London, in fact, is a forest. All it takes to get the official classification is twenty per cent tree cover, and London easily passes that mark, especially if we include the verdant outer fringes of Epping and Richmond. Maybe we should be saying that every city in the UK is officially ‘wood pasture’. Some – Bristol and Sheffield spring to mind – do feel as though they retain a connection with the outlying countryside, even if Sheffield Council is in the news for butchering its famous street trees. You will also need to ignore the cars, roads, exhaust fumes, pavements, shops, lighting, litter, noise and – a killer point – the invisible toxins. Not that there aren’t enough of those running into our fields and rivers. But take a look around your nearest city. There are trees everywhere. Not only where you might expect them, in the squares, parks, gardens and commons, but also on almost every street and pavement. In London, ornamental almonds and thick ropes of wisteria adorn the roads and smother the pastel houses of Primrose Hill; and on the Old Kent Road, at the very bottom of the Monopoly board, there are dozens of trees – blasted by pollution, sideswiped by buses, but standing strong and tall.
Of course, almost none of these London trees have arrived by chance, so although Londoners live in a forest, it’s not a very wild forest and perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we live in an empty plantation, from which the undergrowth has been scrubbed away. There is much more to a forest than just a bunch of trees. We must miss the primordial woods, though, because we have been busily encouraging it back ever since we built and then tore down the city walls.
I’m a Londoner, although I didn’t grow up here. Not many of us did. There’s an age-old idea that there’s a fixed and impermeable border between ‘the city’ and ‘the country’, dating back to the Greeks, no doubt, and reinforced by the European city states, but it has always seemed like an absurd fantasy. The country – shall we call it ‘nature’? – permeates every inch of the city, no matter how much pollution or bleach we throw in its way. Likewise, but with more noise and fuss, the city has spread outwards in the past two hundred years, the suburbs and streets of London absorbing hundreds of one-time villages, farms, fields and woods. We all know what someone means when they say that they live in ‘a city’, ‘a village’, ‘the suburbs’ or ‘the country’, but the boundaries are porous and the underlying assumption is dangerous. We can’t live our lives imagining that we are not part of nature. It’s not something ‘out there’ that needs to be managed and tamed – or more likely forgotten about, just so long as there is food in the shops and no flooding in the streets. Our cities are not separate from nature, and nor are we. We just like to pretend otherwise, although who wouldn’t want to think that hunger, disease, wolves – even death – could all be stopped at the city gates?
I live close to Clapham Common in south London. It’s a broad, flat expanse of green, a typical city park, lined with avenues of mature horse chestnut, lime and London plane trees, and popular with Sunday footballers, dog walkers, joggers and, in the tiny scrap of woodland on the west side, the occasional cottaging MP. It really is a very small wood, with a busy main road on one of its edges (the road is close enough to every edge, in all honesty), but it still manages to exhale beauty and wonder in every season. I have walked here in the dead of winter – fallen leaves dark and slippery underfoot, ice cracking on the rutted ground – and felt a long way from the shrieking city. And I’ve been here on that very first unexpected day of spring, when winter is still growling over its meal, but all of a sudden there’s a scent in the air, a change of rhythm, a faint pulse closer to the surface of the trees, and you know that everything is going to change, now, and fast.
In fact, looking up on this winter’s day, there’s a sparkle of blackthorn blossom against the clear blue sky. There’s wild cherry, too, and the ivy gripping the trees has a lighter sheen, even if it hasn’t yet started this year’s climb to the top. Shoots of phosphorescent grass are making tentative appearances at the base of a horse chestnut, whose young buds are gleaming as though they’ve just been licked. On the other side of the sodden path, in the stacked brambles and clumps of nettle, there’s no sign of new life: all I can see are last year’s leaves, still limply hanging on. We’ve just been through the warmest winter ‘since records began’, which sounds like a good thing, but it’s not. It’s one in a series of increasingly urgent warnings that we are choosing to ignore. I miss the frosts and the snow, the crystal clarity of winter, the snap of ice, and these few damp months of soggy chill are a miserable excuse for a season. Perhaps appropriately, a finch’s eager little song is drowned out by the latest passing plane, flying low and heavy over the wood.
It is still winter, despite the premonitions of change. Most of the trees are in lockdown, saving energy. The wood’s solitary beech tree is hunched and hibernating, as is a moribund ash, its keys hanging in thick dusty bunches from every branch; en masse they look like small grey pineapples, although they scatter and crumble when touched. There’s also a large London plane tree here, quite rightly dominating this small London wood. I’ve grown to love these trees. They’re a hybrid of the American and the oriental plane, but were first bred in Spain, so go by the name Platanus hispanica – a real mixture and viewed with suspicion by the native woodland purists. They won’t propagate in London without intervention, poor things, despite the eye-catchingly hairy balls that hang in impressive quantities from their winter branches. They fall in the spring, once the new leaves start to appear, only to be gobbled up by another successful (and clearly very fertile) alien, the grey squirrel. The first London plane is said to have arrived in England in 1663 when it was planted in the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, but we’ve been spreading the tree frenetically ever since, especially in London, once we discovered its prodigious resistance to pollution. Where other more sensitive trees are overwhelmed by smoke, smog and industrial waste, the London plane just shrugs off another layer of bark and carries on soaking up the miasmic gases through its huge leaves.
The plane trees of Berkeley Square, from which, once upon a time, nightingales sang, are said to be the oldest trees in central London. (There are some truly venerable oaks further from the centre.) The planes have been here about 250 years and over the centuries have evolved into weird, fantastical shapes, absurdly tall, but lumpen and distended at their sprawling bases. The dirty grey, scaled trunks are constantly sloughing off extra layers, which is probably not the best Mayfair look, although there’s a chance it may come into fashion in a post-apocalyptic world. And that’s something that will be upon us sooner than we would like, given the London and national governments’ strenuous efforts to avoid having to clean up the city’s air. Over forty thousand people in the UK are choking and dying unnecessarily every year because of poor air quality. Imagine if that figure were deaths from measles, or bombs. Perhaps our only option, given that we’ve been abandoned to our fate by authorities too scared to challenge the status quo, is to plant more London plane trees. A vast number of them. We owe these cooling, soothing, quietly heroic giants a great debt.
The London plane in the little patch of woodland on Clapham Common is probably about a hundred years old, but they are fast growers and there is already a prodigious amount of timber in its thick trunk and erratic branches. In winter you can more clearly see the zigzag growth of its twigs: after each leaf bud is formed the new shoot heads off in the opposite direction. The nearby notice from the ‘Friends of Clapham Common’ rather sniffily notes that its wood has ‘no known economic use’, which has been the kiss of death for most species that have bumped up against humanity over the centuries, but the plane has shown itself to be useful. You can see the anti-pollution measures in action on this and every other London plane: sheets of greenish bark are peeling from the trunk, revealing a dun yellow undercoat. It’s a friendly tree, late to leaf in the spring and tolerant of others. There’s a small hawthorn seeming to grow out of this plane’s roots and snuggling up against the older tree’s trunk. They could almost be one tree.
The Clapham Common copse (as no one else calls it) is best in the summer, when the leaves muffle the roar of the planes and hide the view of the cars and trucks. There are two old lime trees at the centre, such comforting trees at this time of year, with their tender leaves, soft low branches and welcoming, lichen-coated, gently grooved trunks. One of them must have been pollarded a long time ago, or perhaps it’s a natural sundering, but about twelve feet from the ground the main trunk twists and splits into three, and then the three new trunks soar dizzyingly skywards. I go to find these trees one midsummer’s day, close to dusk, walking fast through the surrounding tangle of hazel scrub, and there, spread out on the early summer pasture, at ease in his very own woodland glade, is an almost naked, thin white man in tight, brilliant-white underpants. The air is heady with acacia blossom. I don’t ask him his political party – I suppose it’s possible he’s not an MP – but he looks absolutely right here, shifting drowsily in the gloaming on his bank of grass. Woodland glades are magical places and things can happen in woods that turn the world upside down. Oberon knew this:
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.
Shakespeare, from Act II, Scene I,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Some years before these lines were written, Henry VIII led his pregnant wife, Catherine of Aragon, out of London and up to a glade in the woods below Shooters Hill. There he set up camp and spent the day lording it over a bunch of actors playing ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Friar Tuck’ and ‘Maid Marian’, while hundreds of extras milled around, dressed in Lincoln green, carrying longbows and wondering at what point they should discreetly retire so that their king could grab his wife, or even ‘Marian’, and start rattling the bushes. Or maybe he was mooning over Catherine and she slapped his pale little hands away and told him to wait until they were safely delivered of their child. It would be no surprise to learn he comfort-consumed a hell of a lot of venison that day.
Even if Henry wasn’t getting any, woodlands have always been the scene of love-making, especially in the days when privacy was hard to come by. The great festival was May Day, and the highlight was the raising of the maypole, when all the young women and men would head to the woods at dawn to gather the May flower (bushels of frothing hawthorn blossom) to adorn and then dance around the welcoming pole. You don’t need to be a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian to see where this is leading, and the early Puritan Philip Stubbes raged against such lubricious behaviour in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583):
All the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills and mountains, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes… the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration… And this being reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground round about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbours hard by it. And then they fall to dance about it… I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravity and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids going to the wood over night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned undefiled.
It sounds like a lay-by on the A6 outside Preston. I especially enjoy that ‘viva voce’, the huddled whispering together of ‘men of great gravity and reputation’ as they contemplate the ‘rearing up’ of the maypole, its binding with ‘green boughs’, and all those pert young things dancing and grabbing each other in the woods. It’s enough to get an honest Puritan quite worked up.
The practice of maypole dancing has largely died out, as people have moved to the cities and taken up clubbing, although you’ll still see poles in some villages and primary schools at the right time of year. In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, written three hundred years after Philip Stubbes’s fulminations, the young girls of Little Hintock village head to the woods on Midsummer’s Eve, followed not-so-subtly by most of the local men. When the clock of Great Hintock strikes midnight the girls cast a handful of hemp seeds to the ground, mutter an incantation and hope to be confronted by a vision of their future husband. What they get instead, as they try to sprint home, is a wholly unsurprising encounter with the men, and there is much ‘giggling and writhing’ and ‘desperate struggle’. The heroine, Grace Melbury, has been educated out of her natural connection to the woods, and instead of being waylaid by the earthy but maddeningly shy Giles Winterborne, who lives at one with the forest, is instead gripped by the effete outsider Dr Fitzpiers, who claims her as his own with a kiss. Once that’s done, and she’s heading for home with ‘the moon whitening her hot blush away’, Fitzpiers bounds after the very willing ‘hoydenish maiden of the hamlet’, Suke Damson (indeed), and they have it away in a hayrick.
You can judge the worth of the characters of The Woodlanders by their feelings for the woods. On the one hand there’s the bibbling idiot Fitzpiers, and the bored and overwrought Mrs Charmond, who in the damning words of one old village crone is ‘the wrong sort of woman for Hintock – hardly knowing a beech from a woak [sic]’. On the other hand, there’s Giles and his wild kindred spirit (but for some reason unfanciable), Marty (who ends up having to sell her lustrous hair to the dreadful Mrs Charmond). The beautiful Grace Melbury, meanwhile, moves tragically between the two camps, yearning to travel to civilized foreign lands with Mrs Charmond, but beset by visions of Giles who rises ‘upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation: sometimes leafy and smeared with green lichen, as she had seen him amongst the sappy boughs of the plantations: sometimes cider-stained and starred with apple-pips, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in Blackmoor Vale, with his vats and presses beside him.’ Grace never does get the chance to rub down Giles’s lichen-smeared flanks, with his vats and presses beside him, and instead marries Fitzpiers, making both of them (in fact, everyone) miserable. Just to spell it out, ‘the casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze’. There is truth in the woods, but only some can see it. At least, according to Hardy.
Hardy wrote about woods with longing and love, and although he grew up in Dorset, and returned there once he was making a living from his writing, he also lived in London for some years, and for three of them (1878–81) in his late thirties he was renting a home on Trinity Road, one of the main routes out of the south of the city. The Return of the Native, his first significantly successful novel, was published while he was living there. It’s strange to think of Hardy, such a deeply rural writer, living in London, but of course Trinity Road was not the traffic-scarred highway it is today. And Hardy is surprising. He wrote longingly of being:
Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,
Unto this wood I came
As to a nest
from ‘In a Wood’
But he then finishes the poem by telling us that he’d rather be living amongst people: at least they smile, and talk and can even, just occasionally, be loyal and friendly to one another. Trees, he believed, fight to suppress their rivals (and even their own kind) in the struggle for light, nutrients and forest supremacy. Honeysuckle chokes saplings, holly bushes recoil from thorn trees, sycamore and oak shoulder each other aside, and ivy hangs like a noose in the woods. There’s a strip of woodland on the edge of Trinity Road, not far from Hardy’s old home, and there’s at least one tree living here that must have been around in Hardy’s day. One oak in particular stands in a clearing just yards from the road, its trunk dark with urban grime (and probably harbouring only about a dozen of the possible three hundred-plus species normally associated with the oak), but there’s no doubt that Hardy himself would have brushed past it on his way to the shops. He obviously felt sorry for it.
Here you stay
Night and day,
Never, never going away!
Do you ache
When we take
Holiday for our health’s sake?
Wish for feet
When the heat
Scalds you in the brick-built street,
That you might
Climb the height
Where your ancestry saw light,
Find a brook
In some nook
There to purge your swarthy look?
Hardy, from ‘To a Tree in London’
Hardy seems to imagine that the tree will have to leave London in order to reconnect with its ancestors and ‘purge’ its ‘swarthy look’, but there were trees in London long before humans and their houses – just as once upon a time there were lions, hippopotamuses, hyenas and super-elephants, basking and bickering on the banks of the River Thames. The climate has changed many times since then, as has the fauna, but I suppose it is possible that nothing has grown here, in this small wood close to Hardy’s old home, other than native British trees and plants, ever since the most recent Ice Age retreated northwards.
The ghosts of an older, pre-industrial world are everywhere in London. You can stick a pin into a London street map and the odds are that you will hit one of them. I try this on my local map and strike ‘Meadow Road’, an obvious rural ghost. In the year 1800 the Earl of Dorset had an estate here and was making yet more money by infilling eastwards from the South Lambeth Road. So Dorset Road leads into Meadow Road and Meadow Mews drifts off into a postwar estate. It sounds idyllic. There’s no doubt that Londoners like to be reminded of meadows and woodland and perhaps that’s why so many of our streets are named after woods and trees and orchards and vales: they’re a memento of what was once there – a stand of trees, a pasture, a patch of rough ground, a working copse. Sometimes, of course, they’re just names dreamed up by the developer, or they remind the builder of what he left behind in his Dorset home. A bucolic name certainly won’t hurt the house prices. But I’m afraid for once the name jars, standing in ‘Meadow Road’ by a derelict pub, with only a few scrappy street saplings for company – although someone has taken the trouble to plant some flowers at the base of the trees. It’s a hopeful sight.
If you scratch the surface of any London road, and take a look at who has lived there over the years, you will always find deep-rooted connections to the natural world, and not just in the street names. In Meadow Road, for example, opposite the Ashmole Estate at the north end of the street, is a lovely set of early Victorian houses and cottages, the first buildings ever to settle upon the Earl of Dorset’s water meadow. Their fronts are painted perky shades of pastel and there’s enough wisteria to suffocate an elephant. In the 1940s the extra-wide house at number 8 was lived in by John Menlove Edwards, pioneering Welsh mountaineer, restless and off-beam psychiatrist and would-be conscientious objector (his application for CO status was refused by a Liverpool board in 1940). Edwards was one of the pre-eminent rock climbers of his age. He liked to climb in wet, difficult conditions – a damp Welsh scree slope over an Alpine rock face – with no pitons or ropes. He loved overhangs where the hand-holds were treacherous and crumbling, and was the first to scramble up many now-famous Snowdonia climbs. As his friend and fellow climber Geoffrey Winthrop Young put it, he was ‘serpentine and powerful as an anaconda coiling up loose or wet overhangs’. Edwards was gay (seriously, ‘Menlove’? – who says our names don’t govern our destinies?), at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and this may well have contributed to the desperately sad decision to take his own life with a cyanide pill in 1958. Meadow Road must have seemed a long way from those Welsh mountains.
The natural world is all around us in the cities. But so, inescapably, are traces of war. There’s an ancient hawthorn tree at the front of Branksome House, the four-storey housing block that marks the edge of a large 1950s estate built on bombed-out land. Its well-tended lawns (‘no dogs’), playground (‘no ball games’) and window boxes are in much better repair than the shabby late-Victorian houses opposite. One of these, number 74, a nondescript, grey, three-storey terraced house, was home to James Foster Barnsley and his wife, Susannah Maria, from about October 1915 – although James, on his wedding day and in a flurry of excitement, managed to give as his address number 47. We know this because James Barnsley was a private in the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment and was killed in action aged twenty-seven on 1 May 1917 – and the local Stockwell War Memorial has been assiduously researching all its dead. James’s brother, William Charles, was also killed in the war, although seven of their siblings survived.
They would almost certainly have known the Bunn family at number 35. John Bunn, three years older than James Barnsley, enlisted with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and died of his wounds on 10 August 1917. John’s ‘C’ Company, 10th Battalion, was thrown into the first days of the Ypres offensive and, at some point in that gruesome bloodbath, possibly in a failed attempt to cross the River Steenbeck in full view of German machine-gunners, John floundered and died. Nature and war. Their ghosts slip and glide through the fabric of London. And so it seems right to ask: does a love of the beauties of nature make war and violence (or the pull of war, the allure of violence) any less likely? To put it another way: if we are not exposed to nature, if we are starved of woods and mountains, clean rivers and fresh horizons, are we more likely to turn on each other and our surroundings? The creators of London’s parks certainly thought so, and most people would agree, including the princes and despots of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who looked enviously at Britain’s relative freedom from rioting workers and commissioned Englischer Gartens across the Continent in an attempt to placate their own restless proletariats. They believed (and so do I!) that there’s something intrinsically good about a wood, a park, a stretch of grass. God knows, they’re better than stinking Dickensian terraces or the modern, antiseptic, high-rise glass and steel fantasies. We are all Romantics now. But I think of Hitler (sorry to bring him in), sitting and smiling on the terrace of his gorgeous Alpine retreat; of Göring striding through the ancient Polish forest, brushing past the sleepy oaks, loosing off armaments at the last of the European bison; of Henry VIII, even, reclining in some rose-covered arbour, humming ‘Greensleeves’ and plotting another intimate murder. And what about Pol Pot in the jungle, Charles Manson in his commune, the cabin in the woods with the madman sharpening his axe? It doesn’t add up. Despite this, I am certain that the more time we spend in close contact with nature – in the woods! – the more our humanity will grow. It’s just hard to be sure about that. At least George Orwell, in Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, thinks it might be true:
I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
A short mortar-shot from Meadow Road is Lansdowne Gardens, the first London home of Edward Thomas, the writer and poet of birdsong, woodland and meadows, who was killed in the Battle of Arras in early 1917. He was born here on 3 March 1878, joining his family in a cramped rented flat, before moving south into the new-build streets of Clapham and some slightly more spacious accommodation. At some point in his childhood, probably during frequent family trips to Wales and Wiltshire, Thomas imbibed his lifelong love of nature, and by the time he left Oxford University he was determined to dedicate his life to writing about it. He even published his first book, The Woodland Life, while still an undergraduate, and for the next twenty years he kept up a ferocious rate of production, churning out hundreds of literary reviews, essays, travel pieces and books. He only came to poetry late, urged on by his friend, the American poet Robert Frost, and much of it was written after he had joined the army, and was living in the village of Steep in Hampshire. It was Frost’s insight that Thomas’s prose – and, above all, the jottings in his notebooks – would be brought most vividly to life if it were distilled into poetry.
I head for Steep, by car, on a dirt-drab January day. If it had been May, I might have empathized more with Thomas’s opening line in his essay ‘Spring on the Pilgrims’ Way’ that ‘Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel’ – but that seems unlikely in these road-ruined days. As I drive, I find myself marking off street names and road signs that are named after trees or woodland. There are dozens of them (although, I’d rather not be too specific about my route, because I don’t want to be told by some London know-it-all that if only I’d taken the second left at Lytton Grove I’d have shaved twenty minutes off my journey time). There couldn’t be a clearer illustration of how much has changed in the hundred years since Thomas came this way. I pass a series of ghostly woods (Knightwood Crescent, Southwood Drive, Woodside Close, Largewood Avenue, Woodland Way, Collingwood Avenue, Birchwood Lane, Firdene, Westcoombe); memories of trees (Elmbridge Avenue, Broomhill Road, Oakdene Drive, Oakleigh Avenue, Beech Close, Elm Lane, Beechcroft Drive, Hazel Grove, Hazel Bank, Broad Oaks); and countless ‘Groves’, ‘Meadows’ and ‘Copses’. There’s even a ‘Wilderness Road’. All of it now paved.
So this is what happened
to the names of the trees!
I heard them fly up,
whistling, out of the woods.
But I did not know
where they had gone.
Wendell Berry,
‘Walnut St., Oak St., Sycamore St., etc.’
‘London’ does not want to end. The houses and the streets, drives, closes, avenues, shops and malls, the buildings and the roads, coagulate at the side of the route. It does end, of course: we have our green belt and the manicured, fiercely protected fields of Surrey (which is also, rather surprisingly, the UK’s most wooded county); but this experience of change – much of it, at the time, unwelcome – has been the background hum to all our lives for generations. Tobias Smollett raged about ‘the great Wen’, the spreading cancerous lump of London, in 1771; and in 1852 Wilkie Collins had this to say about an ‘unfinished’ part of London (that is now probably one of its most lusted-after – and central – neighbourhoods):
We reached a suburb of new houses, intermingled with wretched patches of waste land, half built over. Unfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens, surrounded us. At last they stopped at a new square, and rang the bell at one of the newest of the new houses. The door was opened, and she and her companion disappeared. The house was partly detached. It bore no number; but was distinguished as North Villa. The square – unfinished like everything else in the neighbourhood – was called Hollyoake Square.
I noticed nothing else about the place at that time. Its newness and desolateness of appearance revolted me, just then…
Collins, from Basil (1852)
Edward Thomas, in his more gentle fashion, remarks only on ‘the enormous, astonishing, perhaps excessive, growth of towns, from which the only immediate relief is the pure air and sun of the country’. It is hard to fight a feeling of gloom on this choked road south. Of course, this is a hellishly difficult problem. We urgently need enough houses – and no one likes a NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’). But that is also a duplicitous term, invented by a PR company working for the noxious owners of engorged corporations, living lives of untrammelled ease many miles from the land they hope to parcel up and profit from. Easy, green land, with no complications. Just a few trees and fields. No, I don’t think most people do want a supermarket with parking for a thousand at the edge of their village, no matter how many crèches and clock towers it provides. Nor do they want more new housing than can be comfortably absorbed by their roads, buses and schools, just as they don’t need some multinational energy company fracking the hell out of their fields. That makes most of us YIMBYs – yes, I would like some control over what happens to my own back yard.
But I don’t want to think about that now. Not yet. I want to get to Edward Thomas’s woods.
‘Northfield’ is the name of the wood opposite the little church at Steep – the ‘field’ in the name an indication, but not conclusive proof, that at some point in the past this was pasture or arable land. In January, a waterlogged path wends its way through the trees towards ‘The Hangers’, the high, chalk, wooded ridges that must at one time have inspired someone, in a paroxysm of inspiration, to name their village ‘Steep’. We’ve had a lot of rain and the way is narrow and circumscribed by threadbare winter hedges, the ground in between sticky with grey mud. I’m moving forwards with a series of hops and skiddy lunges, treading when I can on the banks of drab russet leaves that have drifted up against the edges. The woods seem to be energetically managed, with recent hazel coppicing and clearances, and timber stacked in beetle-friendly piles. Sky, trees and mud; it’s a grey landscape, with just a couple of evergreen yew trees showing their muted winter coats. A robin puffs itself up on a gatepost, a smudge of colour. But that’s about it until I notice the holly trees. There are dozens of them growing low in the understory, more bushes than trees, their leaves a sharp varnished green, the massed berries pulsing a deep blood-red. They’re not tall: holly can grow to ninety-foot high and in some parts of the country it can overwhelm other species, but here it is growing low in the shadow of oaks, ash and hazel.
Midwinter is the holly’s time, when the leaves of other trees fall and it seems to emerge from the woods. It is, as it says in Gawain and the Green Knight, ‘greenest when groves are gaunt and bare’. At the winter solstice, holly is the ‘holy’ tree, the Holly King, ruling the sleeping world, only giving up the crown reluctantly to the Oak King, who reigns supreme through the summer. Or so I’m told. And I also know that if you throw holly leaves (or maybe the branches) at a wild beast it will kneel at your feet. Pliny the Elder tells us that. And you should cut your holly staff or wand with care and only after offering the appropriate thanks and libations: the holly is sacred and does not like to be taken for granted. But if you get it right, the holly provides a powerful witch’s wand, potent with spiky male energy. In fact, men looking to attract a female partner should carry a few holly leaves with them. Holly, as incense or a tincture, can re-energize the stalest marriage bed. It’s also worth strewing a few holly leaves under your pillow at night if you want to get a glimpse of your future, but do not do this lightly. Holly can lead you to the underworld. Nor should you, on any account, leave any holly inside the home after Twelfth Night: you will attract evil spirits. In Ireland it is bad luck to plant a holly tree too close to your home; in England the opposite is true – it will protect you from lightning and malicious faeries. In either country it is bad luck to chop down the tree. Instead, drink a cup of holly tea and you will find your jealousy and agitation subsiding. Do not, though, drink or consume the berries, they are poisonous to children and deeply upsetting to adults, even though John Evelyn, the magisterial seventeenth-century author of Sylva: or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions, suggests swallowing ‘a dozen of the mature berries… to purge phlegm without danger’. I think we are on safer ground following his advice on how to plant a holly hedge. Evelyn is also extremely and unsettlingly detailed about how to make ‘Birdlime’ out of the bark of the holly, a clagging substance that was smeared on the branches of trees in order to trap songbirds. One final word of advice: if you have just got married, then bring some holly leaves over the threshold of your new home. Men should bring the spiky leaves, women the smooth ones. Whoever does that will rule the roost for the rest of the marriage (although if you both bring leaves, it’s not entirely clear what will happen – perhaps you’ll be divorced within a week).
Holly, then, is king of the winter woods. Its top leaves are generally without spikes (brides-to-be have some climbing to do), but the lower leaves have evolved to grow strong and spiny in order to repel cattle. (But not deer, which munch through the things enthusiastically and must have tongues like hobnailed boots; perhaps the fact that they can do this with impunity should make us doubt the theory – or perhaps what has happened is that the deer’s tongues have evolved faster than the holly’s leaves.) Its berries are really fruit (with four stones), and they’re digested and spread far and wide by the hungry winter birds. It’s not really the only sign of green life in a British wood at Christmastime (there’s juniper, yew, box, Scots pine and ivy), but the holly bears the crown:
The holly and the ivy
Now both are full well grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.
O the rising of the sun,
The running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the quire.
The wood of the holly grows slowly and produces a heavy, white timber, which is often used for chess pieces or the handles of the whips of coachmen. Like the wood of the box tree, holly sinks in water. Indeed, if you are travelling after nightfall, always take your holly-handled whip with you to ward off evil spirits. According to H.L. Edlin in British Woodland Trees (1944), ‘holly is of no importance as a timber tree, but is useful for hedges and ornamental planting. It will not thrive in smoky towns, where all evergreens tend to become “nevergreens”.’ This may be his only recorded joke, but the holly is a somewhat hysterical tree. Perhaps someone should make Mr Edlin a nice mug of hot holly tea.
At the foot of the Ashford Hanger, there are four massive stools of once-coppiced ash, now left to run high and free. These ash trees would have been cut every seven to ten years, but the regular harvesting of their timber for fence and hop poles, staves and posts, must have ceased decades ago. People who know and love woods will often point out that we need more coppicing – and the sound of a chainsaw in a wood is a happy sound. It is undeniable that the woodland landscape we cherish, especially in the south of England – the open glades with their primroses, foxgloves and bluebells – can only flourish if the tree cover and undergrowth are regularly cleared and the canopy is opened to bring sunlight to the forest floor. The axeman brings life to the woods.
These ash trees have been left to make their own way and they are already colossal. A coppiced tree lives far longer than one that has been left unpruned (sometimes, we’re told, ‘for ever’), although one of these ash trees is now threatened by a mid-sized oak growing out of the middle of its base. One day the oak will probably split and shatter its host, but for now they are living cheek-by-jowl, giving me a few moments of confusion as I try to untangle what kind of tree I am staring at. There’s a small heart-shaped hole in one of the trunks, perfect, I hope, for nesting birds or bats. Behind the ash there is more holly. They are bigger, more dominant trees in this part of the wood, sharing space with a number of thick-scaled, prehistoric-looking Scots pine. A wood pigeon is sitting high in one of them, and it takes off, its wings clattering like a briskly shaken bundle of sticks.
The walk to the top of Ashford Hanger is, indeed, steep. Near the top there’s a memorial to Edward Thomas, a slab of stone placed here in tribute by Walter de la Mare some years after Thomas was killed (by a bullet or a shell) while lighting his pipe in a hole in Arras. The plaque on the front reads:
This Hillside
Is Dedicated To The Memory Of
Edward Thomas
Poet
born in lambeth 3rd march 1878
killed in the battle of arras 9th april 1917
And I Rose Up And Knew
That I Was Tired
And Continued My Journey
How nice, how apt, that a hillside is dedicated to Thomas. Is he the only poet to have such an honour? As far as I know, the rest of them are lying in obscure churchyards, or mouldering in Westminster Abbey, but Thomas lives on in the yew and the oak trees, the soft grasses and the chalky scree of his favourite hill. He believed that certain places were cherished and protected by their own ‘little gods of the earth’, and that ‘it is a loss of a name and not of a belief that forbids us to say to-day that sprites flutter and tempt there among the new leaves of the beeches in the late May light’. He is right. We no longer have a name for the inexplicable magic of places, at least not one that we can utter without apology. But I think we know that there is such a thing as the spirit of a place, its genius loci, and I can tell you that this particular hillside is alive with the spirit of Edward Thomas.
If you’re still with me, then you know ‘Adlestrop’:
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Thomas, ‘Adlestrop’
Thomas conjures magic. It’s a simple list – meadowsweet, willow-herb and grass, steam hissing from the express train – but he brings us with him to that station platform in late June. We can smell the engine and hear the birds. We can see the misty hills of England stretching far into the distance. We don’t just want to be there. We are there. And he’s clever because he gives us something we want to believe, that we live in a land of boundless beauty, where over the next hill there are more hills, more woods and meadows, high clouds and birdsong. It never ends. It fills me with longing to find the woods of my imaginings, a fairy-tale forest that goes on for ever, its trees and groves surging to the horizon, further than anyone can travel, smoke drifting up from the clearings, wolves and bears roaming safely in the wilderness.
Anyway. Enough soldiers travelled to the front carrying that crazy vision of England in their heads and hearts, and like Edward Thomas many of them never came back. I sit on a bench to the side of his memorial stone, facing down the hill, and try to imagine what he would have made of his view today. The yew trees are still here, growing thick and green on either side; and in the middle-distance there are small, leafless woods, overgrown hedgerows, mud-green fields and a few rooftops, shining silver in the January drizzle. There’s one house with a rather grand garden, its large lawn tightly trimmed and punctured by some ornamental fir trees; but apart from that there are very few homes to be seen, let alone villages or even towns. There is, though, a bottle-green caravan in one of the fields, framed by some gratifyingly misty hills.
The view may be more or less the same, but when I think to listen for it, I realize that there is almost no birdsong. Or rather, it’s here (and, of course, it’s midwinter so I’m not expecting much), but what there is has been nullified by the sounds of the traffic on the nearby A3. This noise, unencumbered by summer’s leaves, amplified by the valley, is a constant background moaning, so persistent that it’s almost unnoticeable. But stop and listen. It’s incessant. The rolling thunder of the cars, the scream of the revving motorbikes, the hellish payload of lorries howling along the unseen road. It is relentless. Not only that, what this noise represents – pollution, greenhouse gases, the unfettered exploitation of anything we can grab, the imperatives of economic growth – is entirely at odds, profoundly and irredeemably irreconcilable, with everything that Edward Thomas marvelled at on his hillside in Hampshire.
Edward Thomas didn’t have to confront the agonies and dilemmas of climate change, obviously, and although he lamented the passing of a rural golden age, he also mocked the idea as absurd even as he wrote about it. He knew what his public wanted, though, and in his early writings every cottage is thatched and the cheery blacksmith’s hammer startles the geese on a hundred village greens. But he wrote with unrivalled poetic detail in his notebooks about the natural world, of the ‘ducks gathering insects from the surface of a pond at dusk – skimming them literally, with sharp snaps of their beaks, which they hardly dip’. Of the ‘catkins swelling on the birches; they are silent now, but in May at their birth make a pattering against the stiff leaves’. And he wrote of the wildlife of London, of the ‘hawthorn blossoming, in scattered sprays, on Wandsworth Common; while the leaves are gone, or going, with purple about them’. Thomas wrote about nature wherever he found it, because nature is everywhere. And the traffic, baying from the valley, is a reminder that there is no real point in only trying to save or preserve our woods and fields out here in the countryside (although we must), because we’re going to have to do much more than that. Nothing that happens here can any longer be isolated from what goes on in Southampton, or London and Beijing, or the burning forests of Indonesia. I wish I hadn’t driven here.
The very top of the Ashford Hanger, known as Shoulder of Mutton Hill, is a wooded strip of yew and oak and beech, tumbling down both sides of the hill. Edward Thomas loved this place and wrote about it often, making it the setting for his poem ‘The Path’:
Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
from ‘The Path’
Does nature writing always work better as poetry? Robert Frost obviously thought so – and he persuaded his friend Edward Thomas to make the attempt. For many of his poems, Thomas simply took his earlier prose pieces and notes and redrafted them into poetry. He had been ‘a poet’ all along, but it was only in the last couple of years of his life that he felt able – brave enough? – to embrace the form. He even published his first poems under a pseudonym, Edward Eastaway, as though he were trying to distance himself from what he considered years of hack journalism. Overall he published dozens of poems between 1914 and 1917, and the intensity of the poetry, and Thomas’s growing confidence in his art, loops back into the prose. Now more than ever, rather than just noting the natural world, however exquisitely, Thomas makes his character and views an integral part of the writing. You could say he has something to answer for.
The children still play in the woods above Steep, that much is clear. There’s a lean-to den here, made from coppiced ash poles and shaped like Eeyore’s house in the Hundred Acre Wood. There’s a frayed blue rope hanging high from a branch in a beech tree. Further on, there’s a fallen yew, looking like it has hauled itself from the waterlogged ground and then sprawled down the hill, chalk crumbling from its exposed root base. I stare into the hole and think of Edward Thomas, lighting his pipe for the last time. The yew tree is mature, green, still growing, only now it is horizontal, its branches adjusting to the light and swerving skywards. I’m also thinking, as I head along the ridge, how very rarely I meet other people in the woods I walk through. The paths are well-trodden, but the woods are empty.
Just at that moment I see a middle-aged woman coming fast up the hill, strong and stooped under a heavy bag. She looks, like so many people you meet unexpectedly in woods, out of place and time, a wise woman gathering faggots in the fairy-tale forest, absurdly dressed in Gore-tex. I want to ask her the way to Cobbett’s View, a place that the great polemicist William Cobbett raves about in one of his Rural Rides, but she charges past me at a pace I would struggle to match. It doesn’t matter, as around the next corner is a Hampshire County Council sign, with this text written next to a picture of Cobbett, winking at us like a ruined old roué:
Out we came, all in a moment, at the very edge of the hanger! And never in all my life was I so surprised and so delighted! I pulled up my horse; and sat and looked; and it was like looking down from the top of a castle down into the sea; except that the valley was land, not water.
And this view, too, can’t have changed much in the past two hundred years, since Cobbett gazed out approvingly from the back of his horse. There are small fields and hedgerows, coppices and woods, the odd farm, but nothing built-up, the old field-patterns kept, nothing really to mark the passage of time other than the dull chunter of the traffic, muted now by a grey fog that is seeping over the land. We’ll come back to Cobbett, but he liked a land with woods:
Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil… the more destitute of woods; that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers. The cause is this, the great, the big bull frog grasps all. In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich.
It’s a simple formula. The woods around here have been spared because the soil is too thin and the slopes are too steep for crops. The great, big bull frog cannot be bothered to reach out for such a meagre morsel: he’s already gorging on the fat of the land. Away from carefully conserved beauty spots such as the Ashford Hanger, I don’t think Cobbett or Edward Thomas would recognize one hundredth of what they once knew and loved. The pace of change has been unrelenting; and there is now more fecund and varied growth in the back gardens of our cities than there is in the chemical-drenched fields of ‘the countryside’. The honey tastes sweeter in Balham than it does in Steep. And what of the woods? Cobbett is right: a land without woods is a destitute land, its people impoverished, its soil depleted. Why, then, have we allowed our country to lose so much? Who was meant to be looking after the woods? Where did they all go?