Burning Woods
Sweet chestnut has many virtues, but it ranks among average 'woods as firewood. It burns moderately. It can never rival the fierceness and steadiness of oak and beech or the candle-whiteness of ash. It is fascinating to burn uncommon woods. A townsman orders logs by the sack or the hundredweight, and logs may mean anything from trashy elm to railway sleepers. The countryman buys by the cord, which means four-foot lengths, and cross-cuts it. From a good estate or mixed wood he may get six or seven ,varieties. Of common woods oak and beech and ash are kingly, all splendid woods, but there is a prejudice, for some reason, against elm. I never understood why, for wretched though it is when green, elm burns beautifully after a summer' S drying. Of less common woods I like hawthorn, iron-hard, and red as though stained with its own berries. T. E. Lawrence spoke to me once with great enthusiasm of hornbefun, which he burned frequently. He held it., as far as I remember, next to oak and beech. Maple is also good, a yellowish-white, straight-grained wood, which burns like ash. It cleaves and kindles like matchwood. Last winter I burnt ivy, as thick as a man's thigh, and a vast hazel trunk, a foot or more across. Roth are ephemeral. Willow, in , my experience, is the sweetest of woods. Dried, like elm, by a summer's storage,. it burns almost flamelessly, smouldering quietly, simply crumbling away, the smoke wonderfully- blue and sweet. It conies into its own, like apple, on dry spring evenings or in early autumn, when the heat of a fire means little, and the sight and odour of it so much.
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