Country Mouse Giles Wood
A Holland & Barrett health store, pullulating with natural remedies, has opened on our local high street – yet I looked in vain for a natural remedy for what might be called toxic shock.
There is no more upsetting sight to a hypersensitive than a recently harvested field of maize. The one abutting my own land resembles a crime scene inflicted by delinquents: spilt grain, drunkenly leaning uneven maize stalks and compacted ruts filled with water – but no frogs, of course. They have succumbed to the global amphibian-decline phenomenon.
There was something to look forward to, however. A meeting with younger brother Pip. The little chap knows what I’m like and, as a result, our relationship is not a hornets’ nest of complexities.
As on previous occasions, we agreed to meet at Penwood Nurseries near Newbury, where, if the sun was out, we could tiptoe along the gravel paths of container-grown mountain and umbrella pines and, like the early Impressionists on the Mediterranean coastlines, breathe deeply of the aromatic, resinous ether which in reality is composed of various esters of pinosylvin.
Even in the heaviest deluge, pine trees, which have evolved needles with a shape that deflects raindrops, make wonderful, natural umbrellas. It’s all to do with the ridge-shaped profile designed by nature to blast raindrops apart.
The visit was timely because, talking of natural remedies, what we discovered is that pine not only is a natural antibiotic which exerts a stimulating effect on the process of breathing itself, but also functions as a mild narcotic.
High on natural turpentine, we plumped not to fill our bellies – as we’d planned – with real ale, cod and chips at a local, but instead toddled back to Pip’s where we consumed a healthier option: smoked venison from his recent trip to the Knepp Castle Shop with his own home-grown saladings.
There we pored over Diana BeresfordKroeger’s The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us, in which we read that pine aerosols have an anaesthetic effect on the body, bringing about relaxation.
Conifers have traditionally been unfashionable, owing to their associations with suburban life. Pine trees abound in such locations as Pinner and North Harrow. But we are living in topsy-turvy times, and never have pines been more in favour in contemporary display gardens. Moreover, who guessed that, post pandemic, the suburbs would become a desirable destination and being sub-urbane a desirable character trait?
However tame the countryside or town may be, a Scots pine gives it a note of wild grandeur.
The branches are tortuous and sinewy-looking. When the light of the setting sun shines on the trunk and larger branches, they turn to a deep crimson and glow with an inward fire.
Angel Clare, in Tess of the d’urbervilles, noted the heightened auditory pleasure of the pine trees. ‘The sea was near at hand but not intrusive; it murmured and he thought it was the pines – the pines murmured in precisely the same tones and he thought they were the sea.’
Back in my own village, I ran into a neighbour who, like me, was admiring the heron who has begun to visit the village pond. This relocated urbanite is one of many who have flocked out of the city POST-COVID to relocate in the ‘countryside’ where they can work from home. I was intrigued to hear this townie lecture me on the ‘maize for energy scam’, telling me they are a ‘false solution to climate change’.
It seems that, thanks to the fame and prestige of Sir David Attenborough, I am no longer the only native to be restless about the global threat to nature.
My wife tells me Attenborough has landed, with his new Instagram account, the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach a million followers – in four hours 44 minutes, thus obliterating the record previously held by Jennifer Aniston of Friends.
But, just as these new countrymen are surging out of the cities and into the countryside, I suggested to the wife that we ourselves cock a snook at prevailing fashions and move away from the wide, open spaces to a farm-free zone closer to London – to Surrey, in short.
A bungalow on the edge of a dry, sandy heath – even a golf course sprinkled with broom, gorse and mature pine trees, with a half-timbered pub on the horizon with fairy lights over the porch – would suit me and the Tibetan spaniel very well. And, as a bonus, the chance to ask visitors whether they came via the Hog’s Back.
I told Mary I didn’t want to spend the final decade of my life as an unwilling, unpaid lab rat for the pesticide industry and that my body was overburdened with toxins.
She pointed out that my eating three packets of sweet and salty popcorn in quick succession, washed down with regular, full-strength Coke, Kitkats and millionaire’s shortbread suggested that homeopathic doses of ambient fungicide were the least of my worries.