John Stewart Collis

THE WOOD

Contents

1. The Wood and the Work

2. The Floor of Flowers

3. The Tree-shed and the Tools

4. Meditation on the Struggle for Life

5. The Virtues of Hazel

6. In the Primeval Chase

7. Bracken

8. Old and New Attitude to Trees

9. Clothes and Sanity

10. The Garden of Eden

11. Ode to the Sun and to Idleness

12. Birds and Animals in the Wood

13. The Old Woodman

14. A Way of Living

15. Different Moods in the Wood

16. The Scavengers of Corruption

17. The Growth of Trees

18. The Feeling Intellect

19. Each Its Hour

20. Planting; The Head Woodman; The Fable

21. Experiments and Questions

22. Firewood

23. Winter Scenes; The Calamity

24. Farewell to the Wood

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This selection from The Worm Forgives the Plough published by Vintage 2008
This extract published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright © John Stewart Collis, 1973, 2001

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-241-19768-4

1 The Wood and the Work

My task was to clear and thin an Ash wood. It was situated between Iwerne Minster and Tarrant Gunville in Dorset, and belonged to Rolf Gardiner of Springhead, amongst other things a Forester of no mean knowledge and activity. My debt of gratitude to him for commissioning me to do this work and to reap its reward, is outside calculation: I can but dedicate these pages to him.

The last time this wood had been touched was eighteen years previously. It was chiefly composed of ash, though it also contained a considerable amount of hazel, and also some spruce, larch, and oak. In addition there was the eighteen years’ worth of undergrowth in the shape of privet and bramble and a great deal of the clinging, climbing, throttling ropes of that hangman’s noose called honeysuckle. I could not see into the thickness for more than a short distance, nor advance a single yard unimpeded. As for the ash itself, the trees were of all sizes. There were some very fine single ones, now nearly full grown; but often a clump of five or six rose from one stool, interfering with each other.

My job was to introduce the idea of freedom into this tangle – freedom for the ash. Not for all the ash; only for the best, the straightest, never allowing more than one to remain out of any single clump and cutting down even good ones if they were too close to others. Darwin said that in Nature the fittest survive. In fact, he only showed that those survive who do survive. It is only when Nature is acted upon by Man that the best, the fittest survive. When Man acts upon Man the same principle is not applied. The Spartans alone seem to have pruned our species on principle. We do not do so now, for no one can foretell how great a mind or skilful a hand may belong to a fragile body.

Thus I started clearing and thinning the wood, which covered some fourteen acres. I advanced upon the tangle with an axe, a bill-hook, an ordinary hook, a slasher, a saw, and a pole-saw. Though my chief tools were axe and bill-hook, I used each of the other instruments at intervals, rather like a golfer selecting a suitable club for each new occasion. I put my head down (quite literally) and slashed my way through the undergrowth, brushing up the clinging thorn, the entangling and infuriating privet, and hacking down the honeysuckle’s parasitic climbers until I had free play to deal with the trees themselves. Some of them were in very poor shape and it was a relief to get rid of them. But there were many good ones which I had to take down only because they were too close to one another. This sort of thing goes against the grain even when singling mangolds, and in the case of trees it is hard to realize how much room a single tree eventually demands if it is to be a fine specimen. Yet it is a fact that in the first stage of a plantation as many as fifty to a hundred plants may occupy the space taken up in the end by a single mature tree.

The beauty of this job lay from the beginning in the fact that there was so much to show for it. In quite a short time I had made a distinct impression, a definite clearing – the jumble of brambles and shrubs and misshapen trees had vanished from the space I had worked upon, and now just a few straight ash trees stood up clear and free. People speak of ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’. This phrase actually does mean something – (though it might quite easily mean nothing and yet be repeated twice daily by our publicists). It means that a too careful dwelling upon many particulars blinds us from a vision of the whole: you cannot catch sight of the wood as a totality if entangled in the trees. Many botanists are in this unfortunate position. But often the opposite of this is meant. The man who mechanically trots out the phrase that he cannot see the wood for the trees, often means that the confused bulk and muddle of facts confronting him make it impossible to see where his own particular problem stands. He cannot see the trees for the wood. Now that I had already made a beginning, a neat clearing in the wood, I could for the first time see the individual trees.

And as I made a clearing in the wood so also I made a clearing in my mind with regard to timber. As I began to bestow order and tidy up the confusion in front of me, so I began to sort out my odd bits of knowledge about forestry. That is generally my method of advance in matters of this kind. I cannot see, I cannot actualize for myself any department of work unless I have taken part in it myself. I do not possess the politician’s and the sociologist’s imagination to grasp the actuality without participation. I have to get in touch with it first through work. For me it is first the tool, then the book. I could not take down the word Forestry from its hiding-place in my head and relate it to the world I know.

My first question was naturally very relevant to the work in hand – What is ash used for by man? The answer is that it supplied the material for most of the instruments of husbandry. Perhaps slightly less so now than formerly. An early nineteenth-century farmer declared, ‘We could not well have a wagon, a cart, a coach, a wheelbarrow, a plough, a harrow, a spade, an axe or a hammer if we had no ash. It gives us poles for our hops; hurdle gates wherewith to pen in our sheep; and hoops for our washing tubs.’ Today neither harrows nor ploughs owe much to wood, but we still need it for the other things.

So already an ash ceased to be ‘only’ an ash tree in my eyes. And henceforth, when I look across any wood like this I shall see more than trees, I shall see their translation into the familiar objects of the farm and the garden. I shall also see tennis-rackets, golf-sticks, and cricket-bats. Above all – walking-sticks. During some days I had a craze for making walking-sticks myself. The method was so pleasant. Having cut down a tree and observing that it possessed some nice straight branches not too thick for a walking-stick, I cut one off just above the junction of a tributary branch and then cut off the latter a few inches below the terminus. That gave me my handle. Then I measured the stick in my hand against my thigh and made a final cut at the bottom according to my needs – and there was my stick. When I had finished off with a penknife I often had an excellent stick.

2 The Floor of Flowers

Apart from any utilitarian considerations, I have always been particularly attracted by the ash whose witch-like fingers with black nails claw the winter sky, and by the aristocratic manner in which the leaves are the last to come and the first to go. The larch, the sycamore, and the horse-chestnut will be in rich leaf without the slightest sign from the ash; the maple, the whitebeam, the hazel, and even the elm, the beech, and the oak are often well away while still the ash remains quite bare as if there were nothing doing this year.

An eighteenth-century forester named Gilpin called the ash ‘the Venus of the Woods’. Few would subscribe to this if we think in terms of leaves, since it cannot compare with the glories of the beech or the chestnut; but if we are thinking of a naked winter tree then the ash may well claim to be the Venus of the woods. Its branches are at the top of the tree – a crown – in marked contrast with the oak or the chestnut. Thus you can see a long way into an ash plantation and be fascinated by the beauty of the barks. This lack of low branches and late arrival of leaves provided a further advantage for me – a very important one. I could work in the sun till well into May. Furthermore, the amount of light which ash trees let into a wood promotes a fine floor of flowers. How vastly different is the other extreme! – a pinewood floor. I used to take a walk occasionally to a little pine wood a short distance away, and look into its daily darkness where nothing grew and no bird sang. In my ash wood the common wild flowers were abundant. They arrived punctually according to the well-known schedule. First the primroses in March – when I began work. Then the violets, soon to be overtaken by the anemones who in turn gave way to the bluebells, while the ground-ivy and bugle also appeared; though dog’s mercury provided almost the main floor of the entire wood.

We call wild flowers common because of their quantity. But this is just where we strike the great difference between the productions of Nature and the productions of Man. When we produce many samples of the same thing they are of poor quality and we speak of them as mass-produced. The mass productions of Nature do not fail at all in terms of quality. Take the bluebell. There indeed is quantity. Yet every single year we are freshly struck by their quality. Only a flower-snob could fail to see that any one of those bells on the uplifted belfry is as delicate a construction as any tulip or any rose. I will not say more beautiful, or less, for in this realm of flowers we actually are in the presence of abundant examples of – perfection. I think that perfection is the key to the emotion that flowers cause in us. When a thing is perfect the problem of its existence is solved. Gazing at flowers in a wood an unexpected signal seems to go up; we feel a movement of happiness and hope about everything, there is a suggestion that all is really well, all is right with the world, regardless of the geographical situation of the Deity. It is because of this that all men, even ruffians, feel attracted to flowers. For they do intimate to us that, in spite of everything, all is well. Undoubtedly that is what they ‘say’ to us, and why it cheers us up to look at them. Philosophers say that all the ultimate problems – freedom, immortality, beauty, development – are presented and solved in plants. ‘The flora does not only raise, but also answers, all the problems which the human spirit may propound,’ said Count Keyserling. ‘For anyone who could understand plants perfectly, life would no longer hold any secrets. And the plants surrender themselves so ingenuously to man. No being could be more sincere than they are, more truthful, more genuine. They perhaps of all the world’s creatures represent themselves precisely as they are … these blessed, pure creatures are never subject to evil moods, and always mirror the very core of their beings.’

Maybe it was because of this that the Sage who sat under the Bo-tree wanted to make plants of men: and we must admit that a Buddha resembles a plant more than anything else. Certainly flowers inspire us: they hold up before us the image of the Ideal. What we would be, could we be true, they are. Ripeness is all. We know that. We see it in the flowers, they are the mirror in which is glassed that goal. But our greatest problem is our unfolding: in nearly every case something goes wrong at one stage or another. We fall. There is no fall of flowers.