Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  We all went for a farewell lunch together in the shade of a spreading oriental plane tree and a walnut at Madumar Ata, Jalal-Abad’s longest-established and most popular restaurant. Madumar Irsalev, its founder, was born in 1900 and was still cooking here at the age of ninety. The place had begun life thirty-five years ago as a modest café. Now it was so big and prosperous that the proprietor’s family recently built a magnificent mosque just across the street. We entered past a vast, man-sized samovar and washed our hands at a small basin before taking our outdoor table beneath the trees. Gena had telephoned ahead and ordered the dish for which the restaurant is famous: giant potato pancakes filled with the choice mutton and fatty tail-fillets so beloved of this enthusiastically carnivorous people. By reducing cholesterol levels in the body, walnuts would be the ideal palliative to such a fatty diet. Beyond a general belief in the health-giving properties of walnuts, my companions were not aware of the cholesterol connection.

  Zakir had held his son’s wedding reception at Madumar Ata. As with almost any wedding in Kyrgyzstan, he had been obliged to invite over a thousand sisters, cousins and aunts, and the lavish array of presents had included no fewer than twenty-three carpets. We toasted each other repeatedly with glasses of chai and all felt very sad at the prospect of parting and going no more a-roving together through these tumultuous forests, so delightfully inhabited, so brimming with human warmth and candour. The impulse for hospitality to utter strangers never ceases to delight me.

  In the back of a Mercedes taxi heading out of Bishkek two days later, I felt sad to be leaving my friends. I was going to miss them. But I also felt elated to be alone again. As we sped towards the frontier, I tried to make sense of the lives I had shared, however briefly. All the Kyrgyz people I had met were very poor. Their lives were hard, their country was the poorest in Central Asia, and their government was hardly liberal. Yet they seemed far from miserable. I thought of Erissida in her long pullover, waving goodbye at the farm gate beside her mother; of Davlet, showing us proudly round his beautiful orchards; and of the young foresters, stripped to the waist, wrestling in the sunset meadow beside the river at Shaydan. At our last dinner at Zakir’s home, I had received from him a magnificent Tajik knife in a sheath, its handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and, from Gena, a beautiful kalpak and a walnut bowl filled with herbs – hypericum and oregano. Next day, he had driven me and Zamira to Jalal-Abad’s tiny airfield, where cows were discouraged but people wandered freely about the grassy aprons gathering herbs. We had all become such firm friends that the parting was emotional, we really did hug each other like bears. I now clutched a second bag filled with the walnuts we had gathered in the woods, and those Davlet had given me, carefully labelled by variety and origin. Everywhere we went, we had kept some of the best nuts as seed: from the forests of Kurslangur, Arslanbob, Jayterek, Gava and Ortok. In my rucksack were several film cans filled with the carefully labelled pips of wild apples, and squirrel-stashes of walnuts also destined to be sown later in my Suffolk garden, as a living reminder of the wild fruit forests I had encountered on my travels.

  Part Four

  HEARTWOOD

  Suffolk Trees

  Back home, and almost the first tree I met was a tall, brooding Devonshire Quarrendon grown from an apple pip from Ted Hughes’s orchard. I am near the Suffolk coast in Middleton, near Yoxford, where the poets Michael Hamburger and Anne Beresford have lovingly tended forty or fifty apples, pears and plums for half their almost fifty years of marriage. When they moved in they inherited the old orchard, and one thing led to another. Besides publishing nearly twenty volumes of poems, criticism and translation since 1945, Michael Hamburger has worked as prolifically in his orchard for twenty-five years, as one might work on a long poem. He has also confounded the ordinary conventions of horticulture by growing dozens of new apple trees from pips instead of by grafting, with excellent results.

  Down a lane by the marsh that borders the Minsmere River I came on a rambling farmhouse that seemed to subside into the wild profusion of climbing plants surrounding it. Someone was playing the piano indoors. Michael and Anne welcomed me into a house overflowing with books and apples and led me into a library, deliciously scented by neat rows of recently plucked fruits on racks beneath the bookshelves. My hosts mentioned that the poet Schiller couldn’t write a word without the scent of gently rotting apples wafting up from his desk drawer. I suspect the same may be true of them.

  ‘This one’s Berlepsch, a cross with James Grieve, but it keeps longer,’ said Hamburger, handing me a German apple he originally brought to Suffolk as pips and propagated in a flowerpot outside. Rubbing shoulders with Essays on Thomas Mann were ranks of the tasty little pineapple-flavoured Ananas Reinette, and beside them under the window was a battalion of my own favourite apples, the nutty Orleans Reinette.

  Another part of the library was reserved for the English classics: Ribston Pippins, each of which contains five times more vitamin C than a Golden Delicious, and Ashmead’s Kernel. Apples of every shape and complexion, from bottoms to gargoyles, khaki to streaked crimson, balanced in trays on old typewriters or perched on planks atop baskets of kindling in such profusion that gusts of their perfume followed us through the open door as we stepped into the orchard via a long greenhouse crammed with fruiting oranges and grapefruit also grown from pips.

  As Barrie Juniper explained to me before I began my apple quest, pips aren’t supposed to grow true to their parent fruit variety, because apples must cross-pollinate to produce fruit; indeed the apple’s tendency to dream itself into ever new forms is the very basis for the evolution of the 6,000-odd varieties of British domestic apples that have been named over the centuries. That Hamburger’s pip-sown apples actually look and taste like their parents, or at least close, must be good fortune.

  To grow an apple tree from a pip to its first fruiting takes about twelve years. It is a labour of love, and it soon became apparent as we toured the orchard that the key principle in Hamburger’s planting selection was the same as Adam’s in paradise: his wife’s predilections. Because the seed trays and their labels had sometimes been sabotaged by mice, some of the new trees were nameless. It was tempting to christen them as Thoreau named his favourite wildings around Walden Pond: Beresford’s Favourite, perhaps, or, for those delicious apples that refuse to grow to a uniform size and shape, Tesco’s Despair.

  15 October

  Today I sawed off a dead lateral branch of the big walnut, leaving three feet at the stump end to lean my ladder on. The wood is still sound. I will turn it on the lathe and make bed-ends. Taken out of its original context as part of the tree, it now has an independent existence as wood.

  9 January

  A wild, windy night and a bright, clear, blustery day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam. With its wide bolling and outstretched boughs, it is what the Basques would call a trasmocho tree. It has grown into the shape of a church bell, and you can swing up into it and sit reading, enfolded in its foliage. Crossing the stream at the ford, I stand leaning on the wooden bridge to one side, losing myself in the muscular surge of fresh rainwater. I pass three dreys in the complex old pollard oaks in the lane. Each tree is different in habit and even in the details of its leaves and acorns. These are descended from ancient wild wood trees, rather than planted woodland trees. The dreys are ingeniously thatched on top with the pale-blond dried leaves and stalks of the maize that is grown in wide bands along the edges of the woods and the lane as pheasant cover. The pale maize thatch roofs cover the darker weave of oak twigs and leaves.

  Turning off the lane, I make a long trudge into the wind into the oak woods to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the clay everywhere. The whole wood creaks. The curious thing is how quiet and calm it can be inside a wood during a wind. The wood shelters itself. All you hear is the wind in the fringes and in the treetops, a sound with the quality of a shingle seashore not far away. Close beside m
e two birches sing like a squeaky hinge as they rub together. This is an unusual sett, tunnelled inside an unusual hill fort of earth, the diggings from a decoy pond near by in the woods, left here years ago. Beaten badger paths radiate into the wood, out across a plank bridge and into a big meadow that slopes down to the railway embankment. In the long shadows of the late-winter sun it is easy to distinguish them and follow one downhill to a gap in the railway fence, where the animals obviously like to scratch themselves on the wire, leaving little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I return to Cowpasture Lane in the shadow of the embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.

  I remember the whole of Suffolk as a landscape of many elms until the mid to late seventies: cumulus clouds of their canopies on every horizon, elms in the hedges and at the corners of fields, pollard elms like milestones in the green lanes. Probably the most ancient use of elm has been to pollard it for animal feed. I used to cut elm branches for fodder for my own goats. They relished the nourishing leaves far above grass. Let out into the fields, they would rise on their hind legs and strut like circus animals to reach the luscious branches. On our common, a clear browse line was discernible on all the overhanging hedgerow elms at seven or eight feet, just beyond the cows’ reach. Outside the Hall Farm, looking west from my gate, stood three giant elms improbably close together as if arm in arm, like the Seven Sisters, the tuft of elms that once encircled a walnut in Tottenham and gave their name to the road that runs north-east from Holloway. At sunset our three village giants cast their immense shadows along the green all the way to the church a quarter-mile away. They seemed too mighty to succumb, yet they died the same summer as the Rookery Farm elm, leaves withering at first as the scolytus beetles got to work in their galleries beneath the bark. Eager chainsaws felled the skeleton trees, their brittle branches collapsing as they crashed, burying their shattered stumps deep in the shuddering clay. They lay like flensed whales as the firewood men swarmed over them with chainsaws, slicing the marvellous timber into cutlets to be split with the axe or the hydraulic log-splitter running on the power take-off of a tractor. The elms had stood like the triple spires of Gaudí’s cathedral in Barcelona. Robbed of their grandeur, the mile-long inland sea of grass we call our common was diminished by their loss, and still is to this day. I still see their ghosts when I look that way, and cows still gather sometimes around the cratered remains of their stumps as if to shelter.

  As the elms died one by one along my hedgerows during the 1970s, I left them standing as green sails of ivy grew up them and eventually blew them down. The ivy sheltered insects and roosting birds, and kept the wood-pigeons fed with berries in the winter. Many of the dead trees went down in the great storm of October 1987. I sawed them into four-foot lengths and stored the soundest outside the workshop. Much of that elm ended up spinning on my lathe late at night, and lives on as bowls or the occasional row of Shaker-inspired coat pegs. Even when I had consigned great jumbles of the sawn, split logs to the woodshed as firewood, I couldn’t resist reprieving some for the lathe, often at the last moment in the very act of casting them into the fire. I have even posted split elm logs into my wood-stove and then felt so haunted by an after-image of their grained beauty that I have pulled out the already charred wood, doused it and borne it to the workshop instead. Turning elm blunts the chisels and the gouges so often that you spend almost more time at the grinding machine than the lathe, but to see the flowing wave patterns of the grain revealed as you hollow out a bowl and watch the wood begin to gleam like a horse chestnut fresh from its shell is a rare pleasure. What better way for the elm to live on?

  At the common’s far end, a single seventy-foot mature elm still thrives, possibly shielded from invasion by beetles by the big leaves of the horse chestnuts that surround it like bodyguards. And I can now count twenty-seven elms of around thirty feet growing vigorously in my own hedgerows, the wind folding back their branches, turning the leaves inside out, flashing their silver backs.

  A New-laid Hedge

  It dawned sunny and cold but not quite frosty: perfect weather for hedging. I set off through the long meadow to the wood in the far corner of my land. It is the sort of place that might have been christened ‘Botany Bay’ or ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ in the nineteenth century to denote its remoteness on a farm. Of course, it is not at all remote, just mildly inconvenient to reach on foot if you’re laden with tools. So I hooked up the old elm-boarded trailer to the tractor and loaded up with chainsaw, fuel cans, triangular bow saw, two billhooks, trimming hook, sharpening stone, a pair of sturdy leather gloves, leather kneepads, protective glasses and a wooden beetle for driving in stakes. My task was to lay the wood’s perimeter hedge of maple, hazel, dogwood and hawthorn. I probably should have plashed it several years ago: some of the trees were tall and unwieldy.

  Working from the outside of the wood and hedge, I began at the left-hand end, working along the hedge to my right and laying the cut trees and hazel stems to my left. I cut through each stem as close as possible to the ground with a diagonal stroke of the billhook that severed the stem almost right through, but left the bark and enough connective tissue to allow the sap to flow. Once cut in this way, the stems or trees are called pleachers. No doubt an expert sizes up the hedge trees in a flash and makes the crucial decisions about what to cut out and what to leave almost instinctively. I spend quite a lot of time considering each tree in line and imagining how it should fit into the evolving weave of the laid hedge. Removing some of the side branches makes it possible to weave the pleacher in and out of the stakes you drive in every eighteen inches or two feet. There is plenty of hazel in the hedge, and coppice hazel growing in the wood too, so I wasn’t short of stakes. Hazel or ash is best, an inch or two thick, sharpened with the billhook. I drove them in with the beetle and gently wrestled the pleachers into the twiggy basketwork. With each new pleacher I laid and wove, I was building more tension into the structure and increasing its stability. The tensile strength in a plashed hedge is actually the sum of the imparted strength and energy of the hedger. The more you can follow the grain of the wood and work with it, the easier the hedging. Cutting with an upward stroke of the billhook, going with the grain, is far easier than cutting downwards, as you have to at the base of the pleacher.

  Hedgers always worry about frost because it kills the living cells of wood exposed by cutting. Some even light small fires along the hedge to keep it warm. But the work must be done in winter when the hedge reveals its architecture. Since it involves pruning the trees, a temporary reduction of their substance, this is labour for a waning moon, the low tide of the sap. John Clare’s version of the doggedness and the misery of the hedger in The Shepherd’s Calendar suggests his own experience of plashing in the rain:

  The hedger soaked wi the dull weather chops

  On at his toils which scarcely keeps him warm

  And every stroke he takes large swarms of drops

  Patter about him like an april storm.

  Hazel is the most amenable to cutting and plashing, as though it has evolved into the habit. Hawthorn and ash are also pliable enough. The laid pleachers must always slope upwards. The river of sap will only flow uphill. Already, in February, the maple was so full of early-rising sap it wept copious tears when I cut it, the sap trickling down the pleated bark or splashing on to my boot. I tasted it optimistically, but, although a little sweet, it was also brackish, like human tears, and it was impossible not to think of all the sad times when my own tears, or those of loved ones, have run down my cheeks and I’ve licked them away. Impossible too not to imagine that the tree itself was mourning its own wound: this mutilation, subjugation to a human will.

  Some of the maple had grown too big to be cut with the billhook, so I used the chainsaw to cut a wedge at the base of the trunk and gingerly eased each tree over, supporting its weight to protect the fragile hinge of sapwood, cambium and bark. What peace when I switched off the engine and resumed work with the b
illhook. I could hear myself think again. Thinking is one of the great pleasures of working outdoors with hand tools. In The Woodlanders, Hardy calls this kind of labour ‘copse-work’ and explains its effect on the Hintock village minds:

  Copse-work, as it was called, being an occupation which the secondary intelligence of the hands and arms could carry on without the sovereign attention of the head, allowed the minds of its professors to wander considerably from the objects before them; hence the tales, chronicles, and ramifications of family history which were recounted here were of a very exhaustive kind.

  Evening drew on and I leant over the hedge in the dimming light to take hold of one of the green hazel wands and thrust it sideways and downwards into the weave where it is most dense, folding over the slender tips into a barb that will shove through but won’t spring back. There was a half-moon in a clear sky with an intense orange sunset lighting up the line of trees along the green lane on the far side of the meadow. Their shapes were black before it, the fretwork of branches and twigs all picked out in deep red as the huge Suffolk sun dropped behind them. The hedge was very dark when I looked back at it, but the back-lighting showed up a damaged, mossy blackbird’s nest, the mud inside it baked and crazed, so I wove a framework of supporting hazel sticks, adding some crimson dogwood for effect. I decided I would work along as far as a single wild service tree that had grown into a twenty-foot hedge tree since I planted it as many years ago. A foot a year is quite respectable growth in the competitive tangle of hedge roots that must slow up the tree, at least until it has thrust its roots deeper than its neighbours.