by Roger Deakin
Perhaps it is some hidden pheromone in the wood itself that turns my brain, but, as in a dream, I find myself buying the stuff. First, the entire trunk of a beech, neatly stacked to season with spacers between the boards. Next, I spot a stack of burr oak, thickly planked by Freddy Buggs, the local Stoke-by-Nayland sawyer. Instantly lost in the psychedelic wonders of its rioting grain, I imagine the burr oak bowls I could turn on the lathe, and the kitchen table I could make, set with pale plates and eggcups. Clive lifts off the tarpaulin covers with a flourish, revealing more and more curiosities. I have soon added to my order four massive hunks of deep-red turkey oak, a pair of elm boards and a quantity of fine, pale sycamore for turning plates. It is the wood that was always used for milk pails, because it imparts no taste. I am also quite unable to resist the holly in the workshop. I have spent far too much money on timber I am going to have to transport and store under cover. I have no immediate need of any of it, but it is unusual timber, selected by a connoisseur. I convince myself it is an investment.
After lunch we all help Clive lug the armoire into his van and watch him set off to Framlingham on his final delivery as a joiner, then go over to Polstead, a few miles away, to see Dylan Pym. He is a joiner too, and his workshop stands on the edge of the orchard of the cottage where Maria Martin lived. Polstead was always famous for its cherries, but on 18 May 1828 Maria Martin was murdered by a jealous lover, William Corder, and buried under the floor of the Red Barn. Huge crowds came to Bury St Edmunds on 11 August 1828 to see Corder hanged in the last public execution in England. That summer alone over 200,000 people made the pilgrimage to Polstead, removing pieces of the barn as souvenirs year after year until 1842, when it was burnt down by an arsonist. In Bury St Edmunds market at cherry harvest time, the fruit sellers’ cry was ever after ‘Polstead Cherries! Red as the blood of Maria Martin!’
Dylan’s workshop is a boarded two-storey shed surrounded by open-fronted sheds full of seasoning timber, including the planked trunks of oaks up to three feet wide from the local woods. Inside, a blackboard on the wall is chalked up with lists of the numbered components of chairs and their dimensions and a schedule of work from day to day. Dylan’s banjo rests on a windowsill, and an impressive collection of clamps is ranged along a wall. Vapour rises past them from an eight-foot plywood steam box bubbling gently, supplied by an old electric Burco boiler. I notice the dribbles of tannin staining the plywood around the steamer’s ventilation holes. Dylan is making chairs of English oak. He opens the little plywood door at one end of the oblong steamer and pops in a slender six-foot length of inch-square green oak. It is going to be the curved back of a chair like a Windsor smoker’s bow. Dylan explains that timing is the all-important thing in wood steaming. This particular component, he says, needs cooking for exactly twenty minutes. No more, no less. He then falls into earnest conversation with two potential clients and forgets the deadline altogether. After half an hour he remembers and opens up the box. Steam and the acrid smell of tannin billow out, and I help slide out the oak and fit it to a steel backing strap, with handles at either end, then swiftly bend it over the U-shaped form and clamp it tight. Minutes later, as soon as it has cooled, Dylan loosens the clamps and lifts off a perfect U-shaped chair back with plenty of spring in it. He hooks it up on a beam to join a row of others, destined to make a set of chairs. By using green wood from a single tree, with the same moisture content, Dylan ensures it will bend and behave consistently. He leaves the steamed components hanging up for a year to dry and season thoroughly, turns the legs on his lathe, hollows out the seats with an adze and a spokeshave, then assembles the chairs.
I set out this morning with my friend and neighbour Terence Blacker in search of wooden flooring for the barn he is rebuilding as a house. First we go to Coton and turn down a track in the heavy rain. We arrive outside a dripping woodshed packed to the eaves with reclaimed pine from demolition sites. Two youths with crowbars are prising old nails out of some boards. Val Hancock, a man of medium but muscular build wearing dusty glasses, emerges from behind a large circular saw. Sawdust frosts his shoulders, chest and curly hair. He leaves the saw running, and we have to speak against its hum. It is almost as though it is running under its own momentum, or a millstream runs beneath the floor to power it. The interior of Val’s sawmill is landscaped with sawdust and shavings. Foothills arise at one end of an electric plane and keep on rising all the way to the back wall. I notice a giant bandsaw too and catch myself involuntarily checking Val’s hands for a full complement of fingers.
Val shows us yellow pine, Douglas fir and pitch pine, running a plank or two through the plane to show off the figure. The pitch pine has the tightest grain. It is heavier, harder, tougher stuff, with a powerful aroma of resin. Val has built his own sawmill, a huge wood-framed hangar supported on laminated timber girders, out of an old public library somewhere in South London. It is deeply ramshackle and admirable in its defiant spirit of enterprise. Val is doing well too, with a sudden floorboard gold rush of well-heeled computer people and graphic designers busy on their home improvements. I am quite shocked when he tells us the prices, but reflect that the quality of this older, highly seasoned timber is far higher than that of most new wood. Most of Val’s pine has grown slowly in the wintry forests of the Baltic, Siberia or British Columbia. As a result it is close grained and dense, and will make good floors. Val reveals that he is actually milling pitch pine floorboards out of the roof trusses and other structural beams of Victorian and early-twentieth-century warehouses.
We visit several places like Val’s, hidden away up tracks all over Suffolk. As we drive further south, the prices rise. Near Bury St Edmunds someone is charging £150 for the sort of unremarkable doors you could find gratis on any London skip until recently. Even a modest elbow of oak, a support for a crossbeam, is not far off £100. Clearly times have changed. At Olde Worlde Pine somewhere near Clare we find an impressive selection of fourteen-inch oak boards, elm from a mill in Somerset, French oak, ash, yellow pine and pitch pine. The French oak is less expensive because of a glut caused by all the trees knocked over by the big storm in 1999. They tempt Terence with stories about elm: how the floor will move every day according to the weather, how it will be a living thing, shifting like a minor earthquake in a thunderstorm or lying still on calm, cool, dry days. Terence is much moved by this description, I can see, and we drive away deep in discussion of the merits and aesthetics of oak, elm, ash and pine.
On down to Polstead, where we meet Dylan Pym and Jude, and Dylan’s workmate Carl, in their timber-framed and boarded workshop in the orchard of Maria Martin’s cottage. They are working on some ‘chesty’ cupboards, part of a kitchen of English chestnut. We climb a steep staircase into the upstairs office and sit around in Dylan’s superb chairs of deep-brown English oak with steamed spindle backs and arms, rather in the Shaker style. ‘We’re totally into steaming here,’ says Dylan, who is a kind of woodworking Jamie Oliver: genial, relaxed and always ready to pick up the banjo that stands in the corner and play. Dylan shows us his six-foot steaming box and the Burco boiler that powers it. Steaming, he says, is all about speed. Once it is out of the steamer, you have less than two minutes to get the hot wood strapped into its bent shape and clamped on to the form.
We inspect the beautiful English and French hardwood seasoning in the yard outside. Dylan says trees that grow towards the light slowly spin towards it, so that for ever after they will tend to twist, even when you saw them into planks, plane them, season them and store them flat. If their nature is to twist, that is what they will always do.
Ash
My ash bower is a kind of folly, an Aboriginal wiltja that stands at the top of my long meadow in Suffolk. It consists of a double row of lively ash trees bent over into Gothic arches like a small church. I planted it twenty years ago. It is eighteen feet long by nine feet wide, with four pairs of trees six feet apart along each side curving up to meet just under seven feet off the ground, so you can walk up and down insi
de. In the summer heat it is a cool, green room roofed with wild hops and the flickering shadows of ash leaves. I sometimes sling a hammock inside. I even installed a bed last year, exactly like the one I slept on in my swag at Peter Latz’s place in the shadow of the ghost gum and the caterpillar hills. Or the one that sheltered the puppies beneath Mary Kemarre’s wiltja on the bush-plum hunt. Every so often, it needs pollarding and reshaping. I make no claims for the originality of its conception: it was directly inspired by David Nash’s Ash Dome. It is what they call in film or art magazines an hommage, although I prefer to hold up both hands and call it pure plagiarism. For all that, it gives me enormous pleasure and interest, and it has grown into a mild obsession.
Years ago, once they had reached seven or eight feet, I bent the saplings together in pairs and grafted each one to its partner. They began to grow together, uniting into a single organism with two sets of roots but a single vascular system. In other words, they began to share the same sap. Then, as the lateral branches grew long enough, I did the same with them, peeling off a section of the bark and bast of both branches with a pocket knife to reveal the cambium at the point of contact, then binding them tightly together. Again the branches grew together as one flesh to form a swollen scab of bark.
The result of all this wood-welding is a remarkably stable structure, engineered in exactly the same way as a timber-framed house. The first wooden houses were indeed A-frames, or cruck built, just like this. Their mortice-and-tenon joints, secured with oak pegs, were the equivalent of the grafted stems and branches. In parts of Indonesia and Malaysia subject to flooding, houses are elevated on stilts of living trees on a similar principle to the ash bower.
The structure is really a composite pollard, or a laid hedge on stilts. It is constantly sending up new shoots, reaching for the light like a hedgerow ash. Every two or three years I must pollard or lay its canopy. This is what I have to do today under the waning moon. If the moon can cause the tides to rise and fall, why should it not do the same to the sap in plants and trees? That is the logic behind the notion that the husbandry of increase, such as sowing and planting, is best done during the waxing phases of the moon. Conversely, harvesting, the work of decrease, including coppicing and pollarding, belongs in the time when the moon herself is decreasing.
I prop a ladder against one side, lay two scaffold boards along the basketwork of the roof and rope them down. They spread my weight, so I can move about up there with a billhook, pollarding some vertical shoots, cutting others into pleachers, bending them over, weaving them in. Wrestling the tallest of them, I feel how much muscular, tensile strength there is in ash. Bent over and woven or tied down, the pleachers have the pent-up power of strongbows. Every now and then I descend and stand back to ponder my next few moves. Which rods to cut out and which to lay? Should this tall one go lengthwise or crossways? The pondering and choosing resembles chess, or a game of outsized pick-a-stick. I use a rope to haul over some of the pleachers, tying it high up, guiding it from solid earth for better footing.
The elephant-grey bark begins to gleam in a light rain shower. I love this skin of ash, almost human in its perfect smoothness when young, with an under-glow of green. It wrinkles and creases like elephant skin at the heels and elbows of old pleachers where they have healed. It bursts out in pimples or heat bumps where the epicormic buds are about to break out into new shoots. The oldest and best-laid hedges are often in sheep country in Wales or Cumbria, where the hedgers have had to respond to the challenge of animals determined to find a way through. Laid branches of ash or hazel will often form solid elbows uniting the stools of several trees together where they have grafted naturally through close contact and the rasping action of the wind on the hedge.
The bower is floored in lords and ladies, ground ivy and mosses, and its eight trunks cross-gartered with wild hops, our English vines. They thatch its roof with their big, cool leaves, dangling bunches of the aromatic, soporific female flowers from the green ceiling like grapes. As spring comes on, the bower fills like a bath with frothy white Queen Anne’s lace. The great strength of ash lies in its suppleness and in the straightness of its grain, and it makes the very best firewood, even burning green before seasoning.
Almost within sight of the bower, on the common beyond the moat and along the green lanes, are dozens of ancient ash pollards. Because of the extra effort of regrowing new poles at each pollarding every twenty years, the pollard trees grow slowly but live longer, like coppice stools. Left alone to grow naturally, an ash will live no more than 200 years, but pollards as much as 500 years old rise like grey, lichened dolmens in the hedges of Cumbria. In Bradfield Woods in Suffolk there is a giant ash coppice stool still slowly rippling outwards from its ruined core that might well have been living over a thousand years. Even at the age of twenty the trunks of the bower are beginning to show some of the early signs of what will accrue with age: they are green with algae, and lichens are beginning to form around their damp feet. They are putting on ankle socks of moss. There is something goat-footed about ash trees: the shaggy signs of Pan.
I imagine these eight trees as they may be in 200 years: their long embrace a living expression of arboreal solidarity. By then lichens will have very gradually colonized the trees, and may be a good indication of their age, since they exist in a different dimension of time. Lichens do better in the wetter conditions towards the west and the Atlantic. In Cumbria they call the 500-year-old pollards that line field boundaries, tracks and streams at the heads of the side valleys leading off Borrowdale, Stonethwaite and Seathwaite ‘cropping ash’. They seem to grow out of the stone, and are encrusted with some of the richest lichen communities in England besides those in Cornwall and the New Forest. Lichens do well on ash because its bark is less acidic. They like poplar, sycamore and willow for the same reason, and thrive less well on the acid bark of trees like pine, oak, birch or alder.
The existence of a complex flora of different lichen species on a tree is a sign of its age, and may be evidence of a link with the wildwood. A great many moths, like the peppered moth, mimic the lichens of bark in their intricately camouflaged wings: evidence of just how widespread and abundant lichens must once have been. The legendary lichenologist Francis Rose, whose pioneering work in the New Forest led to the discovery of some 344 different lichens living there, developed such acute ecological sensitivity through his years of fieldwork that he was able to predict, from close study of a map, or just from a car window, where relic populations of certain rare lichens associated with ancient woodland would be found. During the 1970s Rose refined his concept of ‘ancient woodland indicator’ lichens to publish, in 1976, an index of thirty key species, most of them subtle variations on Lobaria pulmonaria. Finding any twenty of the species on the list would give a very good indication of unbroken ecological continuity in a wood stretching back at least to the Middle Ages, and quite possibly to pre-Roman times.
Lichens are incredibly sensitive to place and famously averse to pollution. One of the typical lichens of ash trees is the delicately branched Evernia prunastri. Seen under a magnifying glass, the lichen looks like the tiniest bonsai tree. In his definitive New Naturalist book on lichens, Oliver Gilbert demonstrates how, the further you move away from the polluted centre of a big city such as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the bigger and more luxuriant are the specimens of Evernia. Nine examples collected on a straight line running from seven and a half to thirty miles from the city centre show a massive increase in size.
Pollards slowly develop their own very rich ecosystems. Each of the ash pollards on our green is a world of its own, tenanted, like the common, by a great variety of individuals, each intent on a particular form of sustenance. Snails live in the crevices of the hollows, probably grazing by night on lichens, like the herbivorous bark lice that live on the trunks. Ants run up and down in continuous two-lane traffic, perhaps to milk aphids in the canopy. Spiders sling webs across the crevices, and all kinds of moths, both caterpillars and adults, roos
t or feed concealed in the tree.
Along our local lanes, ash pollards stand as monuments to centuries of woodmanship. Climbing wooden ladders to a bole eight or ten feet up, and standing in it to cut off the poles, is hard work. The axe was often the preferred tool, since it cuts cleanly and is easier to swing from a standing position in the tree. Sawing by hand means squatting or kneeling in the bole. Ashes thrive on the heavy clays of High Suffolk. Two hundred yards from here a dozen pollards rise from the common in a double row like ham-bones, their knuckles a kind of battleground, swollen like boxing gloves. Yet there is also a fruitfulness about their swelling as they launch yet another eager generation of smooth grey poles: they have the topknot look of date palms or pineapples.
In the next village, Thrandeston, a superb ash pollard stands alone at the crossroads on the green. It is fissured like a rock, over two yards in girth, and hollow, as old pollards usually are. But I worry that its twenty poles are due for pollarding before they split the tree in two in the next big gale, and who will cut them now? Lichens have painted the south- and west-facing flanks a soft pale green. Moss cools the roots. A little further along the quiet roadside on my route to our market town of Diss is a trio of such magnificence they are almost a shrine to me. Three giants’ fists thrust defiantly into the misty Suffolk sky. The biggest is over eight feet in girth, with an enormous open hollowed bolling like a madly exaggerated cartoon of a Doric column. This horny mass of scar tissue measures six foot six across its outspread palms. Inside the musty, hollow trunk the wood is tanned almost black and figured with bird’s-eye patterns of tight curls and fine, stippled waves. As if to confirm the ash tree’s antiquity, the road bank beneath it is pinned with celandines and dog violets.