You guessed right

As I ran on further, looking ahead for the copse, I recognised the shapes of the trees: poplars. I'd been led again to the poplars. I could see both the green-leaved and the cinnamon-coloured ones. More of the latter.

There was a space in the boundary hedge and I went through.

It was a copse that time forgot.

Close to the entrance was a huge old fallen tree that had been cut into ten foot lengths.

The hollowed out base of the trunk, I could have curled up inside there for a nap

Near the ancient fallen tree was the site of a meal.

A small bird. Robin-sized, I think, but not a Robin.

There were cinnamon-leaved poplars (aspens?) with a girth far bigger than my embrace. One with twinned trunks.

Another, less vast, was growing at the edge of a dried up drainage ditch that ran into the river. I had read that poplar roots spread rather than growing deep and I could see that here.

Deeper into the copse, I came upon a line of fallen green-leaved poplar! Just like in my other wood!

Again, the leaves were coming out - and, oh!, how sweet the scent of these leaves!

These looked as if they had fallen longer ago than the trees in the other wood. The trunks where they were split seemed to have decomposed or weathered more. Yet they were still alive...

As I looked at the three fallen trunks, opening up the canopy, two of them in leaf, I began to wonder: what if these green-leaves live only 70 years and their time was coming. What if they fell in order to open the canopy, with their trunks providing initial sustenance for shoots that would grow down, to root, as well as up? I hadn't read that poplars walk like willows, but they are related to willows and they do clone. What if this was not living death but dying into birth?

There is a tree, called the suicide tree, which flowers the year before it dies - and its fallen body protects its young from being eaten.

I took some twigs were I thought that the trees could spare them - and also some soil in the hope that I might get traces of the right kind of fungi. Who knows?

Then I just listened.

A moment of astonishment when I stood still and a Robin flew right behind me, a matter of inches away, to sing almost in my ear. And another when a pair of Long-tailed Tits foraged past in constant call-and-response communication with each other.