From the fields
Giving himself neck ache from constantly looking upwards, John Lewis-Stempel makes the most of a sunny May day harvesting ‘tree hay’ and marvelling at the myriad wildlife– including flies and earwigs–that reside on bark
STANDING under the beech tree, looking up into the cave roof of blue shade, the density of the tree’s canopy blocking out the day’s sunshine. In late spring and summer, the beech is the parasol tree, casting glad, cooling shade for the weary walker, the picnicker and, doubtless, once upon a time, for persecuted outlaws, the Robin Hoods.
No British tree, not even oak, has such presence as beech. A single beech tree, such as this one in the copse, is sufficient in itself to create the quintessence of beechwood: the sense of entering a churchy, sacred space: the immense grey pillars, that vaulted ceiling, the mystried gloom.
Oak is the hail-fellow King of the Wood, beech the Ice Queen. Oak is one trope for Britain, hearty, rustic and guileless; the smoothboled beech is the alternative Britain, the shadow self, secret, minimalist, spiritual.
Oh, yes, and standing under a beech causes me to philosophise even when working, as I am this morning, lopping select lower branches with long-handled pruners to make ‘tree hay’. Collecting tree leaves for feeding livestock, usually from pollards, is a vanishingly small component of farming, although once it was widespread across Europe and likely predates the scything of grass to make ‘proper’ hay.
I only have a handful of pollards, so I prune lower limbs of hazel, beech, sallow, hawthorn, blackthorn, elm, ash, lime and field maple in copse, hedge, orchard and garden. However, only those trees brazenly daubed by a dob of white paint are pruned, the trees/bushes I know categorically do not have birds nesting below 20ft and so remarked.
Tree hay is peasant work. The pruning, with a billhook or long-handled pruners, brings down the flies, and other flies—lured by the honey sweat of a human—come in and bite, leaving on my neck a pearl choker of shining pustules.
Entomologists use a ‘beating tray’ to collect and study the invertebrate inhabitants of woodland; this consists of a light-coloured piece of strong fabric, such as calico, stretched across a frame. I am wearing a white shirt, which serves just as well. My shirt crawls with caterpillars, aphids, flies, spiders, bits of twig and branch. After half a day of cutting, I resemble the Green Man of Tudor pageantry and modern village-pub sign, even something truly arboreal; a blackcap once perched on me, mistaking me for a shrub.
The insects: they zoom-zoom, kiddy-play jet-plane noise around my head as I move between trees in the greenshade of the springti
