“A wood should not be a museum,” says John Lewis-Stempel. For four years he managed Cockshutt Wood in south-west Herefordshire, three and a half acres of deciduous and coniferous woodland “with a secluded pool where the winter moon lives”. This is his diary of his final year there.
Such small woods play a vital role in the life of our countryside: they are the last refuge of many flora and fauna. Grassland sustains 70 pairs of birds per 100 acres but a wood is home to 400. Woods are “fortresses of nature against the tide of people and agribusiness”.
For this reason, Cockshutt is a working wood, an example of “agroforestry”. Lewis-Stempel kept pigs, cows and Hebridean sheep (“small, black and primitive”) to control what would otherwise be a “sea of briars crashing around the trees”, allowing wild flowers to grow and attracting wildlife. In the summer he harvested “tree hay”, leaf fodder from ash, oak and elm, storing it as winter feed to which he added vitamin-rich upper branches of holly (whose leaves don’t have spines). The wood also supplied him with logs for his fire (“the released sunlight of years gone by”), wild plants, mushrooms for his table (the book includes recipes, from elderflower champagne to chestnut soup) and the occasional pheasant and wood pigeon: “I farm for wildlife. Cannot wildlife provide me with a meal?”
His family come from “farm stock” dating back to the 13th century. He considers himself to be a “countryside writer”, not a nature writer: “I give the view of the countryside from someone who works there.” There’s a powerful sense in his books of the land as something to be worked and managed.
The diary form is perfect for conveying the shifting moods of the seasons and allows Lewis-Stempel to delve into the history, lore, poetry and even the language of woods. But it’s his observation of the natural world – the sight, the sound, the smell of it – that is so memorable. He has a distinctively brisk, muscular style of writing that has a poetic intensity and concision. In October, “the leaves of the service trees flutter, flicker, flame, in pseudo fire”; and in March he discovers “primroses leaking spots of sun out of the earth”. Above, the sparrowhawk is “a twisting blade of badness”.
This heartfelt, evocative book shows that woods such as Cockshutt, which has stood since before “the Romans trod their road to Hereford”, occupy a special place in both the countryside and our psyches. As Lewis-Stempel says, “Woods: they inhabit the mind.”
• The Wood: The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood is published by Doubleday. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) 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.
