H. E. Bates on the spirit of a wood

    The Oxford English Dictionary has for wood -- “a collection of trees growing more or less thickly together (esp. naturally, as distinguished from a plantation), of considerable extent, usually larger than a grove or copse (but including these), and smaller than a forest; a piece of ground covered with trees, with or without undergrowth.”
    A plantation is without spirit. We can plant the trees, but we can’t plant the spirit, for the spirit comes from planting as we can’t plant, as only wild Nature can. Listen to H. E. Bates:

[The wood] is a contrast of power and delicacy, space and littleness. Yet all the time, throughout the year, it has its own special atmosphere. You have only to walk a yard under the trees in order to become under its spell, to sense the change, the sometimes startling, sometimes soothing difference in the spirit of the air. There is some precious quality brought about by the close gathering together of trees into a wood that defies analysis. The mere planting together of trees will not create it. An avenue will not do it, nor a park, nor an orchard. There must, it seems, be a closeness, an untidiness, a wildness. There must be all kinds of trees, all kinds of flowers and creatures, a conflicting and yet harmonious pooling of life. A wood planted, as fox-coverts often are, with one kind of tree, has no life at all. It stands dead as a wood of hop-poles. It is the wood of little and great trees, of flowers and water, of squirrel and fox, bird and badger, of light and shadowiness, that has the everlasting vibration of life in it, that special rare atmosphere, at once soothing and refreshing and somehow elevating, that only the best of woods can give.

    (Quoted from page 353 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of H. E. Bates, click here. For images of or relating to H. E. Bates, click here.