I have been lucky enough “in the current economic climate” to have had a busy year but, as such, have not visited my eight acres of Essex woodland nearly as often as I would have liked.

On returning recently I half-feared that it might have been bulldozed and turned into a car park or supermarket. Perhaps, without my occasional visits, it may have become despondent, withered and died, or local youths may have used it to practise their vandalism and littering.

But when I turned up I was amazed to find that it had been getting on with its woodland business just as it has for at least the past five centuries.

I am delighted to own some woods, but the woods are not bothered about me.

Early autumn in deciduous woodland has an atmosphere of the morning after a huge party. The leaves are beginning to thin, revealing great orbs of mistletoe, and the yobbish squirrels have left their empty chestnut cases strewn over the floor for somebody else to clear up.

There is less birdsong. The summer migrants have already left for warmer climes and the winter visitors have not yet arrived. Wood ants, having spent the year building enormous pyramids of tiny twigs, are disappearing underground to whatever lies beneath. And under the ground is the key to everything.

Just as summer dragonflies spend seven years under water and then emerge for only a fortnight before they perish, the mushrooms and toadstools that we see are only the tip of an iceberg.

Nearly all trees could be called dual organisms in that they work with a fungus that lives in their roots and stretches out delicate tendrils into the surrounding earth. The fungus and host plant supply each other with vital nutrients and minerals, and neither could survive without the other. The networks of cotton threads that keep these woods alive through the whole year only now show themselves to us when conditions are cool and damp enough.

From the ground these outlandish structures emerge like life forms in one of Frank Hampson’s Venusian landscapes. I punched the air in triumph when I found a group of fly agaric toadstools growing around a sickly old birch. To see the classic red toadstool with white spots in real life is so surprising — it reminds you how brilliant, diverse and complicated our native wildlife is.

The fungi are fundamental.

What has struck me most about the woodland is the way in which everything works together. Without human interference this habitat manages itself perfectly well throughout the year.

We are very lucky, in this country, to have clearly defined seasons.

Winters that can be bleak and deadly cold, summer heat waves hot enough to make one take one’s cardigan off.

I sometimes struggle, but my woodland takes it all in its stride.

We human beings are not as clever as we think we are.