The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [85]
And then, of course, he would walk the Forest.
His route that day had taken him from near Burley over to the north of Lyndhurst. The woods were quiet. Huge oaks spread all around. Here and there, a small clearing appeared where some ancient tree, brought down by a storm, lay across the forest floor, leaving a patch of open sky in the canopy above. As he walked, he would pause occasionally to inspect some lichen-covered trunk, or turn over a fallen branch to see what creatures were dwelling under it. And he had just passed above the village of Minstead and come to a section of the Forest that bordered a high open heath, when he paused and looked down at something with interest.
It was such a tiny object: just an acorn from last year’s fall, which had escaped the hungry pigs and, nestling in the damp brown leaf mould, had cracked open and struck roots into the ground.
Luke smiled. He liked to see things grow. The tiny white roots looked so vulnerable. A little green shoot was emerging. How astonishing to think that this was the beginning of a mighty oak. Then he gently shook his head. ‘You’ll never make it there,’ he said.
How many of the acorns that fall ever become oak trees? Who knows? One in a hundred thousand? Surely not. Less than one in a hundred times that number, perhaps. This is the vast strength, the massive, numberless oversupply of nature in the forest silence. The chances of an acorn living were almost infinitesimally small. The pigs turned out for the autumn mast, or any of the other forest animals might eat them. Ponies or cattle might crush them underfoot. If an acorn survived that first season and happened to be on ground where it could strike root, it could only grow into a tree if there was a break in the canopy above to give it light. But even for those few that grew to be saplings, there was still an ever present danger.
It is not only man who destroys. Other animals, too, left to themselves, will destroy grasslands, woods, whole habitats with a stupidity as great as, perhaps even greater than, that shown by humans. The deer loved to eat oak shoots. The only way for one to survive was to have a protector. Nature provided several. Holly, although the deer ate holly, might screen an oak. Butcher’s-broom, the little evergreen shrub with the razor-sharp spikes – the deer avoided that. For some reason they seldom cared to eat bracken either.
Very carefully, scooping out the soil around the seedling with his hands, Luke carried it in a cradle of earth, without disturbing its tiny life. A few yards away there was a small ring of holly surrounded by butcher’s-broom. Entering this, ignoring the scratches on his arms, he planted the seedling in the patch of earth in the centre. He glanced up. There was clear blue sky above. ‘Grow there,’ he said happily, and went on his way.
Brother Adam knew Beaulieu Abbey so well that sometimes he thought he could have walked around it blindfold.
Of all its pleasant places none, he thought, was more delightful than the series of arched recesses, known as the carrels, that lay along the north side of the great cloister, opposite the frater where the choir monks ate their meals. They were perfectly sheltered from the breeze; facing southwards, they caught and trapped the sun. Sitting, book in hand, on a bench in one of the carrels, gazing across the quiet green square of the cloister, smelling the sweet aroma of cut grass laced with the sharper scent of daisies – this, it seemed to Adam, was as close to heaven as anything knowable by man on earth.
His favourite carrel lay near the middle. Down the stone steps from the doorway to the church: that was five steps down. Turn right. Twelve paces. If it was a sunny afternoon you felt the warmth through the open arches by the seventh step. Turn right after the