Once the project was under way a curious thing happened. I wanted to make a collection. This may not sound particularly remarkable, but for somebody who had worked for decades with rank after rank of curated collections it was rejuvenation. Life among the stacks in the Natural History Museum in London had stifled my acquisitiveness, but now something was rekindled. I wanted to collect objects from the wood, not in the systematic way of a scientist, but with something of the random joy of a young boy. Perhaps I wanted to become that boy once again. Eighteenth-century gentlemen were wont to have cabinets of curiosities in which they displayed items that might have conversational or antiquarian interest. I wanted to have my own cabinet of curiosity. I would add items when my curiosity was piqued month by month: maybe a stone, a feather, or a dried plant – nothing for the eighteenth-century gent. I believe that curiosity is a most important human instinct. Curiosity is the enemy of certainty, and certainty – particularly conviction that other people are different, or sinful, or irreligious – lies behind much of the conflict and genocide that disfigure human history. If I could issue one injunction to humankind it would be: ‘Be curious!’ My collection will be a way of encapsulating the whole Grim’s Dyke Wood project: my New Curiosity Shop. And I already know that the last item to be curated will be the leather-bound notebook.
The collection requires a cabinet to house it. Jackie and I plan to fell one of our cherry trees and convert it into a wonderful receptacle for the wood’s serendipitous treasures. We must discuss the work with Philip Koomen, a noted Chiltern furniture-maker devoted to using local materials. Philip’s workshop, Wheelers Barn, is in the remotest part of the Chiltern Hills, only about five miles from Grim’s Dyke Wood as the crow flies, but about fifteen as the ancient roads wind hither and thither. His studio is imbued with calm. Polished sections through trees hanging on the walls show the qualities of each variety: colour, texture, grain, and age all combine to distinguish not just different tree species, but individual personalities. No two trees are identical. Some have burrs that section into turbulent swirls. Pale ash contrasts with rich walnut, and cherry with its warm tones is satisfactorily different from oak. This is a man who cares deeply about materials and believes in the genius loci – an integration of human and natural history that lends authenticity to a hand-made item. Philip’s handiwork from our own cherry tree will be a physical embodiment of our wood, but by housing the idiosyncratic collection picked up as the project develops it will also contain the wood, as curated by this writer. It will be a cabinet of memories as much as objects. We haggle a little about design, but I know I shall rely on his judgement. I will have to be patient when I gather up the small things in the wood that take my fancy. It will be some time before the collection can live in its dedicated home.
This book could be thought of as another kind of collection. Extracts from my diary describe the wood through the seasons. I follow H.E. Bates’s wonderful book Through the Woods (1936) in beginning in the exuberant month of April rather than with the calendar year, and frigid January. But then, H.E. Bates himself inherited the same plan from the writer and illustrator Clare Leighton, whose intimate portrait of her own garden through the cycles of the seasons, Four Hedges,1 he much admired. My friends and colleagues come to sample and identify almost every jot and tittle of natural history that they can find. Natural history leads on to science, and the stories of grand estates, woodland skills and trades, and life along the River Thames. Human folly and natural catastrophes link the wood to a wider world beyond the trees. This complex collection explains why the wood is as it is today; its rich diversity of life is a concatenation of particular circumstances. I am trying to reason how the natural world came to be so varied, and my understanding is refracted through the lens of my own small patch. I am trying to see the wood for the trees.
Bluebells
Some trees stand close together, like a pair of friends huddling in mutual support. Others are almost solitary, rearing away from their fellows in the midst of a clearing. The poet Edward Thomas described ‘the uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet not all quite perpendicular or quite straight’.2 Each tree trunk has individuality, for all the harmony of their numbers together. One leans a little towards a weaker neighbour; another carries a scar where a branch fell long ago; this one has an extraordinarily slender elegance as it reaches for its place under the sky; that one has a stocky base, as chunky as an elephant’s leg, and doubtless at least as strong. No two trees are really alike, yet their collaboration on the scale of the wider wood creates a sense of architectural design. The relatively pale and smooth beech bark helps to unite the structure, for in the early spring’s soft sunshine the tree trunks shine almost silver. The natural cathedral of the wood is supported by brilliant, vertical superstructure, one that shifts subtly with the moods of the sun.
It is too early in the month for many fresh beech leaves to have unfurled from their tight buds. The wood is still flooded with light. Some of the sunlight falls on the crisp, dark tan to gold-coloured leaves fallen from last year’s canopy that lie in scruffy patches on the ground; stubbornly dry, they have yet to rot away. The sunshine brings the first direct heat of the year, enough to warm our cheeks with hints of seasons to come. Am I imagining that the beech trunk is actually hot on its illuminated side? It does not strain the imagination to envisage the sap rising beneath the grey-green roughened bark, rejuvenated by April showers. Where the sunlight reaches the thin soil spring flowers accept the warmth and light; briefly, it is their time to flourish. After standing to contemplate the grandeur I now have to get down on my hands and knees to see what is happening at ground level. By the pathside are patches of heart-shaped leaves mottled with white; the sun glances off the tiny, glossy, butter-yellow petals of the lesser celandine, eight petals in a circle per flower, not unlike a child’s first drawing of what every flower should be. Celandines are growing in the company of dog violets, whose flowers are as complicated as the celandine’s are simple: the whole borne on an arched-over stem, carrying five blue-violet petals, of which the lowest is lip-like and marked with the most delicate dark lines converging towards the centre of the flower. At the very heart of it there is a subtle yellowing and, behind, a spur offering a treasure of nectar: clearly the whole structure is an inducement for pollinating insects – a road map promising a reward. Through the beech litter brilliant green blades of a grass, wood melick, are pushing upwards to seek their share of precious light. Near the edge of the wood, lobed leaves of ground elder form a mat of freshest green; this notorious garden weed is constrained to behave itself in the wild.
But close observations of wayside flowers may be something of a distraction from a Chiltern spectacular. Perhaps I prefer to taste a few appetisers before becoming overwhelmed by the main course. For just beyond a short sward of wood melick is a shoreline edging the glory of the April beech woods in England: a sea of bluebells. The whole forest floor beyond is coloured by thousands upon thousands of flowers; a sea – because it seems unbroken and intense, like the yachted waters in a Dufy painting. But the display might equally be described as a carpet of bluebells;