The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

this plant is the perennial sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum), no taller than the bluebell. Each flower in the cluster has only four wee petals; under my lens the edges of the leaves can be seen to be lined with minute prickles that can be felt by gingerly stroking a finger along their margins – usually eight delicate leaves to a whorl. As for the sweetness implied in both the common and the Latin name, this little plant has a fragrance more persuasive than that of any bluebell. Its sweetness grows as the woodruff is dried – which it does readily. I placed a bunch in a warm airing cupboard and it was preserved in a day. Dried woodruff was once slipped between the sheets to sweeten bedding, so the sleeper might dream of woods in spring. The scent of new-mown hay is the same chemical agent (coumarin) as in woodruff, but only if that hay has sweet vernal grass as one of its components. Sweet woodruff is used to flavour traditional springtime drinks and sweets in Germany, though its German name of Waldmeister (‘master of the woods’) seems too assertive for such a refined little plant. My son thought to try it as a ‘botanical’ to flavour gin; there has been a revival in boutique spirits, and he wants to be ahead of the Zeitgeist. Although juniper berries are the traditional flavoring for gin, all kinds of refinements are possible by steeping other herbs and spices in the spirit. Experimental Batch Number One was rather overpowering, but Experimental Batch Number Two turned out to be delicious. It was presented with a tasteful label featuring the wood in spring. Grim’s Dyke Gin may yet feature in some future genre market.

      Bluebell and sweet woodruff are specialists. Not every bulb or herb can thrive in our beech woodland. Timing is all. These plants have to steal as much light as they can before the canopy shuts off the sunshine. There is really no option but to flower in spring. They join the dog violet and the lesser celandine in the early shift. Wood melick, which makes something approaching a field of lively green over parts of the wood in May, will produce its nodding rod of single flowers and then fade before summer is over. The bluebells’ burst of photosynthetic activity is done even before the beech leaves mature, and the energy the plants have gained during their brief but glorious exuberance is stored in the bulb. Job done, everything above ground withers away. The lesser celandine’s3 pretty, heart-shaped leaves also enjoy but a brief existence; they soon turn yellow and shrivel. They too sequester energy in little cream-coloured, bulb-like storehouses that linger in a somewhat scrotal cluster below the ground through most of the year. I have seen similar-looking bulblets form at leaf junctions, any one of which might produce a new plant next season. The leaves of sweet woodruff and violets linger on, a little dowdily, after flowering, but the woodruff has a strong root network that can survive a major drought unharmed. I add two more pleasing spring flowers discovered from snuffling around in the wood: a discreet purple-flowered wood speedwell, Veronica montana, modestly creeping along a pathside where there is a little more light, and a pretty buttercup, goldilocks (Ranunculus auricomus), with apparently much the same requirements. Both have the kind of understated beauty that rewards a little botanical nous.

      Our slowly spreading English bluebell is a marker for ancient woodlands. Stately wood spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides) tells the same story, and I have found it in four places. It almost makes a small shrub. Its young, leafy shoots are a lovely coppery hue and slightly pendent, contrasting well with the flowering heads, which are a lively green. All spurges have peculiar flowers, unlike those of any other plant. They have none of the usual paraphernalia: no petals or sepals, and the reproductive parts are reduced to the minimum. What could be mistaken for petals are actually yellow-green leafy bracts that form a kind of cup around the minimalist sexual business. A cluster of these distinctive structures makes the flower head. Unlike lesser celandines and bluebells, the spurge plant stays on in the wood, gradually losing its fine vernal contrasts, and fading with dignity. I have seen spurge species thriving in deserts looking just like cacti, and others creeping on seashores, and yet more growing far too vigorously in my vegetable patch, so it is scarcely a surprise to find one species that likes to live in old Chiltern beech woods. All spurges carry a horrible, poisonous white sap that seeps out if a leaf or stem is broken. Once I accidentally rubbed a minute amount of the milk into my eye and danced around for two hours in excruciating agony, weeping profusely. I cannot recall such a painful reaction since they closed my favourite Chiltern pub (the Dog and Duck).

      Men of letters

      Writers are not a rare species. They seem to crop up everywhere, rather like spurges, although some are less poisonous. I confess that at first I thought I would have my patch of Chiltern Hills beech woods to myself. I was wrong. Over the brow of the ridge behind Lambridge Wood Barn, in the village of Lower Assendon, and just beyond the Fair Mile leading out of Henley-on-Thames in the Oxford direction, a small Tudor cottage decked in oak beams was home for several decades to a famous writer: Cecil Roberts. In the 1930s Roberts published a series of three books centred on Pilgrim Cottage: Gone Rustic, Gone Rambling and Gone Afield. I now have them all in hardback, though had I not bought Grim’s Dyke Wood I would probably never have heard of this particular author. Gone Rustic was reprinted at least six times: it was a bestseller. All the books are charming, gossipy, name-dropping confections about life in a kind of idealised Rustic. Beneath the dustjackets they have bas-relief covers with cottagey timber framing built in. Roberts’s is the same world as that in which Hercule Poirot joined genial house parties in small stately homes only to find His Lordship dead in the drawing room. It has an exact fictional match in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, set in a genteel part of Sussex where private incomes would pay for housekeepers and cooks, and the protagonists could concentrate on painting watercolours and choosing chrysanthemum varieties. Working-class country folk tended to have only colourful walk-on parts.

      According to Cecil Roberts’s account in Gone Rustic, he discovered Pilgrim Cottage in 1930 by accident after sustaining a puncture on the road from Henley to Oxford. He writes: ‘Around me the view was imposing, almost Tyrolean, with steep larch covered hillsides, and in the distance between thick beech woods nobly clothing the greensward, a ravine.’ The last may have been a reference to the gentle valley leading to Stonor. Pilgrim Cottage is still much as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. Cecil’s upstairs windows would have commanded a view of Lambridge Wood on the near skyline, so he really was a neighbour. I imagine him fussing around his garden, absorbed in his gladioli, while instructing his housekeeper to lay tea for the Marchesa, who would be arriving betimes in the Hispano-Suiza. Pilgrim Cottage, he complained, was positively deluged with visitors, all of them fascinating, making the necessary wielding of his pen a matter of some concern. In spite of all his socialising, he did manage to produce a quantity of books and much verse. The core of his Pilgrim Cottage books is provided by local history, well described, and much of it relevant to my story; and his tales of local craftsmen are invaluable. His other love is Italy, and he jumps to Venice and palazzos and the story of the Finzi-Continis at every hint of a metaphor. His interest in natural history was as perfunctory as his interest in gardening and sunbathing was obsessive. The Chilterns provided a green backdrop to his real concerns, which were always human.

      Cecil Roberts had another life during the Second World War. Pilgrim Cottage and its stories had a great following in the United States. Their appeal may have been rather akin to the current popularity of sagas featuring big houses and their goings-on a century ago. Roberts was recruited to aid the war effort by giving lecture tours in America, which he evidently did with great success. The New York Times reported that ‘the best propaganda in the world is the British and the most efficient expression we witnessed were the lectures held all over the USA by the noted author, Cecil Roberts. These lectures never had the flavor of propaganda but brought more good will towards Britain than anything else.’4 His charm could obviously do its work far away from the Thames Valley.

      When the conflict was over Roberts felt he had not received sufficient official recognition for his efforts. He tried to restore the balance by publishing his autobiography in no fewer than five volumes. Rowena Emmett, daughter of Mr and Mrs Plater, the next occupants of Pilgrim Cottage in 1953, told me that for many years beaming Americans would turn up at their garden gate requesting permission for photographs. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘quite a nuisance.’ The former owner did not downplay the fame of Pilgrim Cottage. He had written to the Platers advising, ‘many thousands