A Greenwood for the People

摘要

No doubt all kinds of sublimated longings lurked behind the desire that welled up in me in the late seventies to have a wood of my own. I was not far off middle age, had lost my bolt-hole in East Anglia, and was finding the whole business of freelancewriting increasingly lonely and precarious. A bosky retreat rather more ancient than myself would have been anyone's sensible prescription. But on the surface the ambition seemed more mundanely practical. I simply wanted somewhere where I could put allthis woodland theorizing to the test. I could see the scene quite clearly: the parish out coppicing in the winter sun, the wood responding with floods of spring flowers and seedling trees, the 'Private' notices consigned to the bonfire (except those against the local hunt and the conifer barons), the Greenwood restored to the People. The one blemish in this Utopian fantasy was that to disown a wood, so to speak, I would first have to own one, and play the property game.