Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
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and no bottom, as they say here – that no one was in the market to take on extra capacity because feeding the cattle in the coming winter would cost a fortune. Drought was stalking all of us.
Even at the end of July, the leaves on the trees already looked used, dirty, in need of replacement. By early August, some of the hawthorn and hornbeams in the hedges were already largely yellow. By the end of the month, the spindle leaves were spotted black and had dried at the edges into a pair of narrow red curling lips. Elders had gone bald before their time and there were ash trees of which whole sections had been a dead manila brown for weeks.
An oak tree 60 feet high and wide may drink about 40,000 gallons of water a year. It is a huge and silent pump, a humidifier of the air, drawing mineral sustenance from these daily lakes of water that pass through it. Where, in a summer like this, could such a tree have got the income it needed?
The truth is, at least with some of the oaks here, they had been running on empty, trying to live through a grinding climatic recession. I was fencing between the Cottage and Target Fields – the Wrenns’ bullocks had, as ever, been getting through – and I leant on a low oak branch as I unwound the wire. As I pushed against it, quite unconsciously, without any real effort, the branch, perhaps 15 or 20 feet long, came away from the trunk of the tree and dropped slowly to the ground. It had seemed fully alive, decked with leaves and new acorns as much as any other, but it pulled away as softly, as willingly as the wingbone of a well-cooked chicken. I pushed it into the fence, as an extra deterrent to the cattle.
Two days later, at the top of the Slip Field, I found an enormous branch, full of leaves and acorns, lying on the ground beneath its parent, perhaps 40 feet long, the bulk of a small house or a lorry. It too had been neatly severed at the base, as if the branch had been sacked, ruthlessly dropped for the greater good of the whole.
These living branches rejected in mid-season made me look at the oaks here in a new light – their scarred bodies, their withered limbs, the usual asymmetry to their outlines, the slightly uneven track taken by each branch as it moved out from the main stem – and started to see each oak not as a thing whole and neatly inevitable in itself, but as the record of its own history of survival and failure, retraction and extension, stress and abundance. Each oak has a visible past. The story it tells is more like the history of a human family than of an individual, forever negotiating hazards, accommodating loss, reshaping its existence.
One afternoon we were all in the kitchen together. We were sitting around the table and Ken as ever was regaling us with stories of past triumphs. Suddenly we heard, coming over the wood, from the lane that runs down from Brightling Needle towards the valley and on up to Burwash, the sound of sirens: ambulances, police, fire? We didn’t know. It was a rare noise, more troubling here than in any city street. It marked a real person’s crisis, that of someone you knew. We heard that evening. Stephen Wrenn had been killed. A tractor he had been driving toppled over a little bank, no higher than the back of a chair, and crushed his head. He died instantly. He and his new wife had only just returned from their honeymoon. The entire village went into shock over it. Two or three hundred people attended the funeral and the vicar who, a couple of weeks previously, had married him, helped bury him too.
One evening later that summer, when I was taking the children down to the seaside to play on the sands at the mouth of the River Rother, I happened to meet Brian Wrenn, sitting quietly by the river, looking out to sea. I sent the children on down the track and sat down next to him. We talked about Stephen. Brian said he was ‘learning to face a different future’. It was as if his whole being was bruised. There is very little to say to a man who has lost his child.
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