COUNTRY LIFE
Wooding
Wooding, the 'cutting of ash or hazel or most often .sweet.1 chestnut copses, begins soon after Christmas in the south, and goes on all through the late winter until spring, the copses often thick with primroses long before the last pole is , carried. Spanish chestnut is , grown thickly, matures rapidly, springs up with lush .vigour after each cutting, and like willow seems indestructible. It rises straight up, beauti- fully leafed, the leaves long and shining and toothed, the bark in winter smooth as beech and much the same colour, but a little darker, a kind of plum grey, a lovely intermediate colour seen often in pigeons' feathers. The wood itself is white ; the cut stools shine up clean against the wintry back- grounds. The standing timber is sold in cants : cant evidently. from canto, a corner, an edge. The copses certainly often stand like that, on field corners, triangular, or in strips on the road edge, though this may be the result merely of con- venient planting. It occurs to one that the word cant may be local, and again that it may not be a specific measurement. The average rotation for chestnut is sixteen years, but is very often less. The first cut is thin, the wood cleaving poorly, the second better, the third good, yielding 10 or even 20 foot hop-poles, good cleaving wood for fences, and in addition faggots, pea boughs, bean sticks, withes, thatching wood. The work of cutting, in its various stages, done in the winter sunshine or during bad weather in the little bark-roofed hovels that, a woodman erects for himself, looks, like so many country occupations, a leisurely, charming task, the standing trees throwing long, soft shadows, the smoke of the burning chestnut chippings very blue and aromatic, the primroses responding beautifully to the sudden inlet of light. It is, I need hardly say, the work of an expert. Chestnut needs great care and, incidentally, pays very well for it too.
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