“Sometimes you have to check,” writes Ruth Pavey, “just in case life means you to do a somersault.” Her own modest upheaval was to buy a piece of land, at auction, on the Somerset Levels, with a view to turning it into a wood.
At the time she was a teacher living in London (she is still gardening correspondent on Hampstead’s Ham & High newspaper), and the land, four acres of scrub woodland costing £2,750, was not even the lot she’d had her eye on – that went to a higher bidder. This was the consolation prize.
From the start of this captivating book, it is clear Pavey’s plot has its own plot. And grounded though she might sound – her prose is supple but never runaway lyrical – you swiftly realise she is willing to be blown on many a rogue breeze in pursuit of neighbourly narratives.
The world, for the curious, is full of clues. She introduces us to Somerset locals, outsized lawnmowers, sheep with a pushy disdain for fencing, and lets us into the idiosyncratic evolution of her wood. Visiting the old couple who previously owned the land, in a nearby care home, she worries that she will seem an unhinged Londoner, and so emphasises her family roots in Somerset. The old man does the talking until his wife pipes up to comment that the spring water running into a pond on Pavey’s land never dries up. Just as suddenly, she then dries up herself. Pavey relishes life’s quiet absurdities (though it is herself she sends up most thoroughly). If this book was not as much a pleasure to write as it is to read, I’ll eat my hat and gardening glove.
A visiting friend asks what her wood is for, a question that throws her at first. But one is able to answer on her behalf. Reading is the equivalent of being in her wood – of being quiet, released from care, able to look and think. It is a treat not because an idyll is being described, more because it shows that beauty can embrace (even be enhanced by) imperfections. And there are imperfections galore. I particularly enjoyed the description of the secondhand Rollalong caravan bought from her neighbour, farmer Ted. Its romance is qualified by the problems of trying to paint it (observing the blood of the squashed insects caught in the whitewash) and of trying to sleep in it on freezing winter nights. She had, she admits, a “rather gothic conversation” with her brother about health and safety. But whatever the worries (it is at the Wigmore Hall she incongruously learns how to light a gas mantle), she does not neglect to register: “real quiet is absorbing, it makes you want to listen to it”.
As a gardener and as a writer, she is more free associator than purist. She responds to the “genius of place”, but without being slavish. She has planted 150 trees, her planting not always indigenous (although she has manfully resisted the temptation of peonies). In one chapter, her gaze strays beyond her plot to consider her 18th-century neighbour William Pitt and reflect that he would have sorted her patch at speed, “had the spring tapped, built a hermitage, opened up vistas, replanted orchards”. She adds that she admires “that bravura approach to life without at all being able to emulate it”.
The non-bravura style makes this book – attractively illustrated with Pavey’s black-and-white sketches – a winner. Pavey is a sympathetic companion, never a hectoring expert. She lets you know grafting can be hard graft. Wielding a scythe, ditto. Mowing grass is no picnic. Pretty soon, she gives up sleeping in the Rollalong, caves in, and buys a ruined cottage in nearby Langport, described in a 1907 guidebook as “an unattractive little place”. She is amused enough to quote this and disagree. Her book is about how taking root and accepting impermanence work together – a sustaining contradiction. And it is a wonderful reminder of how often the best things in life – the beautiful moments in the wood – are unplanned.
• A Wood of One’s Own by Ruth Pavey is published by Duckworth Overlook (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
