Pavey - Wood of Ones Own, A

of

ONES OWN

of

ONES OWN

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY

Ruth Pavey

To everyone who has helped,
or is still helping,
in the wood

Thank you to the many friends who have contributed to the writing of this book. In particular, I would like to thank Sue Gee for her kindness, perspicacity and constant encouragement, Antony Wood and Hazel Wood for their careful reading and sage comments, and Alison Britton for her wit, neighbourly friendship and courage with computers.

I would also like to thank Sophie Scard, of United Agents, and Gesche Ipsen, with other members of the staff at Duckworth, for responding so warmly to the manuscript and working on it with such skill.

My gratitude goes to Penelope Lively for her kind words. Also to Janet Seaton, who researched the archives of Kelways Nursery and wrote Kelways Glorious: The Story of a Pioneering Somerset Nursery (Picts Hill Publishing, 2011).

I would like to thank my brother and sister-in-law and cousins for being part of the story, and all those who, maybe to their surprise, find themselves included in it. Finally, I am very grateful to my son. Although shy of becoming subject matter, it is he who led me back to the West Country.

Generations pass while some tree stands...

SIR THOMAS BROWNE, URN BURIAL

I N THE LATE 1990S I was often on the road from London to Bridgwater. I was born in south Somerset, my grandmother had lived further west, my brother was settled in Bath. Family reasons were drawing me back to the West Country, but this time the route led across a landscape I had never seen before, of willow, water, grass, cattle, swans, ditches, distant hills... the Somerset Levels. With their soft, painterly light, spacious skies and melancholy, their feeling of not quite belonging in the present, or at least of the past still being present, I fell for them.

Until then I had heard of the Somerset Levels without knowing what they were. For a while in the 1970s they had featured in the national news, in a controversy between farmers, who wanted further drainage, and conservationists, who wanted to save remaining wetlands. More recently, because of the winter floods of 2014, the Somerset Levels again floated into the national consciousness; but in general, neither expecting nor receiving much attention, they persist in their half-dreaming, vegetative way, a silted place of slow waters, eels, reeds, drainage engineers, buttercups, church towers, quiet.

Centuries of effort have gone into wresting pastureland from the once-wild marsh, then to combatting the ceaseless accumulation of sludge in the drainage channels. To have known the Levels as nature intended (in this, least ancient, phase of her intentions) would have meant living a very long time ago... as a Celtic saint rowing a coracle to a mound above flood level, a Saxon king in hiding from the Danes, a resilient marsh-dweller.

With the once-vast winter lake gone it would be easy to say that the landscape has changed beyond recognition, but perhaps not quite. The skies are still wide, the distant hills, Mendips, Quantocks, Poldens, Blackdowns, still give blue lines of definition between land and sky. The ambling rivers, however straightened, continue to make their muddy ways towards the Bristol Channel. Winter floods can create expanses of water astonishing to human eyes but instantly accepted by the swans, as though it were only yesterday that the floods were there every year. All this was new to me. What pleasure there is in learning another landscape, and the stories that have grown from it.

Not all at once, but over several journeys I felt the quickening of an old, recurrent wish: to plant trees. It is hard to say where this wish comes from. The desire to cultivate and make a mark is strong in my family, with plenty of gardeners, farmers, teachers, soldiers and a couple of missionaries in the few generations we can remember. But we have little continuity of place. Some people know that they are treading the same ground as their forebears, but we have moved about the globe too much for that. To me the very rootedness of trees is part of the attraction of growing them. That, and their longevity.

There is a lot of hope involved in planting a tree. First, that the sapling will grow at all, then that you will live long enough to see it becoming a real tree. But beyond that stretch years, perhaps even centuries, for the tree to go on growing and living, till people with no idea who planted it will love that old tree for its beauty, girth, the roughness of its fissured trunk, its long endurance. None of this is sure, especially with the erratic climate and the coming of new tree diseases. It can only be a matter of taking enough care, and hope.

Starting trees from seed is easy. Oak, sycamore, walnut, ash they all spring up wherever they get the chance. I first began with tree seedlings in the 1980s but then had trouble finding permanent places for them. I suggested to my London borough council that we could plant up some fenced wasteland with trees, allow some growing time, then open it as a Millennium Wood. But going green had not yet been pressed upon local government. The somewhat baffled reply was that they had already put some interesting trees on a big roundabout, so that was enough. The wasteland remained as it was for about a decade, with sycamores crowding up behind corrugated iron. When it was at last developed as expensive housing I realized how nave I had been, not even enquiring about its ownership.

Over time and wasted seasons, it also became clear that planting trees on rented land, for instance an allotment or a caravan site, is too precarious. It is not good to see young healthy saplings, once a nut or berry or an acorn in your hand, cut to the ground. So to pursue this tree-planting idea it seemed that I, long settled in London, had to become a country landowner.

I had looked for land nearer home but not been able to afford it, so coming across the Somerset Levels revived my hopes. Their workaday modesty suggested that this might not yet be a land of expensive pony paddocks, that it might be the place to try.

The local land agents are Greenslade Taylor Hunt. Unlike the Levels, they were not quite new to me. Mrs Taylor, widow of the Taylor remembered in the current firms name, had lived in Yeovil. As a child I had once tagged along with my father to visit her. She lived in a house built of soft ochre-coloured Ham stone, quarried nearby, with a big garden. In it we would see, said my father, a magnificent tulip tree. We did indeed see a magnificent tree, with leaves of a particular fresh green, but no tulips. Nor did I ask about them, my father being more given to statement than explanation. But still, I have noticed tulip trees ever since, with their odd-shaped leaves and their very occasional, greeny-yellow flowers (that can, at a pinch, be called tulip-like). It is a tree I would like to grow.