The Wood for the Trees Read online

  Bluebells

  Some trees stand close together, like a pair of friends huddling in mutual support. Others are almost solitary, rearing away from their fellows in the midst of a clearing. The poet Edward Thomas described “the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight.”2 Each tree trunk has individuality, for all the harmony of their numbers together. One leans a little towards a weaker neighbour; another carries a scar where a branch fell long ago; this one has an extraordinarily slender elegance as it reaches for its place under the sky; that one has a stocky base, as chunky as an elephant’s leg, and doubtless at least as strong. No two trees are really alike, yet their collaboration on the scale of the wider wood creates a sense of architectural design. The relatively pale and smooth beech bark helps to unite the structure, for in the early spring’s soft sunshine the tree trunks shine almost silver. The natural cathedral of the wood is supported by brilliant, vertical superstructure, one that shifts subtly with the moods of the sun.

  It is too early in the month for many fresh beech leaves to have unfurled from their tight buds. The wood is still flooded with light. Some of the sunlight falls on the crisp, dark tan to gold-coloured leaves fallen from last year’s canopy that lie in scruffy patches on the ground; stubbornly dry, they have yet to rot away. The sunshine brings the first direct heat of the year, enough to warm our cheeks with hints of seasons to come. Am I imagining that the beech trunk is actually hot on its illuminated side? It does not strain the imagination to envisage the sap rising beneath the grey-green roughened bark, rejuvenated by April showers. Where the sunlight reaches the thin soil spring flowers accept the warmth and light; briefly, it is their time to flourish. After standing to contemplate the grandeur, I now have to get down on my hands and knees to see what is happening at ground level. By the pathside are patches of heart-shaped leaves mottled with white; the sun glances off the tiny, glossy, butter-yellow petals of the lesser celandine, eight petals in a circle per flower, not unlike a child’s first drawing of what every flower should be. Celandines are growing in the company of dog violets, whose flowers are as complicated as the celandine’s are simple: the whole borne on an arched-over stem, carrying five blue-violet petals, of which the lowest is lip-like and marked with the most delicate dark lines converging towards the centre of the flower. At the very heart of it there is a subtle yellowing and, behind, a spur offering a treasure of nectar: clearly the whole structure is an inducement for pollinating insects—a road map promising a reward. Through the beech litter brilliant green blades of a grass, wood melick, are pushing upwards to seek their share of precious light. Near the edge of the wood, lobed leaves of ground elder form a mat of freshest green; this notorious garden weed is constrained to behave itself in the wild.

  But close observations of wayside flowers may be something of a distraction from a Chiltern spectacular. Perhaps I prefer to taste a few appetisers before becoming overwhelmed by the main course. For just beyond a short sward of wood melick is a shoreline edging the glory of the April beech woods in England: a sea of bluebells. The whole forest floor beyond is coloured by thousands upon thousands of flowers; a sea—because it seems unbroken and intense, like the yachted waters in a Dufy painting. But the display might equally be described as a carpet of bluebells; that word is more appropriate to the floor of a natural cathedral. Besides, the hue is a dark and rich blue, a shade not truly belonging to the ocean. Rather it is the cobalt blue of decorated tin-glazed wares produced at Delft, in Holland. In these woods, a magical slip is washed over the floor of the woodland as if by the hand of a master; a glaze that lasts only a few weeks, but transforms the ground beneath the beeches. From a distance there is a vague fuzziness about it, as if the blueness were evaporating upwards. The show is produced by massed English bluebells, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, a species unique to western Europe. This is old Britain’s very own, very particular and extraordinarily beautiful celebration of early spring. There is no physical sign in our wood of the Spanish bluebell interloper Hyacinthoides hispanica, the common species in English gardens. It is a coarser plant, with a more upright spike of flowers, and generally less elegant. In many places it is hybridising with the native species.

  Each bluebell arises from a white bulb the size of a small tomato, and produces a rosette of spear-like leaves and a single flower spike; none is much taller than your forearm. It takes hundreds to make a splash of colour. The bells hang down in a line along the raceme in a single graceful curve. “Raceme” is scientifically correct, of course, but how I wish that we could refer to it as a “chime.” Flowers at the base of the spike open first, their six delicate petals curving backward to form a skirt that curves away from the creamy anthers; it takes a while for the whole display to be over, as each flower up the spike comes to perfection one after another. With a natural variation in flowering times according to aspect and local climate, there are a few woodland nooks where bluebells open up precociously, and others where they linger longer. But wherever they bloom, theirs is a short-lived glory; and only when they are seen in numbers can the delicate perfume they produce be appreciated. As they generally reproduce from a slow multiplication of their bulbs, rather than from seed, the masses of English bluebells seen in our woods are a reliable indicator that they are of ancient origin. Hence it is likely that the flowers that delight my eyes today have been admired for centuries from the same spot near the edge of this very wood. The temptation is to pick a great bunch of blooms, but in a vase they lose vibrancy; they need a myriad companions to assert their natural magnificence. A thrush singing in mellow, repetitive phrases from deep within a holly bush adds some sort of blessing.

  —

  THIS IS OUR OWN PIECE of classic English beech woodland, gifted with bluebells, covered with trees for generations, and changing at the slow pace of sap rising and falling. When Lambridge Wood was subdivided by the previous owner, our little piece of it was arbitrarily christened Grim’s Dyke Wood, after the ancient monument that passes through the wood. The new name added an irresistible whiff of romance to the sales pitch that helped us to part with our money. It is a triangular plot with nearly equal sides, two of them marked out by public footpaths. We access the north-east corner of the triangle by vehicle along a track through Lambridge Wood that leads to a converted barn adjacent to our piece of woodland; the barn has a picturesque cottage next door that will also feature in this book. On the ground, it is hard to detect a very gentle slope of the whole plot to the south, but the incline is enough to admit a magical influx of winter light in the afternoon with the setting sun. About four acres (1.6 hectares) of woodland is not exactly a vast tract of forest, but it is enough to include more than 180 mature beech trees, which I counted, and bluebells galore, which I didn’t.

  Lambridge Wood sits high in the Chiltern Hills, thirty-five miles to the west of London, near the southern tip of the county of Oxfordshire. Although so near the capital, the wood could be ten times further away from it and would not gain a jot more feeling of remoteness. As I contemplate the bluebells only the occasional growl overhead from aeroplanes bound for Heathrow reminds me that there is a great urban sprawl so close to hand.

  The Chiltern Hills form the high ground for a length of more than fifty miles north-west of London. They follow the course of the outcrop of the pure white limestone known as the Chalk.3 The same rock makes the white cliffs of Dover, where England most closely approaches continental Europe; the sight of the cliffs has brought a lump into the throat of many a returning traveller, so it might be thought of as a peculiarly English rock, although it is actually widely spread around the world. As limestone goes, it is a very soft example of its kind—one that can be flaked with a penknife. Even so, it is harder and more homogeneous than the rocks that underlie it to the north, or overlie it in the direction of London, and differential weathering and erosion over hundreds of millennia has promoted the relative recession of the softer rocks to either side. The Chilter
ns stand proud.

  The scarp slope along the northerly edge of the hills is surprisingly steep, and from the top of the Oxfordshire segment there are fine long views across the Vale of Aylesbury towards Oxford in the distance. That scarp lies only ten miles north-west of our wood. Half that distance away, Windmill Hill at Nettlebed is one of the highest points in southern England at 692 feet (211 metres) above sea level.4 The tops of the Chiltern Hills are richly wooded compared with the intensively farmed lowlands on the gentle plain to the north, where a patchwork of neat green fields or brown ploughed farmland is the rule. Google Earth or the Ordnance Survey map reveal much the same pattern, whether seen from above or in plan. The high ground has long fostered special pastoral practices, in which woods played a continuous and important part in the rhythm of country life. That is why they have survived. Our tiny patch is just one small piece of a larger tapestry stitched together from irregular swatches of trees, stretching over many miles. Other kinds of farmland are interspersed, to be sure, and in some places there has been sufficient clearance for open downland. But near our patch, copse, shaw, hanger and wood dominate the landscape.

  When I first walked through Lambridge Wood as a newcomer to the Chiltern Hills, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of entering a realm of eternal nature. Here was the antidote to jaded city life. The woods are unchanging; they help to put our small concerns into perspective. They are restorative, havens for animals and plants; safe places for the spirit. Such a perspective drenches Edward Thomas’s rapt accounts of woodland in The South Country, and has a modern mirror in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood nearly a century later. Here is the farmer A. G. Street writing in 1933 after listing more than one disappointment of middle age: “The majesty of the wood remains unaltered. As I wandered slowly through it, the terrific importance of my trouble seemed to fade away. The peace of the wood and the comfort of the still trees soon iron out the creases in my soul.”5 Surely some comparable emotion lay behind the enthusiasm with which we purchased Grim’s Dyke Wood, our own piece of peace. It was a romantic (or even Romantic) notion, and not wrong in its essentials. But, as Henry David Thoreau remarked of the English poets: “There is plenty of genial love of Nature but not so much of Nature herself.”6 The wood has indeed given much pleasure, but much of that delight proves to be an intimate examination of nature close to. And I now know that the history of nature is not only natural history. The wood is not eternal—it is a construct, a human product. It was made by our ancestors, modified repeatedly, nearly obliterated, rescued by industry, forgotten and remembered by turn. The animals and plants rubbed along with history as best they could, mostly unconsidered except as meat, fuel and forage: the natural history was part and parcel of the human history. The result is what we see today. Romantic empathy with “Nature” is all very well, but it does have to brush up against the hard grit of history, which can soon polish off any coating of wishful thinking.

  So this book is both romantic and forensic, if such a combination is possible. My diary records the status of the beech trees and the animals and plants, the play of the light, the passage of the seasons, expeditions and people, and the incomparable pleasures of discovery. I have also taken samples from the wood to the laboratory to dissect under a microscope. I have invited help from experts to identify tiny animals—mostly insects—about which I know little. Add to this excursions into historical literature and archives, and much time spent scrutinising scratchy ancient maps, deeds and sales catalogues to understand how the wood fared under management for profit or pleasure, and its place in the economy of estate, county and country. I have interviewed those who have known the woods during long lives. There will be a little geology, and more than a touch of archaeology.

  Several of my previous books have dealt with big themes: the history of life or the geology of the world refracted through a personal lens. This book is the other way round: a tiny morsel of a historic land looked at all ways. The sum of all my observations will lead to an understanding of biodiversity—the variety of animals, plants and fungi that share this small wood. Biodiversity does not just belong to tropical rainforests or coral reefs. Almost every habitat has its own rich assemblage of organisms competing, collaborating and connected. What is found today is the result of climate, habitat, pollution or lack of it, history and husbandry. For me, the poetry of the wood derives from close examination as much as from synthesis and sensibility. But I am aware that description alone does not necessarily lead to understanding. This example from what may be Wordsworth’s worst poem (“The Thorn”) comes to mind:

  And to the left, three yards beyond,

  You see a little muddy pond

  Of water—never dry

  I measured it from side to side:

  ’Twas four feet long, and three feet wide.

  The Darwin Connection

  Despite this dire topographic warning, I must describe the anatomy of the countryside around the wood, since it is crucial to this history. Grim’s Dyke (and Lambridge) Wood lies at the top of a locally high ridge, and immediately to the north of it a steep slope runs away continuously downwards to a rather busy road; that part of the incline below the barn has been cleared of trees, and is now occupied by a well-fenced deer park. The main road is partly a dual carriageway running westwards up a typical Chiltern dry valley and serves to connect the nearby small and historic town of Henley-on-Thames, where I live, with the larger and even more historic town of Wallingford thirteen miles away. Wallingford also lies adjacent to the Thames, but between it and Henley the great river takes an enormous southerly bend by way of big, bustling Reading, as if reluctant to breach the barrier of the Chiltern Hills. This it finally does—and most picturesquely—near the village of Goring, about seven miles from Wallingford, where the Chalk cliffs are steep enough on the eastern side of the floodplain to suggest a gorge. Geographers have more prosaically called it “the Goring Gap.” Robert Gibbings is the most charming writer on this and other stretches of the Thames.7 I doubt I can live up to his blend of precise natural history with human observations of all kinds. The journey across country between Henley and Wallingford is very much shorter than the distance along the river, a fact that profoundly influenced the development of medieval Henley and its surroundings, including our small wood. Henley played an important part in the transport of goods and people between London and Oxford, and its story is inextricably bound up with that of the River Thames.

  There are other ways to locate our wood within the English countryside. Ancient England is a curiously tessellated collage of different patterns of ownership and responsibility. Parish, village and manor all make different claims. Grim’s Dyke Wood lies near the edge of the old ecclesiastical parish of Henley-on-Thames, so its original church, as it were, is the fine, thirteenth-century flint-and-stone edifice of St. Mary’s in the centre of town two miles away.8 On the way out of Henley in the direction of Wallingford and Oxford the road is dead straight and splendidly bordered with wide grass verges and avenues of trees. This is the Fair Mile, appropriately named, and the ecclesiastical parish extends out in this direction. At the end of the Fair Mile, a minor road forks off to the right along another valley to Stonor, while the main road continues uphill towards Nettlebed and Wallingford. At this point our wood lies at the top of the slope on the skyline to the left (and south). The fork in the road marks the end of the village of Lower Assendon, and is very near to the wood as the red kite flies, which it frequently does around here. Smoke from Assendon chimneys can be smelled in the wood. Assendon also houses the Golden Ball, the closest pub, which seems nearly as ancient as the hills, and is reached by a steep downhill scramble along a path descending from Lambridge Wood. At the top of the hill, and further away from Lambridge, another ancient village with the briefest possible name—Bix—is arranged around a huge common, and is in a different parish.

  But more important to our story than either parish or village is the manor. For most of its recorded history Lambridge Wood, including our pi
ece of it, has been part of the manor of Greys. The manor house, Greys Court, is a remarkable survivor, just a mile away from Grim’s Dyke Wood. Both the house and the estate are now managed by the National Trust, and thousands of visitors flock there. These benign crowds of pensioners and picnickers arriving by car make it difficult to imagine the house as a remote backwater, but there was a time when the Chiltern Hills were wild and inaccessible. Criminals could go to ground there; religious dissenters could hide there. Greys Court still commands the least urban aspect in the Home Counties. From the garden lawn the modern road is hardly visible, and the view is dominated by a broad, clear valley dotted with sheep and flanked on either side by dense beech woods. It could still be a landscape through which horses provided the only transport, at a time when London belonged to another world.

  Although substantial, Greys Court could hardly be described as a stately home. Part twelfth-century fortified castle, and part Tudor mansion, it remained in private hands from medieval times until 1969. In a brick outhouse an extraordinarily ancient donkey wheel resembling some cock-eyed wooden fairground attraction was used until the twentieth century to lift water from a well excavated deep down into the chalk. It is not difficult to imagine how a place like Greys Court might roll with the blows of history, battening down at times of hardship, fattening up in times of plenty. The extensive estate could provide what was needed: sufficient arable land for wheat and barley, pasture for cattle and sheep, from the beech stands fuel and wild game, and good water from the well. Lambridge Wood lay along the northern edge of the estate. Land nearer the big house was more likely to come under cultivation, so the marginal position of the wood doubtless contributed to its long-term survival. It was always useful just where it was.