The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

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СКАЧАТЬ him often, and wrote frank letters to his mother at Hoddam Castle peppered with observations that exactly match his surname.15 On 12 January 1801 he was describing his Christmas at Greys, ‘which began, woe’s me! like most other gambols, with laughter, and ended in tears’. He described the entertainments the local town had to offer thus:

      Miss Stapleton, her brother, and myself, repaired in high feather to a ball at Henley, the night after Christmas, and were much amused in many ways. The company consisted of the town gentry, and the progeny of farmers in the neighbourhood; the clowns with lank, rat-tail hair, and white gloves drawn tight on hands which they knew not how to dispose of; the clownesses with long stiff feathers stuck round their heads like those of a shuttle cock, and wealth of paste beads and pinchbeck chains. They came all stealing into the room as if they were doing some villainy, and joyful was the meeting of the benches and their bums. But the dancing did them most ease; the nymphs imitating the kicking of their cows, the swains the prancing of their cart horses. But joy of joys! Tea was brought at twelve, and off came all the silken mittens and pure white gloves in an instant, exposing lovely raw beef arms and mutton fists more inured to twirl mopsticks and grasp pitchforks than to flutter fans or flourish bamboos.

      There is a precision of observation here that almost mitigates the snobbery. Walter Scott wrote of Sharpe: ‘he has great wit, and a great turn for antiquarian lore’. Nor did the poor Misses Stapleton escape his gimlet eye. A year later he wrote:

      I made out my visit to [James] Stapleton, and yawned with him for a week. They are such good dull people at Greys Court! The sober primitive women do nothing the whole day but fiddle-faddle with their greenhouse, like so many Eves, and truly they are in little danger of a tempter, for their faces would frighten the devil, not to mention men.

      The only portrait I know depicting the sisters (and brother), by Thomas Beach in 1789, suggests this judgement might be unfair. The large painting hangs on the staircase in the grand Holburne Museum in Bath. The two girls are dressed rather fetchingly as shepherdesses. Their features are pleasantly strong, although there is a certain wistfulness in their expressions. Perhaps they had already foreseen their long and genteel confinement to Greys Court. We get a brief sketch of their later lives from the recollections of an old-timer published in the Henley Standard on 29 July 1922. When he was young a familiar sight was ‘the old Post Chaise, with the red jacketed and booted postilion, which brought the old Misses Stapleton of Greys Court almost daily into Henley’. They evidently kept up appearances.

      The preoccupation of the Stapleton sisters with greenhouse horticulture was, I dare say correctly, observed by Mr Sharpe. Miss Stapleton won the first prize at the Henley Horticultural Show in 1837 for ‘a boquet of greenhouse flowers’.16 There are still wooden-framed greenhouses dating back to Stapleton times within the brick-and-flint-walled vegetable garden at Greys Court. Catherine Stapleton was particularly expert on pelargoniums. Her knowledge was recognised by the honour of having a cultivar named after her in 1826: ‘Miss Stapleton’. It is still available as a variety from specialist nurseries. It has charming rich red flowers, paler at the base and decked with a single dark spot on each petal.17 I have a pot of it on my window ledge. With her botanical predilections I am certain that Catherine walked in her own woodland. There she would certainly have found the only member of her favourite geranium family that grows in Lambridge Wood (Grim’s Dyke Wood included) – the common wayside weed Geranium robertianum, ‘herb Robert’. She, like me, must have bent down to examine its small, richly red flowers, and must have smelled its curious pungency, and felt the glandular stickiness of its divided leaves, so often tinted blood-red, and noted its odd, stilt-like roots. She too would have known that this herb was named for Nicolas Robert, a pioneer of accurate botanical illustration in seventeenth-century France. I can imagine sharing with her a moment’s communion over a mutual enthusiasm before the proprieties of the time sent her scurrying back to the old house.

      Fiddleheads

      Ferns have subtle beginnings. As the bluebell leaves fade to little more than slime, ferns push out their new fronds. In the larger clearing, fresh shoots of brambles seem to unfold their leaves even as I watch. Every early shoot – Dylan Thomas’s ‘green fuse’ if ever I have seen one – is almost soft, and downy, and I have nibbled one and found it pleasant and nutty. Today, the backwardly curved spines lining the veins on the underside of the newly unfurled leaves are already beginning to harden – soon they will be capable of delivering a scratch. The bramble patch is impenetrable and intimidating, and the new growth will serve only to thicken its dense conspiracy. Amidst the scrubbiest part of it are dry, brown, fallen fronds of last year’s male ferns (Dryopteris filix-mas). From their centre new growth rises assertively. Rebirth started obscurely a month ago as a cluster of dark knobs. Each one soon rears up of its own accord into a fiddlehead, a kind of self-unwinding spiral that uncurls upwards into the spring sunlight. It is rather like that irritating party toy with which children love to blow raspberries at their friends. At the fiddlehead stage it is said to be edible, and I can see a bruised crown where deer have treated the new growth as a seasonal snack. Even now some of the fronds are opening out, like some unfathomable piece of origami, unsheathing the elegant, pinnate blade that will see the year out. The clustered male fern fronds triumph over the brambles. Once the fronds are fully dark green they will be primed with the poisons that have helped them survive since before the dinosaurs; and then their spore packages will ripen in tiny curved organs beneath each leaflet.

      Under drier beech another kind of fern is less difficult to reach, and is more delicate: a buckler fern (Dryopteris dilatata), with a triangular frond, finely divided, and broadest at the base. It seems too fragile for such a challenging place where little else grows, and even its fiddlehead is more tentative. The shaft that bears the growing frond is delicately clothed in brown, chaff-like flakes. And now on the ground all around this fern so much more brown chaff: little purplish-tan clumps of defunct stamens no bigger than a fingernail have dropped down from the canopy. This is all that remains of the inconspicuous beech flowers. They have already done their job far above me, though the beech leaves are still so new. The greatest trees have the least spectacular flowers.

      It may seem unlikely that beech leaves could contribute to a delicious alcoholic drink, but I have made a liqueur from them for several years, and most of my guests are surprised it is so easy on the tongue. Beech-leaf noyeau can be made in early May when the leaves are freshly unfurled. They are still pale green and soft to the touch – they can be rolled up like cigarette papers. Any tougher and they are bitter. I try to exclude as many of the little brown bracts that originally enclosed the leaf as I can. It takes an unexpectedly long time to pick enough fresh leaves to lightly fill a plastic bag. Once back in the kitchen I stuff a preserving jar quite tightly with the leaves, until it is rather more than half full. Then they are covered with gin (or vodka) until the jar is about three-quarters full. I do not use a high-class brand suffused with many exotic botanicals, but the cheaper stuff from that supermarket shelf marked ‘Youths and Alcoholics Only’. I leave the sealed jar for a month to steep. Then the leaves are removed, allowing all the liquor to drain off. If there are any funny bits floating about, now is the time to remove them. For a whole bottle of gin (700 ml) the next ingredients are 200 grams of sugar, around 200 ml of brandy, and 250 ml of water. After boiling the water to dissolve the sugar the resulting syrup is allowed to cool completely. I then add the syrup and the brandy to the beech-leaf elixir and put the mixture back in the preserving jar, preferably with half a vanilla pod. By Christmastide it should be a lovely golden colour. Only a very cynical person would say that it tastes of brandy and vanilla.

      Bats!

      Claire Andrews has installed her bat monitors. She strapped the recording devices on to our trees about ten feet off the ground, one on the oak by the clearing, the other on a big beech in a sheltered part of the Dingley Dell. They СКАЧАТЬ