The Wood for the Trees
It’s strangely humid for November, overcast and sullen with cloud. Though overcast isn’t quite right - it suggests something flat and immovable, like an iron lid. In fact the gray clouds are lancing overhead, the entire sky swept up in a wild, mercurial chase. Where it briefly splinters apart I can see clear through to a higher ceiling of cloud, classic cottonballs scattershot with blue. The turquoise flakes glimmer at this distance, sparking in sequence like a string of charges, before being swiftly doused by the reassembling sky.
The beechwoods rise before me, banks of tinted trees on the mountains behind our home. Having just finished reading Richard Mabey’s ‘Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees,’ I know that I haven’t been seeing the woods as clearly as I could; I’ve neglected something of their essence. The book had been a gift from my partner, Julia, and the subtle wisdom of its words, along with the nature of its giving, got me thinking about how we nurture unique connections to specific people and places. So I set out for the forest with an altered sense of measure, and a renewed pair of eyes.
My own landscape inclinations lay elsewhere: in moorland, salt marsh, reedbed, and steppe. Landscapes characterized by flat expanses, by an exquisite sense of emptiness, space, and solitude. The places where I can look up or out, either at the vast ceiling of cloud and sky, or the disappearing horizon, and feel more or less the same thing: the inconsequential scale of our lives. Paradoxically, it is here that I feel most alive, experiencing a wild and shuddering depth to existence.
I don’t get the same feeling from woodland, especially beech. If I had to choose a preferred type of forest it would be oak. Not for the sentimental and patriotic reasons that have made it the tree of English devotion – sturdiness, durability, shipbuilding in the age of empire – but for its understory. Oak forests are extravagant with life. Stepping into an old oakwood can resemble the ornate embrace of a childhood dream, where vivid mosses vie for attention with glistening berries and scarlet hips. Lichens trail from branches like pale green curtains rustling with wind. Wildflowers spark across the seasons and honeysuckle twines high into the trees. Birds and butterflies roam densely through oak, finding a kingdom of suitable food in the varied undergrowth. It’s as close in Europe as we get to the fecund mysteries of the tropical rain forests.
Beech, on the other hand, is a silent wood. Often the only sound is of your footfalls over leaves. They are monastic realms, sheltering but a handful of creatures, and even fewer flowers. Beech hoards its territory, allowing little else in. Even moss often manages only a toehold on the lowest bulge of trunk, as though raising itself higher would risk upsetting the rules. It’s little wonder that beechwoods are often referred to as naves, or cathedrals; they lend themselves to comparison with strict, religious order, lacking the ardor of oak, the promiscuity of willow. Instead beech occupies space with a vertical austerity. And that was the crux of the matter, the heart of what I wished to explore: the paradox of my attractions.
It occurred to me while reading ‘Beechcombings’ that the places I’m drawn to – the moors, the steppes, the reeds – aren’t so different from the beechwoods. Rather than a vertical austerity, they are exemplars of a horizontal equivalent. Expansive landscapes share a kindred silence, a distinctively enigmatic emptiness. And like beechwoods, they often support only a few specialized and adapted species, such as bitterns in reeds or heather on the moors. My own personal landscapes are hardly the teeming tropics - more often they are terrains of solitude and stillness. A bit like the beechwoods, it would seem. Mabey’s narratives of trees, and of beech in particular, highlighted for me how complex and eccentric our relationships to landscape can be. There are no clean, easy lines that connect ourselves to a place, as if we were joining up a question with its answer in a beginner’s language book. The threads are often perplexing, and replete with contradictions. And like all relationships, our focus and feelings can change.
* * *
The last amber leaves are being taunted by the wind. They sound riled up, rattling away like they have life in them yet. I walk a logging road that winds like a snake through the trees. A fire salamander wriggles over twigs. The hard frosts have kept it tucked into the soil, and its black and orange skin emerges smudged with earth. The first fieldfares, birds of the crystal winter cold, squabble in the high limbs, and the silence falls heavily when they flee.
With each step the forest encloses me further. Fallen leaves tumble past with the whistling wind, like they were being shuffled up by the ghosts of lost loggers. It’s unnerving, though, to hear the sharp cries of the shepherd in the valley far below, the bubbling sheep bells and barking dogs, as loud and clear as if we’re on a communal stroll. A raven glides by, unusually silent. I’m so used to hearing the bird’s deep, trembling gronk that I still myself for a moment when the dark shadow passes quietly over my shoulder.
Stepping off the logging track, I climb through the dry crackle of leaves. Being within the forest is a substantially different experience to walking along the road, where I was essentially beside it, looking up or down into its depths. I’m humbled by the equal footing, the recalibration of scale and shifting perspective. Standing amidst the ranked statues of limbless trunks, beneath the arched and woven canopy, I’m suddenly aware of the forest’s geometry. Beechwoods are more space than matter, the hollows as meaningful as the trees. Where beech maintains a monopoly, the forest is poised around a strict, monogamous code of sinuous, ghost-gray columns and elliptical leaves. Only those rare plants and tenacious trees that can tolerate the deepest shade disrupt this still, meditational tone. The canopy is so excluding of light that summer could almost pass you by.
Suspended within the forest itself are signs of the long co-habitation between the village and the woods. I imagine centuries of woodcutters floating logs over the deep sea of leaves by donkey. It’s the way they still do it in these parts. One autumn when the snows arrived early, I came up here to watch them. They were a family of loggers – husband, wife, and grown children – and they worked closely with the cold, their chainsaws whining across the white slopes. Snow fell glittering through the leafless woods. The donkeys stumbled down steep, slick paths, bearing hundreds of kilos of cut trees strapped to their flanks. Each time they slipped their bells rang clearly around me, but it wasn’t a comforting, ceremonial sound, rather an unnerving echo of dread, a premonition of falling and snapped bones. Eventually reaching an open meadow, one of the loggers loosened the leather straps and the logs tumbled with a dull thud into the snow.
Every last tree has been cut at some stage in this forest, so that the regrowth has sprung back in multiple shoots from the stool. The shoots are now trees themselves - tall, slender descendants of the original beech. It’s not true coppicing in the sense of cutting the trees every ten years or so for young, flexible wood, but the effect is similar. I count on average four or five new trunks supported by each base, but in places there are as many as a dozen. Over time they’ve matured into trees.
I kneel down and move my hand over a swollen beech stump that years ago budded toward the light. Touching the mottled, sapling bark suddenly reminds me of a number. When earlier in the month our winter firewood arrived from these woods, I’d rolled a few logs to one side before they’d all been split and counted up the number of rings that each had inscribed across its surface. These cross-sections can be read like books, and Richard Mabey describes the annual growth rings as the “record of a tree’s ecology of circumstance.” I couldn’t discern any wider or slimmer rings in any of the logs myself, which might have told me of an exceptionally wet season, or a long year of drought. To my untrained eyes the rings all appeared evenly spaced, perfectly proportioned circles slotted neatly inside the next. What I did arrive at, though, was a number. Each of the trees that would transform over the course of the winter into heat, smoke, and ash was about sixty years old.
For some reason I was satisfied with just the number, pleased with knowing the vintage of our warmth. On the floor of the beechwood, however, surrounded by the slim spires of arching trees and thickly knotted stumps, I do the actual mathematics. I quickly work backwards – and sixty years takes me to 1949. Looking again at the still and silent trees, I see the forest in an unforeseen light: the ‘ecology of circumstance’ records more than just rain, fire, and drought.
In 1949, the Greek Civil War reached its terrible apogee. From the end of Hitler’s occupation the country was torn bitterly apart, ruthlessly divided into the ideological camps that had formed the basis of the nation’s wartime resistance units, pro-royalist on one side and communist on the other. In this border region, nudged up against Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the civil war resulted in the complete depopulation of Greek territory. Every village was abandoned, and no one remained at its end. Along with the immense suffering and loss experienced by the fleeing refugees, followed closely by the decimated bands of escaping communist soldiers, there was a practical consequence for the area’s landscapes: the forest was no longer tethered to the village.
Nestled at the foot of the beechwoods, our village supported a pre-civil war population of around 2,500 people instead of the 150 that it holds today. That’s a lot of warmth, building materials, fodder, and cooking fuel for the forest to provide. But in 1949, when the area emptied out, the beechwood experienced a sudden, accompanying relaxation of pressure. The demand for its wealth disappeared.
I watch the tan leaves sift down and begin wondering whether these lower slopes may have been coppiced in the true sense of the word prior to the civil war, managed and harvested on a regular rhythm for slim cuttings, easy fuel, and animal feed. Although sixty years is insignificant in the life of a wood, it is long enough for young shoots to turn into towering trees. A few years after the war, the Greek government resettled the area with families from other parts of the country and a trickle of refugees returned to their old homes, but the village never regained even a semblance of its original size. The mountain trees have had time to fill up the sky. When I slot the split beech into the wood stove and lay it on the glowing coals, I’ll know something of its origins. It was born out of the embers of exodus and war.
* * *
Unlike isolated, lowland beeches that grow wide as well as tall, the high mountain beech aims straight for the sky with no time for middle-aged spread. To see the slender gray columns stirring with wind is to believe, however briefly, that they’re being orchestrated from above. They bend and sway as one, an elegantly swooning community.
It’s easy to see trees as communal, lacking individuality. We may have a favorite tree somewhere or other, but it’s generally the woods that we reference. Forests have a collective pull on our imaginations, from the dark and dreamy places of fable and nursery rhyme to the iconic riches of the redwoods and the Amazon. But in ‘Beechcombings,’ Richard Mabey also writes on behalf of a tree’s personality – the characters that comprise the woodland community. He speaks of organisms, as well as organizations.
Natural pollards carry a distinctive presence in any woodland. On the lower slopes I find a few of them, beech trees cut short by elemental forces, though I can’t make out whether they’ve been beheaded by lightning, disease, storms, or infestation. This isn’t the traditional practice of pollarding, where a tree is cut regularly at the height of a few meters to provide young shoots from above and grazing beneath, without the threat of the animals consuming the valuable resource, but it produces a similar response.
Where a beech has lost its upper story it consolidates its energies. The tree heals the splintering wound by growing a new sheath of wood, a membrane of swollen scar tissue called callus that is able to anchor the new shoots and protect the injury from insects and infection. Because of their rarity on the lower slopes, the hunchbacked deformities set the pollards apart like outcasts among the elegant spires. What the amputee trees reveal, however, is a remarkable resilience, instinctively resuming life in whatever unusual shape necessary.
Higher up the forest takes on an altogether different, more complex hue, and natural pollards appear with greater frequency. Nearing the 1500 meter mark, a new tree enters the woodland equation and the beech has to settle for sharing its hoard. The silver fir is a stately conifer of stippled brown bark and needle leaves, rising straight as an arrow from its humble seed. It is the quintessence of amplitude, presiding over the forest with an unassuming force. From the vantage of the village, it appears that a dark green wedge is being driven into the heart of the beeches. Up close, this high forest drowns me in its cold mysteries.
The trees are far older across the upper reaches; they are suggestive of suspended time. Great beech spires rise to the skies, their solemn gray boles planted like ancient columns. Dying firs shed their bark, and the russet-tinged timber underneath is riddled with the work of woodpeckers. Snapped branches barricade the forest floor where young conifers have sprouted from seed, bringing a feathery emerald glow to the understory.
Where silver firs have fallen they’ve crashed in their entirety, their root systems heaved from the earth, exposed like a tangle of bad wiring. Beech pollards attract me like secret ruins. One has been split open like a sleeve, its hollow interior large enough to stand inside. Only a thin layer of life survives, but it is enough. The tree’s living tissue, and most of the nutrient transport system, is located in the membranes nearest the protective bark, stored in the phloem, the cambium, and the sapwood. It means that a gutted beech such as this, while no longer capable of reaching the great heights of healthy trees, can carry on in the absence of its heartwood. Above the dome of twisted callus, saplings have initiated the renewal, using the place of old injury and loss as their life-sustaining base.
I reach a gap in the forest, the crisp lip of a mountain fold. The beechwood continues on the far side, but this divide is too wild for trees to thrive. A torrent courses down it, amplified to an ocean roar by the steep, auditorium-like sides of the ravine. The water drains off the alpine meadows and drops quickly through the narrow, granite chute, continuing to the village, where it will snake in front of our house in a rushing stream. I drop some beech mast into the water, and wonder if it will make it that far. The wind comes howling off the high expanses, setting the beeches swaying and whistling nearby. Their yellow leaves drift off, carried the length of the valley like flakes of gold.
I turn away from the wind, and its shrill cries gradually ease as I embrace the trees. The conifers bestow a strange quality on the woodland, a dark weight and sense of mysterious enclosure, as though I were suspended in an underwater world. The forest is “dense with time,” as Richard Mabey elegantly describes it, and curiously absorbing. Ghostly, yellow-frilled fungi shelter beneath tepees of leaves. Lichens flutter like frayed ribbons from a forgotten festivity. Dead wood sinks beneath a sea of green moss, and the silence is as clear as polished ice.
Red dots begin appearing on some of the beeches, spray painted at eye-height. Even where the forest feels far wilder and secluded, the hand of man has touched its trees. I follow the red circles up a path of deep leaves, intrigued by a strange tree further on. It’s a colossal pollard beech, a monstrous deformity, and beautiful too. The tree has been cleaved off at the three meter mark by some natural cataclysm many decades ago. Since then it has retrenched in eccentric style. I can’t even begin to link my arms around it; the whole bole is a twisted mass of ribbed and muscled wood. What’s left of the tree’s antiquity seems dependent on tension. Every part of it is held in careful place by a taut, inner force.
A moss-drenched buckle leans out like a gothic balcony, tilting the tree’s center of gravity. Keeling to one side, it’s somehow managed to counterbalance itself with ligaments of woven wood laid off the other way and weighted with warty bulges. The beech is a gallery of inventive excrescences. The scar tissue is pleached together in complex forms, seemingly grafted into position. Among the mossy knuckles and cleft hollows are the renewing shoots, now slim trees themselves, rising confidently from a sunken crown.
Other beech trees tower around it like a protective citadel, but what’s saved it from being branded with a red dot are its injuries. The pollards aren’t good wood in loggers’ eyes – lacking the even and dependable qualities that are the mark of fine timber. All that is ungainly and at odds with its neighbors, commands a distinctive and preserving presence.
In the midst of the forest I am reminded that wood is a process. There is no discernable movement from trees, nothing but what the wind articulates. Even the unfurling of spring leaves is so gradual that one day, glancing through a window in passing, they are suddenly with us – pale, luminous, promising. But what I sense while working my way around the massive bulk of contused scar tissue, adorned with emerald moss and an intricate fretwork of pale lichens, is a distinguishing spirit, endlessly in motion. The enormity of this beech’s resistance, its struggle to survive, speaks clearly of that becoming. For decades it must have been producing new tissue to cover the sagging, weeping wound, almost kneeling down from the weight in order to stem the tide of insects and infection. Quietly, intently, in the looming shadows of untouched trees, it began anew.
* * *
The wind picks up as I curl down the track, heading home. Beech leaves are cartwheeling past me. A few flickers of sunlight, hesitant as guesses, sparkle through the trees, and I realize that I’m smiling. I’m coming to love woods as well it seems, but slowly, more carefully, like we were widows getting to know each other later in life. It’s not the wild spell cast by moorlands and marsh, nor the enlivening rush of estuary and steppe, but a contentment, a coming to terms with the simplicities of time – the persuasive pleasures of trust, companionship, and sharing.
I descend the last bends in a dream -which isn’t ideal when you’re meant to be paying close attention – but sometimes the land and the seasons, the weather and the light, can do that; can burrow down toward a still, reflective point, a heartwood more essential than a tree’s. Our relationships with landscapes and place are composed of such moments, whether solitary or in succession. As Ellen Meloy has written, “Perception itself is the embrace.” Letting the wild world in until we’re tangled up together.
Around me the forest falls. The burnished leaves and remembered snow, the shadow of the raven upon my shoulder. The cold water torrent, the ruined spires. The autumn falling light filtered through leaves until it settles into silence. There is a presence at play in the trees that will carry me back again, a divination of other depths. I had come to the woods by way of a book, but as the path levels out beneath the vast, pursuing sky it’s the gift that I remember. I whisper thanks through the swirl of leaves in return.
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