by Roger Deakin
A good many cars, and the cabs of lorries, were also wood framed. The original SS Jaguars were no exception. They were built by bolting an ash frame on to a steel chassis and panelling it with metal, just as Morgan sports cars are still made today. Ash is light and strong, with enough flexibility to absorb the stresses of driving, or flying. The Jaguar company’s original name, SS, seems, in retrospect, an odd choice for the thirties, but denoted nothing more sinister than ‘Swallow Sidecars’. William Lyons had founded his company to make motorcycle sidecars, also timber framed, and cars were a new departure. When the advertising agency suggested the name ‘Jaguar’ for the new SS sports car in 1936, Lyons accepted it only with great reluctance. But it wasn’t to be long before he was grateful to drop the ‘SS’ discreetly from the company name. Now thoroughly assimilated into English, the word ‘jaguar’ is borrowed from Tupi or Língua Geral, a language once spoken by millions all over Portuguese Brazil and now probably destined to disappear, since no more than a few hundred speakers remain. Literally translated, jaguara means ‘predatory beast’. ‘Piranha’ comes from the same language, and is still available, as far as I know, to the motor industry. Nobody knows quite how many jaguars remain in this world, but the wild rivers and forests essential to their lives are disappearing every day from the map of South America. The same forces that are creating global warming are bringing about the accelerating extinction of the wild jaguar. Most of these superb animals, the third largest of the big cats, now inhabit the Amazon basin, with only a few hundred left in what was once a stronghold: Central America. Loss of habitat is the main factor, but it hasn’t helped that throughout the 1960s some 15,000 jaguars a year were trapped for their fur, and many are still hunted. What is certain is that the great majority of them now exist in chrome effigy on the bonnets of fast cars.
It cannot have escaped the executives in the Jaguar board room that they might soon be presiding over a company named after an extinct mammal. This would not go down well with the advertising agency. Esso, we notice, quietly dropped their ‘Put a tiger in your tank’ campaign some years ago. Over at the Reliant factory in Tamworth, they have no such problem: the robin is still one of the most successful birds in Britain. So if Jaguar has recently got into the habit of winning prizes for its outstanding green credentials as a manufacturer, and is at pains to promote a caring nature-loving image, who can blame it? No company has greater reason to work towards a greener planet, less destruction of forests and the consequent resurgence of its beleaguered totem animal. It has stopped using mercury and cadmium, turned off unnecessary lights and taps, recycled its office paper, purified and recycled the water it uses to wash new cars, and formed its own Environmental Strategy Committee as long ago as 1992 ‘to look at ways of making its cars more eco-friendly’. As a maker of high-performance cars with hefty engines, Jaguar knows it is under scrutiny by the environmental movement. Its brother company, Land-Rover, another member of the Ford Motors group not known for the sparing use of fuel, has recently had a taste of direct action from Greenpeace.
Even the burr walnut trees from the old Californian orchards are getting harder to find. Jaguar’s public response has been to fund the creation of a two-hundred-acre stretch of walnut woodland in Staffordshire: the Jaguar Walnut Forest. Planted in 2001 on arable farmland at Lount, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch south of Derby, as part of the new National Forest, it contains 13,000 walnuts and 70,000 other trees. This is, of course, meant as a gesture and not to assure future supplies of veneered dashboards, gear handles or steering wheels.
Robin Bircham grows walnuts in Suffolk and supplied 6,000 of the saplings for the new Jaguar wood. I went over to see him at Boxted Hall Farm, where he tends 180 trees in a seven-and-a-half-acre orchard. Many of them were planted in 1935, and the main variety is Bardwell, which may be the same as the French Bijou, so called because women sometimes keep jewellery in the big shells. We walked between rows of well-spaced trees sixty or seventy feet tall, spreading into an unbroken canopy. Blight, said Robin, was often a problem in damp Suffolk, diminishing the yield of sound nuts, but he used no chemical sprays. Once the canopy of an orchard has closed, the trees themselves, which hate competition, secrete their own organic weedkiller, juglone, from their leaves. Squirrels, crows and humans also steal from the orchard, and a late frost can ruin a whole year’s crop. In a good year Robin harvests up to three and a half tons.
At first Robin and his wife used to pick up the fallen nuts in October and November, sending them to Covent Garden, where most were simply left to rot, unsold, so instead they decided to specialize in fresh, wet walnuts, and began supplying them to Harrods, Fortnum & Mason and Buckingham Palace. They wash the nuts and grade them by size. The bigger ones go to London, and the smaller nuts are sold to local shops and delicatessens. There are hundreds of different walnut varieties, just as there are apples or plums to suit different tastes and growing conditions. All produce nuts of different shapes and sizes with distinctive flavours and textures, and some are easier to crack than others. The reigning varieties in France are Franquette, Marbot, Ronde de Montignac, Lara, Fernor, Fernette, Chandler, Serr, Tulare and Broadview. Lara, says Robin, can yield over a ton of nuts per acre.
Walnut grown for its nuts in an orchard is less likely to make useful timber, because for fruiting you want plenty of low horizontal branches. A good timber tree, on the other hand, is straight, with as few branches as possible. In the Dordogne around Périgueux, one of the centres of walnut growing, the French orchardists will choose one or two of their trees for pruning as timber from an early age to create a twelve-foot straight bole, and will prune all their nutting trees to make butts of seven or eight feet, taller than the four or five feet usual for an orchard walnut in England. Walnuts are best grown directly from seed, since they dislike being transplanted, even when young. The seedlings send down a prodigious tap root very quickly, and it is easily damaged.
Robin Bircham introduced me to the Walnut Club, a select band of about a hundred enthusiasts for the tree who would like to see a revival of its popularity in Britain. I went to my first meeting one late-summer morning at the Northmoor Trust near Oxford, in the lee of Wittenham Clumps, the Iron Age hilltop fort made famous by Paul Nash, who painted the hill and the beeches at its summit endlessly. Ronald Blythe had told me how Paul and his artist brother John used to go and stay at Sinodun House, Wallingford, with their Aunt Gussie, who had been engaged to Edward Lear. Paul discovered in the Clumps the element of timelessness and mystery that elevated them beyond their purely physical presence in the wide, otherwise level landscape. He wrote that they ‘eclipsed the impression of all the early landscapes I knew … They were the pyramids of my small world.’
Against this deeply English backdrop, two dozen of us took a morning walk in a twenty-acre plantation of young walnuts that have sprung up from seed brought over from Kyrgyzstan in 1997 by Dr Gabriel Hemery, whose aim is to select and propagate new varieties of Juglans regia most suitable for timber from this unique source of genetic diversity. We were looking at the progeny of 375 promising-looking trees selected in the wild walnut forests of the Ferghana Valley by Dr Hemery. We are ten degrees further north than Kyrgyzstan, but the parent trees grow at 7,000 feet and have to withstand the bitter Central Asian winters of the Tien Shan Mountains, so Dr Hemery’s reasoning is that they should easily be hardy enough for our climate. He grew the walnuts in plastic tubes because he soon discovered that the seedlings do far better in their shelter, humidity and higher temperature. The local hares, as he also soon learnt, have a tendency to chew off the terminal buds if they are left unprotected.
By now up to eight feet, the saplings had been seeded directly sixteen feet apart to allow them to spread into ample domed crowns. In relation to its height, the walnut develops a bigger crown than any other tree in Britain. Dr Hemery and his team had conducted some ingenious experiments with nurse trees. Reasoning that walnuts appreciate humidity and nitrogen, they planted a shrub native to Asia, Elaeagnu
s umbellata, on either side of each young walnut. Elaeagnus has nitrogen-fixing roots, which may possibly nourish the walnut, and grows to a height of sixteen feet, creating both humidity and shelter for the young tree, concentrating its growth upwards rather than outwards and suppressing weeds. They had done the same thing using Italian alder, hazel or elder as nurse trees, with promising results.
There was much talk of developing tall, fast-growing trees with straight trunks for timber, whereas it seemed to me and several other Walnut Club members that the singular virtue of the tree is best appreciated by the French, who compromise by growing a rather shorter bole and harvesting the nuts for sixty to seventy years before eventually uprooting it for timber or veneer. I know several joiners who think, like me, that the grain of an old fruit tree, complete with knots and burrs, is far more attractive than the relatively bland, uniformly straight grain of a commercially grown timber tree. I fell into step with Sebastian, who has fifty Franquette trees in the Lot in France, and Clare and Matthew, who planted an orchard of Broadview trees in Norfolk and are now harvesting plentiful nuts, when they can beat the crows to them.
The walnut research at the Northmoor Trust is sponsored by Jaguar, who seem only too eager, like their parent company Ford, to prove their environmental concern. You can hardly blame them, when even their own shareholders are pressing for far more radical changes in the design and manufacture of cars in response to global warming. In April 2005 William Clay Ford Junior, Ford’s Chairman in America, announced that the company would soon be issuing ‘a comprehensive report … that will examine the business implications of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Ford vehicles’. The Connecticut State Treasurer, Denise L. Nappier, a long-term shareholder, was delighted. ‘I congratulate Bill Ford’, she said, ‘for his recognition that planning for climate change is not merely an environmental issue, but a key business issue.’ The italics are mine, since ‘merely’ appears to privilege ‘the business implications’ above the future of the Earth. The question is, how serious is this concern, really? How far are Ford, with their English offspring Land-Rover and Jaguar, prepared to go to put an end to the damaging emissions of large, powerful cars with big engines?
Anticipating some of what Roland Barthes was to write sixteen years later in his 1955 essay on the Citroën DS, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, in Terre des Hommes, ‘The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function … It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.’
Watching one of the big Jaguars inching along the assembly lines, it occurred to me that one way for this machine to ‘conceal itself entirely’ would be if, like the true wild animal when it takes to water, it were to leave no sign of its passing, no carbon vapour trail, no damage at all to the Earth. Take all these away, and it would attain perfection. And there would be no more need to plant walnuts.
David Nash
Approaching Blaenau Ffestiniog, I feel I have landed in a black-and-white film. Everywhere I look, the monochrome of slate fills the screen. Yet somewhere within it, like the glow inside a coal fire in the grate, I know David Nash is there, inside his chapel studio filled to the rafters with his works of wood: a furnace of imagination and adventure in a sombre world. Gigantic spoil-heaps of slate, angular molehills thrown up by the mines, rise away steeply in silhouette, dwarfing the sombre terraced houses and their gleaming roofs. The steep paths of the quarrymen zigzag up, or ramp in diagonals across the gloomy, unstable screes that loom everywhere above the town. A ruined viaduct leans out into a void. Tramways and railway tracks run to the cliff edges of the heaps, buffered by air. After the soft wooded valleys you wind through on your way up, it is a treeless world, except for the odd rhododendron clinging to the slate, or hugging the wall of a roofless winding-house. There is something architectural about the zigzags, diagonals and monochrome waste-tips of broken slates, discarded like loose change because only those few that split cleanly could be used to roof houses.
Blaenau Ffestiniog hunkers down at the head of a valley in the mountains of north Wales ten miles from the Irish Sea. An odd place for an artist whose name is synonymous with wood to choose to be, but this is the country of Nash’s youth, where he and his brother spent all their holidays exploring the Vale of Ffestiniog and the banks of the Dwyryd River from their grandfather’s house. He has been walking its lanes for fifty years. The irony is that Nash came here after art school to escape a grey world: the suits and money culture of London in the mid sixties. This is a place of deliberate self-exile, in the working landscape of a Celtic country where they still speak another language. Coming here to see David Nash feels as I imagine it did to journey to remote Cornwall in the 1930s to visit Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth at their studios in the fishing community of St Ives.
Capel Rhiw, the Victorian Methodist chapel where David Nash lives and works, stands almost grandly in a row of slate miners’ cottages on the outskirts of the town. There were once 18,000 people and twenty-six chapels in this Welsh Machu Picchu. The chapels were so crowded on Sundays that the congregations overflowed and sang in the streets outside. Nash and his wife, the painter Claire Langdown, live in the schoolhouse they have converted behind the chapel, which is both studio and a store for all the works that are in transit, waiting to be dispatched to some new exhibition overseas or retained because they’re old friends Nash isn’t inclined to let go.
I step inside to a surprising burst of pagan colour: the warm glow of wood. It is a beautiful, uplifting building with little nuggets of primary colour in the stained-glass friezes of its high windows that beam down blue, yellow and red. I shall not forget the sheer drama of the exuberant throng of Nash’s work that fills the tiered space literally to the lofty ceiling. Moving through the chapel, I mingle with the wooden multitude, ‘the congregation’, as Nash calls it. It is like meeting the family, an unusually big one, exciting and daunting at the same time: impossible to remember all their names, only a general impression that you want to get to know them much better one by one in due course. I catch a hint of the impression I often had as a teacher entering a classroom: that the moment before I came in, they had all been deep in conversation.
We leave our boots at the kitchen door and sit down to tea. The Nash cat sleeps in an ingenious cantilevered basket that hooks over a radiator. It is such a vociferous creature, says Nash, you can play it like bagpipes. The one-inch copper water pipes leading from the cooking range meander like euphoniums on their way up to the ceiling. This is surrealist plumbing but typically practical, because it acts as a radiator as well as being gently comical. The kitchen worktops too are characteristically bold, practical and larger than life: four inches of thick-sliced sycamore. This is the wood traditionally used to make milk-pails, says Nash, because it imparts no taste. A series of early carvings on offcuts of Canadian cherry by Claire depicts in relief a curtain blowing through the top of an open sash window, like Marilyn Monroe’s billowing skirt in The Seven Year Itch. Wind translated into wood. Outside the window, slate and more slate. Two men barrow slabs of it about the garden.
Later on Nash drives us up a hill above the town, and we climb over a low fence on to a sheep-grazed mound, ascending over what appear to be cinders, until my companion stoops and holds up a singed fragment of leather and I realize we are standing on the charred remains of a gigantic pyre of ancient army boots. It is like a scenario from the Goon Show. All that remains intact is metal: the clicking heel studs, the little bootlace eyes, and a million hobnails, tacks and studs. Nash loves this dark tumulus: another burial mound of an extinct industry. The boot factory had been established to supply the army during the war. Then, when both came to an end, they built a boot-mountain and set fire to it. As an accidental installation, there could be no more telling expression of the history of Blaenau Ffestiniog, no better war memorial for all the unemployed slate mi
ners who marched off to war.
Back at the chapel, I recognize many of the individual pieces of work: the soaring, high-backed, spoon-shaped Throne, the various Ladders, stairways to heaven made by cleaving the inverted tree in two and joining the opposed halves with carved staves, and Vessels, symbolic boats carved from a single trunk. There is an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling about wandering among all these bowls, spoons, chairs, vessels, stoves and tables: versions of human artefacts plucked from their domestic scale and context, often larger than life, reminders of the ubiquity of wood in our daily lives.