Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson

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      At the edge of our land you could see, across the little side-valley of a stream that runs down to the river, one of the Wrenns’ very banky fields. Before, it had been grazed tight, thistly and docky in patches like every bit of land around here, but with a background of new, bright green grass. Now, with the cows gone, and with Stephen gone, it looked different, the hay long and not cut until late, an air of abandonment to it, or at least of other matters on the mind. I looked across at that field and in it saw what had happened to the Wrenn family, the stupid, trivial, devastating disaster, the slice taken out of their lives.

      I will always remember Stephen for the grinning optimism of what he said about the trees, the way we were lucky, blessed with the oaks here. ‘Look after your trees,’ he had said to me, and I will, as a memorial to him if nothing else. Isn’t it a habit, in some part of the world, to plant a tree on a person’s grave, to fertilize a cherry or an apple with the body? It seems like a good idea. That, anyway, is the picture I now have of Stephen Wrenn, but it is an oak, not a fruit tree, that is springing from his grave, the big-limbed, dark green, thick-boled, spreading, ancient kind of oak, so solid a part of the country here that it is known as the Sussex weed.

      In the aftermath of Stephen’s death, we were all rocked back. I took to spending time in the autumn wood. It is, on a quiet day anyway, a pool of calm. All the rush and hurry evaporates in a wood. If you lie down there, nothing happens. There is a sort of blankness, a consoling eventlessness about it. If a pendulum were swinging there, it would be floating as if on the moon, weightlessly falling, weightlessly climbing the far side. A wood distorts and thickens time. Occasionally, a small five- or seven-leaf frond off an ash tree, or a single hornbeam leaf, will spiral towards you. A pigeon, with a chaotic bang-shuffle to its feather noise, will fluster out of the trees.

      Those are only the headlines; the body-text is absent. There is no busyness here. The extraordinary patience of these vegetable beings is what defines them. The way in which the trees stand and wait, open-armed, their leaves dangled in the air for sunlight, their roots spread hemispherically beneath them, capable of doing no more than accepting the wetness that might come to hand, this is a form of existence that could not be more alien to our own. The leaning patience of the tree, its long game: that’s the beauty and the dignity of it.

      As I lay in the Middle Shaw one morning that autumn, escaping work, fed up with it, haunted by Stephen’s death, a sudden squall blew through the trees, unfelt at ground level but caught and noisy in the crowns of the oaks. It was a blast from the west and in that sudden wind, the wood began to knock and cannonade around me; the acorns, of which there were more that year than anyone could remember, were being blown and shaken out of their cups. The wood quite literally was noisy with the oak’s seed rain, as the acorns bounced down through the lower branches and spattered on to the leafy floor. This was the seeding moment of the year, the culmination of the year’s life. It was as near as a wood could ever come to breeding, the climax of the year. But all this rattling activity did not represent the reality of the trees. A true film of a tree’s life would be grinding in its slowness, nothing but the great non-event of gradual enlargement. But that slowness is what is beautiful about a tree. Its concurrence with time, its superbly long rhythms, cannot be captured in a way that would make people watch or listen to it. The music of a wood would make Gorecki’s Third Symphony look up-tempo, a sharp little dance-tune. Which makes the real thing so rich and so rooting if you manage to make the time to listen to it.

      Or so it seemed that autumn. The wood was a balm-bath, a long slow statement, simply, of the trees’ presence and persistence and dignity and life. That is the reason groves are sacred. Great trees stand as a reproach to our business, to our neurotic rush and hurry. But what a price they pay: incapable of defending themselves, as passive as whales under the harpoon. For all their dignity, they are no model for us. Anyone who acted like a tree would be thought mentally deficient. That is the conclusion I came to: we have to be anxious to be human. Passivity, calm and the long view: none of it’s quite enough.

      I knew I had to start getting a grip on the land we had now acquired. The woods were the place to start. Wooding is a winter job, when the sap is down and trees are not hurt by the saw. A winter-cut stool of ash, hornbeam, hazel or chestnut will sprout again in the spring, and those new fresh sprouts, called ‘spring’ in this part of the world, will re-establish the tree as a living plant. And so I asked Peter Clark if he and I together might begin to get the woods in order.

      Peter Clark had been wooding for 14 years or so, all his adult life, and he was expert at it. He used his chainsaw like a balloon-whisk. A flick here, a zzzzzz there and order came out of chaos. There was a businesslike air to the way he approached the semi-derelict tangle of bramble and wind-blown tree. He didn’t, as I would have in a half-hearted, uncertain and rather respectful way, nibble at the edges, trimming this, pulling away at that. He waded into the central problem. Confronted with the giant collapsed ash stools, the muddle of elder and bramble and old splintered oak limbs, he attacked them ruthlessly and systematically. The cosmetics were left till later. Meanwhile, the stacks of usable cordwood grew at those points on the edge of the wood where, in a ground-hardening frost, a tractor and trailer would later reach them. His fires consumed the toppings, the useless bits and pieces. Every day that winter they burned in three or four places at once, positioned so that the smoke could chimney out through a gap between the big trees around them. From a field or two away the wood looked like a small leafy settlement, with the smoke climbing out from the three or four separate hearths and the chainsaw whining and relaxing, whining and relaxing as another fallen thorn or overgrown hazel was sliced and readied.

      It was a wonderful sight – in the mind’s eye as much as anything else – Peter moulding the wood in the way other people might pick up a lump of clay and shape a pot from it. He was a gentle and not especially gregarious or socially confident man. If there were other people about, he would often decide not to come in for a cup of tea or for lunch. Wooding is a private business, done in private, the results remaining virtually private, the whole event without a public face. And it was there, in that self-contained world, that he excelled. ‘Do you like wooding?’ I asked him and he replied in the way you might expect. ‘It’s a job,’ he said and lifted his eyebrows into a smile.

      We have four patches of woodland on the farm. One, the Way Shaw, is a field that was let go before the war and was now a thicket of bracken and wind-twisted birches. Ken said the remains of a V-1 doodlebug lay somewhere in there, but nobody knew where. Two of the others, Toyland Shaw and Middle Shaw, are old hornbeam coppices with some big oaks in them. The fourth, the Ashwood Shaw, is a wonderful old ash coppice, with giant stools growing on a steep bank between Great Flemings and Hollow Flemings, some of the stools twelve and fifteen feet across, with four or five 60-foot-high trees growing from each divided base.

      This, in miniature, is a rich inheritance, an ash wood and a hornbeam wood providing the two necessary materials: one light but strong, making perfect poles for the handles of tools, for rakes and hay forks, the other tough and resistant. Mill cogs were always made of hornbeam wood and whenever I look at them I think of that, the iron hardness lurking under the oddly snake-like bark, the trunks not making good clean poles like the ash but twisted, fixed in a frozen and rather ugly writhing. The ash and the hornbeam, the calm and the perplexed, the classic and the romantic of an English woodland.

      I was feeling my way with the wood. Clearing up was obviously the first stage of what to do here, but it wouldn’t be enough. That autumn a couple of enormous ash trunks crashed out of the wood and into Hollow Flemings, the field below the shaw. There had been no great winds, nor anything else to disturb them. They had simply grown too big for their foundations. The leverage of the 60-foot trees became too much and they snapped out of their fixings at ground level, leaving a torn stump and exacerbating a weakness which meant that other stems from the same stool would soon go. The only way to save the plants was to cut them down. New growth would spring from the shorn stubs and the interrupted cycle of coppicing, which, judging from the size of the stools, must be many centuries old on that bank, undoubtedly a medieval landscape, would be resumed.

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