All bark and some bite

A vital source of food, a pharmacy and a haven for wildlife, a tree’s living skin is a surprisingly sophisticated surface, says John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

I GOT lost in the middle of a wood once. It was night, I was on the tail of a runaway terrier and the torch gave out. It was winter, rain-clouded, moon-less— as close to laboratory black-out as anyone could hope to avoid in real life.

How to get back to the house, in such blindness? I looked back at that December midnight and wondered if, by some strange energy, some subconscious tampering with fate and time, I caused the bulb to blow. Previously, I had spent hours in the wood, where we kept pigs and sheep, learning to identify trees by touch. The braille of bark. That night I had my test.

After some initial stumbling, I found, in sequence: The Old Oaks (deeply, vertically fissured bark, fingernail deep, in mosaic ‘tiles’); The Beech Sorority (smooth, eel-skin, seal-skin, but as cold as stone); The Birch (sloughing off its skin, like unwanted paper bandages); and The Gean, or Wild Cherry (bark with hoops of pores, or ‘lenticels’, that I used as my abacus when sheep-counting). Then it was a left turn, straight up the steep path and out of the wood.

If my fingers had met polystyrene bark (elder), gunstock bark (hazel, polished by the passing bodies of pigs), punch-spongy bark (Californian redwood: an early owner of the wood had a grandiose dream, for pluvial farwest Herefordshire, of arboretum creation) orientation would also have been enabled by feeling trees.