Claxton, Norfolk I recall the circumstances of the cut, how it was stored and then the moment it was sectioned to fit the fire

The garden task that gives me greatest satisfaction is the cutting of our winter wood stack. I like to joke that our logburner consumes only hand-prepared organic “food”, and there is even a sense in which each piece is an individual.



Over the years I’ve learned that the secret to preparing logs is not some fancy axe or equipment. It is time. I have thus worked out a four-stage process that spans two years, beginning with the moment when the live trees are felled.

They are mainly self-sown sallows that sprang up just after the war on the edge of my four boundary dykes at Blackwater Carr, when the fen was open grazing marsh. Decades of non-intervention allowed them to develop into linear thickets the length of the whole site.

Rather than permitting the mature trees to choke the dykes with leaf mulch I clear them off the banks while simultaneously restoring the original flower-rich pasture.

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The fresh timber is stacked at Blackwater, for 6-10 months of seasoning, completed under tarpaulin, when it can be used by breeding solitary wasps or by overwintering ruby tiger moth caterpillars. Then after its transfer to Claxton comes a second rest, when it creates another great invertebrate habitat, especially for woodlouse spiders and a lovely group of moths called flatbodies.

Finally comes the log splitting for the woodsheds, when they are cut and restacked for anything up to six months in advance of use.

In his book Wildwood, Roger Deakin suggested that he was warmed three times by his logs: when they were felled, while being split and then finally as they burned. I enjoy an imaginative corollary, savouring each piece as I try to recall the circumstances of the cut, how it was subsequently stored and then the moment it was sectioned to fit the fire.

By the time it goes through the glass door I have two years of connections. Something about many of the logs – the thickness of the trunk, details in the bark or patterns in the grain – permits me to recognise them in their slow journey to the flames.

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