A wood is the one fixed point in a changing world

‘Can’t see the wood for the trees’ is an old saying and a true one, not only metaphorically but literally. Nature students often look carefully at trees and know a lot about them. But they don’t notice the wood, and know nothing about its life and history. Since I began drawing trees with close attention I have tried not to fall into this error and have begun to study individual woods. In west Somerset, I have three particular favourites.

One, near the sea at West Quantoxhead, is creepily dark and spooky, ogreish, though you sometimes see a superb red deer peering at you through the gloom. This is a babes-in-the-wood place, fertile in fairytale material, and you can imagine bears and wolves living there (there are certainly plenty of foxes). My second prize wood is near the ancient hamlet of Asholt, where Coleridge almost certainly got his ‘cedarn cover’ detail for ‘Kubla Khan’. Not that there are cedars in the wood: it is mostly beech, oak, ash and lime. There is a special place I can go to look down on it from across the little valley where its stream flows: in spring with the new leaf and in autumn with the red and gold it is a magic place, and I paint it often. My third top wood is low-lying by a brook on the back road to Taunton. It is best seen in strong sunlight when the beams break through the massive canopy and produce a cathedral-aisle effect, with deer flitting through the rays. Coppicing takes place, which means that in due time it is a mass of bluebells. It must rival Norsey Wood, near Billericay in Essex, believed to have one of the greatest bluebell stretches on earth.