From the Forest Read online

  Pollarding was a method of tree management devised to avoid such problems.4 Instead of cutting the tree down to the ground, you let it grow for longer and then cut it off at a level above the point a deer or cow can reach. ‘Pollard’ derives from the now nearly defunct word ‘poll’, meaning ‘head’, which still lingers in the poll tax, polling in elections and the redpoll – a small finch with a red forehead: essentially, pollarding is beheading a tree. Again, the tree will put out new shoots from the point at which it has been cut off; again, stripping away the canopy opens the ground underneath it to the sunlight and – where it is not overgrazed – allows new trees to self-seed into the space between the pollards. Obviously some species will pollard (and indeed coppice) better than others. As I explained, except for yew, coniferous trees do not re-grow if cut back in this way, but many deciduous trees flourish under such treatment. The best trees for pollarding are those that in a natural state put up a tall single trunk. So, for instance hazel, which is naturally shrubby with several main stems, does not make a good pollard although it does make excellent coppice. In Britain the most usually pollarded species are beeches (as at Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire), hornbeam (as in Epping Forest) and, above all, oaks.

  Pollarding has some important effects on trees. The most significant in relation to Staverton is that it extends their lives, possibly indefinitely. Because the tree does not have to maintain so much canopy and because its branches are perpetually renewed, it stays in a ‘juvenile’ state. Almost all the most ancient deciduous trees in Britain were at one time pollarded or coppiced.5 Additionally old, naturally seeded pollards are less at risk from windblow. In the now-famous storm of 1987, ancient trees were the least affected; being hollow or rotten appeared to make no difference whatsoever. Great swathes of Rendlesham Forest, with its ‘robust’ young plantation conifers, were flattened, but right in the midst of the devastation, the ancient oaks of Staverton were barely affected.6

  But although (and because) the pollard tree lives for a very long time, strange things happen to its appearance. Because it is regularly ‘wounded’ by having its branches cut, water and fungi and other parasites get inside the tree, and eventually most pollard oaks are hollowed out. This does not affect its continuing life – the central core of all trees is ‘dead’ – but it does create homes for a bizarre range of life forms. Ancient oak trees provide habitats for 284 different insect species (or 423 if you include mites) and 324 species of associated lichens; by contrast, the introduced spruces of modern plantations harbour a mere 37 species.7 More varieties of insects leads to more varieties of birds, and together, to wider and easier dispersal of flower seeds. The biodiversity in ancient pollard woods like Staverton (despite the fact that it has a comparatively small range of flowers) is mind boggling.

  At the same time, centuries of cutting away the old growth and encouraging new shoots have led to gnarling and knotting and strange patterns in the bark; epicormic twigs (which grow out through the bark, giving oaks their whiskery look) tend to become ever more eccentric, growing in patches and clumps and making the tree trunks look like gnomes (or, of course, gnomes and dwarves are whiskered and hairy because they look like ancient pollard oaks).

  But some of the most extraordinary things happen to a pollard oak when you stop pollarding it. Because of the distortion and attention it received while being managed, the new branches twist out at odd angles, often much lower than on a ‘maiden’ oak grown for timber.8 It may develop several equal trunks from the point where it was cut, or great branches that grow outwards, crooked and reaching down to the ground. These horizontal branches (together with low pollution and a damp climate) encourage epiphyte ferns, like polypody, to make their homes on the oak; mosses and lichens and fungi flourish. The trees in an old pollard wood become more and more different from each other, more and more individual, more and more strange. And in Staverton there are thousands of them.

  These are the trees that as a child you once dreamed you would climb – and for all she is twenty now, my niece is climbing them. She is laughing at herself and we are laughing at her, but she is scrambling up wide branches which reach down to the ground so that she can just step onto them at ground level, and be welcomed into her aerial castle up a magical staircase with a thick velvet carpet of green moss. The princess whose brothers were turned into swans must have sat in trees like these, silent and working away at her impossible sewing; the dashing if useless future king Charles II hid all day in a tree like this, laughing at the stupid if righteous soldiers looking for him below. These are the trees that years ago you thought you would build a nest or tree house in and live like a bird, like Owl in Winnie the Pooh – or even, on the days you were sulking, glare from, like the Owl in Squirrel Nutkin, not benign at all, but greedy and fierce and free. Inside the hollow oaks the ground is often dry and soft with heaps of old leaves; it smells sweet and musty. These are the caves that you were going to run away to and hide out in and wait for the prince to come riding along or for an old woman to pass by and give you a gift that would make your fortune. These are the trees of magical dreams.

  The wood offers more material gifts as well; along the sides of the paths, and particularly on the edges of the wood, the bracken, tall and dark, was a-dance with butterflies. None of us knew much about butterfly identification – although I have since learned that Suffolk is home to 30 of the 59 British breeding species9 – and I do not know what kinds of butterflies they were. This made them feel more strange and wonderful somehow. There were gaudy-coloured ones with bright ‘eyes’ in the centre of their wings and if they were not Painted Ladies they should have been, and white ones adrift like dandelion seeds, and a gentle-looking dark brown smaller kind. And one so memorable I was able to look it up later – a Spotted Wood Butterfly (Pararge aegeria), dark chocolate brown with a drift of black-centred white spots across its wings, some of them cut neatly in half at the boundary between wing edge and air. They were floating and flirting in the sunshine. We invited them onto our fingers, and they walked so lightly on their fragile, slender legs that they seemed weightless.

  Butterflies are lovely, silent, like angels. In the Middle Ages they were a common symbol for the Resurrection: first there is a stumpy little caterpillar, earthbound and greedy; then it apparently dies and is buried in the coffin of its own cocoon; the butterfly emerges metamorphosed – colourful, beautiful, apparently no longer needing food (adult butterflies are primarily nectar drinking), and flying free on gentle wings. The image is better even than it first appears because something very dreadful and frightening happens inside the chrysalis. We use the word ‘cocoon’ now to mean a place of safety and escape, but in fact the caterpillar, having constructed its own grave, does not develop smoothly, growing wings onto its first body, but disintegrates entirely, breaking down into an organic slime which then regenerates in a completely new form. It goes as a child into the dark place and is lost; it emerges as the beautiful princess, or proven hero. The forest is full of such magic, both in reality and in the stories.

  Philosophy is odious and obscure

  Both law and physic are for petty wits

  Theology is basest of the three

  Unpleasant harsh contemptible and vile,

  ’Tis magic, magic that has ravished me.10

  The magic of the fairy stories is the same magic as in woods like Staverton. The magic of trees that look like gnomes; of flowers that weren’t there last time you looked; of butterflies appearing unexpected in the sunshine; of hazel catkins weathering out the winter tucked under their own twigs; of pied flycatchers, skittish flutters of black and white in the green trees, suddenly there when only days ago they weren’t – now we know they were in North Africa all winter, but . . . The magic in fairy stories is ordinary, ubiquitous and unearned, like the magic of the woods themselves.

  More recently, as the woods have shrunk and children have gone into them less, we have turned increasingly to a more bookish, intellectual understanding of m
agic – a High Art, black or white, good or evil, but a reward always of long training and arcane knowledge: Merlin, Ged, Harry Potter, the Jedi. This sort of magic is drawn from the Celtic tradition and also from the ancient Middle Eastern astronomer magicians, the magi in Matthew’s Gospel who came to Bethlehem led by the star.11 Magic in this tradition is a noble but dangerous pursuit, it can give enormous power in exchange for great labour (and, oddly, often celibacy). Even with our emerging ecological concerns, magic is emphatically not something ‘natural’ – it is learned, practised and priestly. It is suggestive that the ‘Fairy Godmother’ was introduced into fairy stories only when they became a literary, educated form: Perrault invented Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother and a sophisticated scene of metamorphosis, whereas the Grimms’ oral tradition was satisfied with a little bird on a hazel tree in the back yard tossing down a golden frock just for the asking. Perrault also created the Fairy Godmothers for Sleeping Beauty – originally they were just a group of ‘old women’ of whom there happened to be ‘thirteen living in [the] kingdom’.

  It is also rather noticeable that powerful men – Gandalf, Merlin – have replaced batty old women. The magicians of contemporary fantasy literature draw to a remarkable degree on myths about scientists (detached from the world in their intellectual pursuits, absent minded, socially inept and immensely powerful). The commentators who complain about sexism in fairy stories seem to overlook this – in the older tales it is most often elderly single women who dispense a peculiarly domestic form of magic.

  The magic of the fairy stories is like the fat in good beef: the meat is marbled with it – you cannot cut it out and dispose of it, and it is what gives flavour and texture to the meal. No one studies magic in a fairy story from the Teutonic tradition – it is just there.

  You are an old grumpy soldier without home or hope and you come down a long track through the woods towards a castle, and an old woman – for no reason whatsoever – gives you a ‘little cape’ of invisibility.

  You are a somewhat stupid third son and your father tosses three feathers into the air to set you and your brothers off on your adventures and your feather just happens to be blown onto the entrance to a magical underworld.

  You are a dispossessed princess, bound to silence by a preposterous promise extracted under threat, and your beloved horse has been taken away and killed – but for no apparent reason, it turns out to be a talking horse, and what is more, by a bit of good fortune its severed head can still speak after it is dead.

  You long for a child and a frog crawls out of a pond and gives you one. (Without wanting to labour the point, frogs produce literally thousands of eggs, tadpoles, baby frogs, with exceptional and often incompetent casualness, laying the spawn in small puddles in the middle of tarmac roads if the mood takes them – a fertile image of casual fertility.)

  You are a child lost in the forest and you come upon a house made of bread and cake and sugar. But oddly enough that is the only magic in the story – the rest is surprisingly practical and down to earth. The old woman who owns the house tries to exploit and ultimately eat you, but solely through your own labours and intelligence you outwit her, steal her goods and go home rich.

  Entirely through your own disobedience and stupidity you eat a poisoned apple, given to you by a stepmother who owns a magic mirror. But it does not kill you. The dwarves who have protected you have no magical cures at their disposal; it takes some clumsy coffin bearers to shake the bite of apple out of your throat.

  You are a boastful liar; you pretend you can spin straw into gold, but you can’t. You are in serious trouble, but luckily a magical little man appears and does the job for you – at a price. You outwit him almost by accident; there is no magic involved on your side, but your prettiness and ambition are more powerful than any wizardry.

  You are a little tailor, smug, self-satisfied and ambitious. By a casual mixture of chance and cunning, backed up by some slightly dishonest swagger and assisted by the folly, credulity and cowardice of others, you win yourself a kingdom. You get no magical help at all – you are completely self-reliant, except that among the trials you have to overcome there are some giants and a unicorn. These are from the world of magic, but you use no magic to overpower them, just native wit and a certain mental and physical nimbleness.

  You yearn for a baby and you finally get one, but it is a thumbling, a tiny creature, which nonetheless has no magical powers of its own and has to use its size to advantage to make its way in the world.

  You are a child who has an alarming encounter with a rapacious wolf. The only magic here is that the wolf can speak and disguise itself as an old woman.

  You are a small girl whose parents have sold you (for a very low price) to a known witch, who imprisons you in a tower. Is it magic or just good luck that your hair grows so long and thick that your lover can climb up to your secret cell? The witch, despite her reputation, does no magic; the prince works no spell; you have no supernatural powers except that your tears cure his blindness.

  You are a girl with seven brothers, a deranged stepmother and a possibly abusive father.12 Here there is deep magic, for the brothers are enchanted into swans. However, their restoration does not depend on magic at all, but on a long and painful effort by you. You have to keep silent for seven years and sew each of them a shirt out of starwort.13 There is nothing magical about your task; it calls only for a stoic endurance and loyalty. Later, while you are still labouring at your brothers’ redemption, you are falsely accused of being a magical witch who has eaten her own babies and you are condemned to death by fire, but you do not swerve. At the last possible moment you are rescued because you have completed your voluntary reparation, and everything ends up happily.

  Magical things just happen; they are everywhere, but unreliable, knotted seamlessly into the mundane world of poverty, work and the mysterious goings-on of the forest. In some stories it is hard to tell what is magic and what is not. There is luck, there is love, there is virtue, there is magic. There is the forest.

  Magic is never a thing that you do – the protagonists of these stories are not themselves magical; they don’t ‘make magic’, although they use the magical tools and chances they are offered. Although there are many stories in which there is no magic at all, there are none in which a magic worker is the principal character. Magic is something you are given, something that is done to you or around you. You do not have power in the way that the characters of higher, more noble traditions do. You may have to work very hard, and endure great pain or sorrow or hardship, but you do not do this to learn, acquire or achieve the magic that will save you. That comes from outside in a fairly arbitrary way – it is all pure gift. No one studies magic; of all the young adults who leave home to seek their fortune, of their own volition or because they have been driven out, not a single one goes off to learn magic. They go travelling like modern gap-year students, to learn about life, to escape poverty or cruelty at home, to undertake apprenticeships in useful trades, to ‘learn what fear is’, to make their fortunes, or for no particular reason that we learn of. The magic comes to them, without solicitation or endeavour. It is usually in the form of assistance, not solution: they have to use the magical gifts they are given, and they have to continue to work or suffer or both. There is a lesser-known light-hearted story called ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’ which illustrates this point rather well. Three brothers are driven out of their home by the machinations of the household goat; they take up apprenticeships in three respectable trades – as a joiner, a miller and a turner. When they have served their time their masters give them each a reward: a table that covered itself with food, a donkey that spat14 out golden coins, and a club that would beat people up for its owner. But the first two brothers foolishly let their magic gifts be stolen from them by a greedy innkeeper. The third brother uses his gift sensibly: he reclaims theirs, punishes the thief and makes his fortune. He was no luckier and no more deserving than his broth
ers, but he used his gift wisely.

  A possible exception to this appears to be the ‘good sister/ bad sister’ stories: the good, sweet, polite, helpful sister is kind and obedient to an old lady and earns her magical reward; gold coins pour out of her mouth whenever she speaks. The bad, rude, lazy sister gets the same opportunity, but through her arrogance, idleness and unkindness she loses her chance and is punished; whenever she speaks a toad hops out of her throat. But even in these stories the magic is chancy; the ‘good’ sister may get given something magical, but even in that there is a high element of luck – she did not serve the old woman in some Faustian contract, she just served the old woman who happened by chance to be magical. Neither girl is given the power of magic. The old woman does not teach the good sister how to make gold flow out of her own mouth or anyone else’s. No one is apprenticed to a witch, no one gains higher powers – most often they gain loads of money and usually true love as well, although that is frequently secondary.15

  I know of no other cultural tradition that treats magic in this odd casual way. I believe it is a distinct forest magic that grew out of the experience of living in woods, where you cannot see far ahead and where things change abruptly. The desert (where the magi come from) and the seashore (where the Celtic wizards come from) are vast and dangerous. The views are long and the weather is extreme and frequently changes suddenly and dramatically. The stars revolve slowly overhead, slow enough for their progress to be pondered upon. The changes in these environments are less seasonal than they are in woods and fields. They do not carry with them the extraordinary fibrillation between same-old and shocking-new that the woods present: the rhythmic regularity of the seasons contrasting with the vibrant surprise of this season, of today. There are always butterflies in the bracken in August – the speckled wood butterfly is not rare, is not specific to Suffolk and is not particularly exotic (it is more neat and smart); but this speckled wood butterfly, today, now, preening in the dappled sunshine below a weirdly contorted ancient oak, is entirely unexpected and might not have been there. Every summer the pied flycatchers make the long journey from Africa, but this quick flash of black and white, this sudden ‘pik, pik, pik’ alarm call or pleasing melodious song with its repetitions and changes, this almost-certainly-a-pied-flycatcher on this warm August afternoon is a completely unlooked-for and magical moment which we can do nothing to create or summon or control and which comes unearned, as pure gift.