What a miraculous year 2020 is proving to be — for trees. As the season of storms rolls in, with all the lashing power and threat we have come to associate with extreme weather, it is tempting to meditate moodily on nature’s violence and destruction.
But the news from our fields and forests is that Earth also does richness, benevolence and abundance — and right now, in your local wood, superabundance. Pull on your wellies and prepare for a treat, for this is a ‘mast year’.
‘ “Mast” is the term used to describe the fruit of forest trees, such as acorns and beech seeds,’ says Lorienne Whittle, citizen science officer at the Woodland Trust. ‘A mast year is when trees and shrubs produce a bumper crop of their fruits or nuts.’
Autumn leaves are blown from trees as a gust of wind passes over Stourhead, where leaves are changing colour at the National Trust property in Wiltshire
If just one species became suddenly bountiful, the mast would not be quite so strange and compelling. But in a mast year such as this (the last was in 2017), oaks, beeches, chestnuts and fruit trees hundreds of miles apart produce cornucopias of nuts, acorns and fruit all at once, as if mysteriously coordinated.
In its own way, it is as mighty a phenomenon as the great spectacle of birth of the grazing animals of the Serengeti — and it works in the same way. Although our countryside is not suddenly littered with wildebeest calves, the trees are pulling the same trick.
By all coming into massive fecundity together, they overwhelm the appetites of the mice, squirrels, jays and other creatures which predate their harvest.
A series of lean years, during which predator populations go hungry and shrink, is followed by a magnificent burst of bounty.
Gardeners and nature lovers know that the rhythms of years are never the same.
When I was a child, my family named summers after natural blooms — the summer of the cabbage white butterflies, the summer of the cardinal beetles, the summer of the earwigs. This year was the summer of the swifts and house martins, and now we have the autumn of the beech nuts.
Autumnal scenes over Loch Ard in the Scottish Trossachs
The key to this mast’s timing seems to have been the warm, dry spring: such a balm to Britain during the March lockdown, and a great boon for the nation’s flora.
The absence of a late frost, and a gentle summer of light rains and warm sun have brought this great forthcoming. Although the woodland creatures are surely feasting, the excess means huge numbers of saplings will survive.
This is the aim and achievement of the mast, and a hint that trees play a longer game than mammals like us. A super year like 2020, even every decade, ensures many species will prosper.
A walk in a park or the country now, in the knowledge that there is something special happening, is a gently stunning experience. Conkers are shining jewels couched in mace-like pods of spikes. Beech nuts — also, confusingly, known as beech mast — are smaller, the spines of their pods more profuse and less fierce. They pop open four ways, like fairy hats.
Members of the public enjoy walking through a wonderful display of autumnal colours in Windsor Great Park on October 20
The Romans used to relish them as we do pine nuts. Bake to flake off their shells, then fry them in oil. Sweet chestnut cases are like bright green miniature hedgehogs, ferociously defended with spikes. But when ripe they split, revealing nuts ready for roasting.
Raise your gaze and you can see the abundance of the mast. Crab apple trees swell with fruit. The berries of the rowans, also known as mountain ash, look like flaming torches.
I once had the pleasure of exploring a beech wood with Richard Mabey, the writer and naturalist whose book Beechcombings describes his deep love and knowledge of these remarkable trees.
Aerial view of Loch Dunmore in Faskally Wood near Pitlochry in Perthshire surrounded by trees showing autumn foliage
‘They’re connected by networks of fungi linking their roots,’ he explained, describing how the trees communicate this way via chemical messages, exchanging warnings of disease or insect attack, exchanging water and nutrients.
Andrew Smith, director of Westonbirt, The National Arboretum in Gloucestershire, told The Times this week: ‘Part of the fascination of experiencing a mast year is that we don’t completely understand the complex blend of factors that give rise to them and allow plants and trees to co-ordinate the production of so much fruit and seed.’
Yet they are somehow co-ordinating. And when you know this, strolling through a wood becomes a magical experience.
You are surrounded by giant beings, all in communication with each other, and each of which can live 400 years and produce 1.8 million beech nuts. You enter a kind of tree-time.
The doings of the day and the cares of the human world are insignificant compared to these great, silver-trunked presences, living out their slow and mighty lives as if in another dimension.
‘I was subconsciously beginning to glimpse something fundamental about how they worked,’ Mabey writes in Beechcombings, of his time getting to know the trees of Frithsden Beeches, near Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
A walker admires the autumn colours that dominate the horizon at Jesmond Dene in Newcastle
‘The slipperiness of life inside them merged into the slow flowing rhythms of the wood. There seemed to be nothing jagged about beech life.
‘Sometimes I felt like a beech-creature myself, slipping through this deep ocean of sinuous shapes and muted colours.’
The coming of the mast is a rich and unexpected gift from nature in a year when we have so needed its consolations.
In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is easy to feel that mere words are not enough.
But the deeply compassionate work of the late American poet Mary Oliver is striking chords with ever more readers around the world in this time of fear and hardship.
She comes to the heart of what woods bestow on us in her poem When I Am Among The Trees.
‘They save me, and daily,’ she writes. ‘The light flows from their branches . . . “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” ’
It seems a gentle and true thought to remember, should you go wood-walking this weekend, to admire the great giving of the mast.