Joanne McNeil: It's so easy to light my fire these days

Theres nothing quite like a wood fire in winter. Photo/File

When skies darken, storms roil, or valleys freeze white on sharp winter nights, is anything better than a basket of prime kindling and a goodly stash of dry firewood?

Never mind energy wasting sports or the gym, there's no better exercise than curating daily firewood.

Because neither of us hailed from landed gentry accustomed to lengthy occupation of rural acreages, we did not realise, almost 30 years ago when we started this garden, that we could be largely self-sufficient in firewood one day.

Hacking womanfully at the rampaging jungle now with trusty handsaw, loppers and axe, I muse at how we fussed over every tender seedling, little suspecting the capacity of Northland's vigorous flora to grow monstrous, crack foundations, invade space and block sunlight, drains and views in no time flat.

Clearly one life is not long enough to learn efficient gardening. Perhaps inter-generational residence in one place increases the chances of inheriting such wisdom.

Now though, the seasonal rhythm of maintaining space and light by felling, trimming, weaving intricate bonfires with the brush, drying, sawing, splitting and stacking, and occasionally foraging roadside windfalls from the abundant long acre, or prized driftwood from marinas, has become a pleasurable ritual.

I defer, in waxing lyrical about fire, to my adopted (pre-feminist) forbear Thomas Hardy in Return of the Native (for man, read human).

"To light a fire is the instinctive act of a man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous Promethean* rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light."

He would have puzzled at our current hazardscape - albeit that burning sustainable firewood is carbon neutral - where smoke and fire are considered so dangerous it is an increasingly rare privilege to be twice warmed; by fire and by the act of harvesting its fuel.

Don't get me started on the fascinations of filigree huhu tunnels, sinuous limbs, fresh-cut smells, or timbers long unseen, such as lovely straight, pale kahikatea - once sold cheaply as "white pine" and used for butter boxes, now unprocurable - or dark, hard, hot, greenly oleaginous puriri.

The danger that any given piece of wood will prove far too beautiful to burn must be resisted, as must seeing precious windfall kauri twigs gathered from beneath the rickers along the ridge, with leaves of richest red ochre, as intrinsic treasures rather than the excellent kindling they really are.

Old flax flowers are the best fire starters though. Even wet, they kindle with a single flame.

I didn't believe it either until I saw it done in howling rain perched one stormy night north of Greymouth between the Tasman and the main divide.

Sitting at home by the fire, safe and warm while the wild world rages, it seems part of what I have become habitually in my anecdotage is an old woman carrying sticks.

I could not have foreseen it in the flush of youthful planting but maybe, in a world of artifice, it's no bad thing.

*Prometheus - mythological Greek; stole fire to save humanity.