The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 9

  It was in the twentieth century that the deepwood came to its true end. During its course, forests were depleted at unprecedented speed across the western hemisphere. In Britain and Ireland, the two wars led to almost unregulated clear-felling. Half a million acres of broadleaf forest were felled in the years 1914 to 1918 to meet war needs. Techniques of woodsmanship and forest husbandry - regular cutting, coppicing and pollarding - that had been developed over centuries lapsed from practice. In the thirty years after 1945, the ‘locust years’, nearly half of the remaining ancient semi-natural forest remained was lost to plantation, development and the plough.

  The deepwood is vanished in these islands - much, indeed, had vanished before history began - but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have always been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling’s story ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’, it is by right of ‘Oak and Ash and Thorn’ that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history.

  There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked in woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of colour, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of the streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their colour rhyme in the eye-ring of a blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories of forests, different times and worlds can be joined.

  Woods and forests have been essential to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought. Woods, like other wild places, can kindle new ways of being or cognition in people, can urge their minds differently.

  Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodlands - of what in German is called Waldsterben, or ‘forest-death’ - I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen of the T’ang and S’ung dynasties - in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between human and other species - would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the trees would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau’s story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping ‘eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines’. When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south ‘to our German neighbours, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.’

  My favourite story concerned the French airman and writer Antoine Saint-Exupéry, who in 1933 flew several Libyan tribal leaders from their homes in the desert to tropical Senegal. As they climbed out of the aeroplane and saw the jungle stretching away from the edge of the landing-strip, Saint-Exupéry recorded, they ‘wept at the sight of the trees’, never having encountered such beings before.

  Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates’s declaration that ‘Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.’ Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. The discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

  Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed - incidentally, deliberately - imagination and memory go with them. W. H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture,’ he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods.’

  The truth of Auden’s proposition would be proved only a few years after he made it. In the late 1960s, a virulent strain of Dutch elm disease arrived on the south coast of England, brought in with a shipment of rock elm logs from the United States. From its beachhead near Southampton, the disease spread rapidly inland and outwards. Within two or three summers there were few sizeable elms left alive in the south of the country. Within ten years, around thirty million had died: 1976, the year of drought, was the peak of the epidemic, but millions more trees have perished since then. Though the elm has not become extinct, it has been devastated, and with it has gone one of the most distinctive presences of the English landscape.

  Among the many admirers of the elm was John Constable. Constable loved trees as he loved people. His friend and biographer C. R. Leslie wrote that he had often seen Constable ‘admire a fine tree with an ecstasy of delight like that with which he would catch up a beautiful child in his arms’. And of all trees, Constable loved the elm best.

  In Dedham Vale on the border of Essex and Suffolk, where Constable lived, there were elms twice as old in years as they were high in feet - and they were hundreds of feet high. Smaller elms grew through and into the hedgerows, lined the banks of the Stour, and flanked Dedham’s churches. Sentinel elms were planted to mark the old ways, the drovers’ roads, so that they could be followed in mist: trees as way-finders, map-markers.

  Constable sketched and studied the elms intently. He recorded the elmy underworld, the shady green-gold circle of leaves beneath the first boughs, and he recorded the canopy, which on the biggest elms could spread over a quarter of an acre of sky.

  In 1821, he painted an elm on Hampstead Heath in which the foliage of the tree is forgotten; the canvas instead concentrates on the trunk of the tree, the point at which it meets the earth. The tree is an English elm: we know this, for its bark has cracked into polygonal patterns, where the bark of the wych-elm and the Huntingdon elm would have fractured more linearly, into long crevasses and furrows, and the bark of the smooth-leaved elm would have formed a regular meshwork of angled ridges and valleys.

  Bark is a subtle, supple substance, easily overlooked. It can be thought of as the tree’s skin; like skin, it carries the marks of folding and of expansion, a stretching which snaps it into flakes or plates or lenticles. If you were to take slow-motion footage of elm bark over a year, you would be able to see it moving, working, living: crevasses gaping, calluses forming, the constant springing open and closing over of fissures. As Constable knew, a world can reveal itself in a tree’s bark. Lean in close to bark, and you will find a landscape which you might enter, through whose ravines and edges you might make day-long journeys.

  Constable’s painting of the Hampstead Heath elm is a study of permanence and transience. There is permanence in the root-work of the tree, its delving into the ground in which it has dwelt for decades and
should dwell for decades to come. There is transience in the light, falling generously and temporarily upon the grass behind. And there is transience in the foreknowledge we now have of the fate of this elm.

  During the Dutch elm disease epidemic, Constable’s nameless elm died, along with the other elms on Hampstead Heath, and the elms that lined the Stour, or raised their single verticals on the skyline of the Dedham Vale. His Hampstead elm would have died as all the others died: first its finely serrated leaves, with their racing-green uppers and silver-green undersides, would have curled and browned and crisped. Then the branches would have wilted and drooped. Then the bark itself would have hardened and scabbed off, to reveal bare trunk wood beneath, which would have been so smooth, pale and sheeny that it recalled bone.

  Dutch elm disease is a fungus that diffuses itself with distinctive efficiency. Its spores are spread by its vector, the native elm bark beetle, Scolytus scolytus. The beetles lay their eggs in the bark of dying elms and the larvae form networks of tunnels, which are known as galleries, under the dead bark. The fungi produce sticky spores on the walls of these galleries, so when the larvae mature into adult beetles and emerge they are already contaminated with spores. They fly to healthy elms and feed off their living bark, depositing the spores of the fungus. The fungus spreads quickly through the root systems of a tree, causing the capillaries to tighten. The tree’s water-conduction system fails; it dies of thirst. So the beetles seek and destroy each tree in turn, sparing the oak to the elm’s left, the ash to its right.

  The patterns left by the beetles beneath the bark are eerily beautiful. The beetles bore out nuptial chambers in which they breed, and feeding galleries radiate off this central channel, tunnelled out by the larvae. The resulting forms resemble radiations from a dark sun, or the imprint of a winged or tentacled creature. The bark beetles have been called ‘engravers’, for the affinity between the distinctive linear pattern they leave on the inside of the bark and the work of a skilled mason lettering a headstone.

  The devastation of the elm, when it came, seemed to some a prophecy fulfilled. For the elm had long been associated with death. In country lore, it was known as the tree of ill-omen. It was ascribed a maliciousness; if you loitered beneath it, branches would drop on to you from the canopy. The tree’s habit of throwing out one strong side branch also made it a popular gallows tree. Elmwood was for a long time the staple wood of the coffin-maker. These associations with death were turned true by history. So synonymous is the elm with death now in England, that one cannot help but look at Constable’s paintings as elegies for the elm - studies in the future pluperfect.

  So the elms died, and the bark of the land was changed by their dying. Familiar horizons were transformed. People found it difficult to orient and steer themselves in landscape they had known for decades. Yet the elm is not extinct. Small trees live on in hedgerows, suckering out versions of themselves, spreading laterally, keeping their heads down: any tree that grows above twelve feet tends to become infected. Although the elm’s associations with death are formidable, so too is its capacity for survival.

  Just before leaving for the Black Wood, I had gone over to Suffolk to see Roger, and to talk to him about forests, and about the elm in particular. I had not been born until 1976, the drought year, and I wanted to know what it had been like to live through the ravagings of Dutch elm disease, to watch the countryside change so drastically.

  Roger’s knowledge of trees and silviculture was immense, gleaned from a lifetime spent not only reading about wood but also working with it: planting, pleaching, coppicing, laying and turning. His sense of trees, like his sense of life, was strongly communal. He disapproved of the habit of fetishising single trees - chieftain pines or king oaks. Trees to him were mutual organisms, best understood when considered in their relationships with one another. Put differently, trees were human to Roger, and humans tree-like, in hundreds of complicated and profoundly felt ways. Since finishing Waterlog, he had been at work on Wildwood, a book about woods and trees. Researching it, he had travelled to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Australia, Tasmania, and throughout Europe and Britain. As the years passed, the project branched out, digressing into studies of the hula-hoop craze, the manufacture of pencils, the history of the Green Man, Roger’s anarchist ancestors, the architecture of Bender shelters . . .

  Roger, like my mother and father, was a collector. He collected knowledge, he collected books, he collected friends, and he collected things. His mind and his house were both prolifically stocked. Every shelf and sideboard in Walnut Tree Farm was thronged with objects that Roger had found on his travels, or that his many friends had carried back from theirs: birds’ nests, flint hagstones, buzzard feathers, clumps of sheep’s wool, a chert arrowhead, a wooden propeller from an early plane, stamped with an untraceable serial number. Over the years, I had brought him several stones, and he had brought me others in return: mineral postcards, hand delivered.

  Almost everything in the farm was second-hand, collected: its framework comprised salvaged oak beams from a demolished barn, and on its floor of salvaged flagstones stood salvaged stand-alone dressers, bookshelves and chests of drawers. Roger was an inveterate scavenger: visiting farm sales and auction sheds, rummaging junk shops, skips and tips - but also forests and riverbanks - for what might be unexpectedly useful or unexpectedly beautiful. His finds were spread around the house and meadows. At the back of the house was one of his favourite trophies: a big cast-iron bath, in which he liked to wallow during the summer months, filled with water that he heated by snaking out a hosepipe on the brick terrace and leaving it to bask in the sun.

  When I went to see Roger that day, we ate lunch together in his kitchen and drank glasses of apple juice. He talked about the vanishing of the elm, about trees he had known that had died - including the great English elm at Rookery Farm in Norfolk, under which he had taught Howards End to his Lower Sixth students in 1976. The following year, the tree was infected with the disease, and began to perish; two years later, leafless and grey, it was felled.

  After we had finished eating, Roger said he had a new scavenging prize, of which he was proud. He took me out into his steepled barn. In the dim cold light, I could see a series of fat metal tubes of differing lengths laid out on a worktop. Roger looked expectant. I looked puzzled. They were organ-pipes from a local Suffolk church, he explained, which had been about to go for scrap, until he had heard about them and bought them off the church. Excitedly, he showed me how he had fitted a steam-hose to the narrowed bottom of the middle-C pipe, and lidded the top end, in this way making a chamber in which he could steam lengths of wood into pliability for furniture making.

  Then he took me over to another workbench, where he picked up an elmwood bowl he had turned from the trunk of an elm felled by the storm of October 1987. Elm is a magnificent timbering wood, he told me that day, because it continues to live and breathe long after it has been carpentered into a table or floor. Its vitality, he said, is exceptional among woods. He said, too, that the elm would return to England: that I should not worry, that in due course, probably after humans were gone or had retreated, the elms would rise again.

  From my crag-top perch above the Black Wood, I looked back down on to the forest below me, and watched the trees move differently in the wind. The big oaks held their round shape, their branches describing orbits around a fixed point, their leaves bustling in circles. The thinner younger pines quivered and swung in arcs and lines. I wondered if it would be possible to traverse the Black Wood without touching the ground, keeping only to the canopy, in the manner of Cosimo.

  Away to my west were the first reaches of Rannoch Moor, which showed white and silver, widening off beyond sight. To the north, over the road on the far side of the loch, the hillsides were thick with conifer plantations. The trees, set in their dark regular straight-sided patterns, appeared unnatural, as though their outlines had been cut with a jigsaw. Even at this distance, I could see the churned-up ground of the cle
ar-cut zones, where, through the settled snow, the black sump-holes, the stubs of trunks and the tracks of machinery were still visible. It looked like a war-zone. I stood, and shook the snow from my feet, and began the descent back down the hillside and into the moving wood.

  The poet and musician Ivor Gurney was born and brought up in rural Gloucestershire at around the end of the nineteenth century. For his family, as for many at that time, the long country walk was a habit and a pleasure. Like the poet Edward Thomas - whom Gurney admired - he grew up as a natural historian, exploring Gloucestershire’s riverbanks, woods and hedges.

  The loving intensity of Gurney’s relationship with the Gloucestershire landscape rings throughout the poetry and letters he wrote as a young man, and the journals he kept. He observed how the fields enjoyed a ‘clear shining after rain’, and wrote of the wide River Severn ‘homing to the sea’. Of all aspects of the countryside it was woodland he loved best, with its ‘avenues of green and gold’. A composer as well as a poet, timber and timbre were to Gurney closely grown together: among the many poems he set to music were his own ‘Song of the Summer Woods’ and A. E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’.

  In 1915, Gurney joined up to fight in the Great War. His first posting was to Sarras, on the Ypres Salient. When Gurney arrived at Ypres, the Salient had been a battle area for two years, and the landscape he found there was a dark travesty of the countryside he had left behind. Before the war, Sarras with its rivers, orchards, woods and pastures might have resembled Gurney’s Gloucestershire. But two years of conflict had transformed it. Mud, midway between fluid and solid, threatened to drown men and entomb them simultaneously. On the military maps of the area that Gurney used, some of the old names of the landscape remained. But many of the new names spoke of the avoidance of death, or of its arrival. Shrapnel Corner, Crump Farm, Hellfire Corner, Halfway House, Dead Dog Farm, Battle Wood, Sanctuary Wood. The woods were no longer there, however; these were ghost names only. The trees had been felled for revetting, or blasted from the earth by shells. The only evidence of the forests that remained were upright bare dead trunks, stripped of leaves, branches and bark by shrapnel and gunfire. At their bases, human bones protruded from the mud like roots, and blood salted the earth.