fast bombers, the De Havilland Mosquito, was built of spruce, birch plywood and balsa wood. It was introduced in 1938, and nearly 8,000 Mosquitoes went into action in the war. Even Reginald Mitchell’s revolutionary Spitfire had a wooden propeller.