There is an evil empire haunting this collection of woodland pieces: the Forestry Commission. During the 20th century the wicked commission planted conifers the length and breadth of Britain, often felling ancient woodlands in the process. Bright, airy broadleaf forest rich in animal and plant life was replaced (with official blessing) by dreary ranks of Corsican pine or Norwegian spruce – strangers to our shores – that soon choked out all the flowers beneath them. The trilling of thousands of birds was replaced by the soughing of regimented evergreens. Open hillsides were obliterated by endless swaths of deepest green that seemed to suck in the very sunlight. Peat bogs were sacrificed. Fast–growing timber became a crop as mundane as sugar beet.
Adrian Cooper is director of Common Ground, an organisation dedicated to local distinctiveness, so to him these commercial and soulless forests are anathema. His collection of essays is a celebration of most of the woody things that the Forestry Commission forests lack: individuality, personal connections and affections, quirkiness, even scruffiness.
If there was a superhero to bring down the evil empire it was surely Oliver Rackham, whose death in 2015 deprived us of the greatest scholar of woodland history we have ever had. Many essays in this book acknowledge the influence of Rackham, who meticulously established the antiquity and employment of old woodland through much of Britain, but especially East Anglia. He changed minds. By 1980 the value of ancient woodland was widely appreciated, both from a cultural and an ecological point of view. “Tree huggers” were once viewed slightly askance as arboreal hippies, but now we all love trees – that is, nice, native broadleaved trees and not badly behaved foreigners.
The irony is that these same species have never been more threatened: by sudden oak death, ash die-back, alder blight, and other problems still obscure, following on from the Dutch elm disease that had already transformed the landscapes beloved of John Constable. The Forestry Commission have belatedly become more sympathetic stewards of trees, while the government’s attempt to sell off the national forests was stymied by general outrage, and rejected by parliament in 2011.
Cooper has assembled a distinguished bunch (or should that be “grove”?) of writers to share their favourite woodlands with us: Richard Mabey, Peter Marren, Ali Smith, William Boyd, Germaine Greer, Philip Hoare, Jay Griffiths, Alan Garner and Simon Armitage among them. Writerly quirks and contrasting styles parallel the spread of localities and their diverse characters in a way that becomes almost overwhelming in its profusenes.
The following are extracted by Maureen Brookbanks from Arboreal: A Collection Of Words From The Woods edited by Adrian Cooper (£20, Little Toller Books).
THE STORM THAT STOLE MY Trees ~ William Boyd is a best-selling writer whose novels include Any Human Heart and Restless.
“I had always had a curiosity about trees — probably because I had been born and brought up in West Africa. Unreflectingly, I had come to know the names of the trees in our large garden — the casuarinas pines, the frangipanis, avocado, guava, the flamboyants with their huge seed pods. Our garden was hedged by 8 ft-high banks of hibiscus and poinsettia. Step beyond that and you were in a version of tropical rainforest — hugely buttressed figs, teak, lianas, palms — and all manner of noxious wildlife.
By contrast, our family home in the borders of Scotland was arrived at via a tall, landscaped avenue of mature beeches. The tributary that flowed through the fields surrounding the house, and that fed the Tweed downstream, was lined with willow and black alder, ash and hazel.
Yet it wasn’t until I moved (part-time) to the French countryside, about an hour or so east from Bordeaux, that my relationship with trees changed for ever.
In 1991, we bought a semi-ruined farmhouse there set on a small hill and nearly surrounded by mature oak woods — huge trees, 80 ft high. On the nights of December 27 and 28, 1999, France was hit by a storm of genuine hurricane force — Cyclone Martin. It arrived after dark and the winds, we later learned, reached 115mph. I peered out with a torch, flashed the beam around and was shocked by what I saw.
Our house on its small hill was always identifiable from miles away by the towering cedar tree that grew beside it. My torch beam picked out the cedar, now uprooted and flattened, its tip a few feet from the front door. It had come down with no noise, any thud of its falling obliterated by the cyclonic winds. We anxiously waited out the rest of the night until the storm subsided. I was worried about our trees.
We had planted many around the farmhouse — cypresses, oaks (holm and deciduous), figs, maple, two acers, umbrella pines, a Chestnut. At dawn I went out to inspect. They were all standing, except for two cypress trees, horizontal but unbroken. However, a huge mature oak had come down, along with the cedar.
On reflection, we had been lucky. When the cedar was cut up for firewood I counted the rings on the bole that was left and they came to a hundred. It was obviously a tree planted to commemorate the arrival of the centennial change in 1900 — it had lasted an exact century before the storm brought it down. In its place I bought more trees — three oaks, three lime trees, a mulberry — and planted them in a rough grove where the cedar had stood. Sixteen years later, they have all flourished and have easily doubled in size.
I’ve come to know, almost as individuals, all the 30 or so trees we’ve planted around our house in the past two decades. I see how they’ve fared, note how they’ve grown, inspect them for maladies, fret about them at times of drought, marvel at their new growth as spring moves into summer. And this familiarity has stimulated an interest in trees in general, in London and wherever I travel, and in the many acres of oak woods around our house where I can see and study natural woodland flourishing and changing through the seasons, always with the words echoing in my head: ‘Planter un arbre — c’est un beau geste’ (Plant a tree — it’s a fine gesture)”.
THE TREE THAT CARRIED A Curse ~ Peter Marren is a renowned naturalist and award-winning wildlife writer.
” The village of Ramsbury, Wiltshire, where I live, is best known for a natural landmark: a tree. It stands, or rather it stood, in the exact centre of the village. At one time the tree was flanked by Ramsbury Building Society, the trusted protector of village cash, which took the tree as its icon. It was a huge wych elm said to date from the days of Charles I, planted for its beauty and shade.
A century ago the Ramsbury elm was a healthy tree, 12 metres tall and nearly 20 metres across its span. Villagers would sit beneath the comforting security of its boughs, gossip and watch the world go by. Children used to clamber inside the hollow trunk, emerging at the top, far above the street. They knew the tree from the inside, every crevice and hold. The hollow was also said to be the ‘scene of countless romantic trysts and even conceptions within its hollow trunk’.
The tree first began to show its age after World War I, years that coincided with road surfacing and an increase in motorised traffic over its ageing roots. By World War II it no longer resembled its former grandeur. Only a few vertical branches projected from the trunk, like brooms. But it retained its aura of venerability, a mighty tree from a distant age, another time, in some indefinable way a comfort.
Then, in 1983, the old tree died. Most likely its demise was accelerated by the overwhelming crush of buses and lorries on its decayed roots. Everyone knew the legend which told that when the great tree died, bad things would happen. For the Ramsbury elm was a Witch Tree. It had a curse attached.
The story was that, long ago, a wicked witch called Maud Toogood had lived inside its hollow and her bones were buried within its roots. Like the ravens at the Tower of London, the fate of the village was bound up with that of the tree (as it happens, Ramsbury means ‘burg of the raven’). Of course, we are not supposed to believe in witches or witchcraft any more, and so it was no doubt coincidence that the demise of the tree was soon followed by a rash of financial scandals, including the arrest and jailing of Ramsbury Building Society’s investment manager for fraud.
The question then was what to do with the dead stump. Some wanted it to be preserved in perpetuity, perhaps by filling the hollow core with concrete. In the eyes of many, it was still the Tree, unique and irreplaceable. Health and safety decided a new one must be planted. Unhappy villagers gathered to watch it come down. The pile of broken timbers was picked apart for mementoes.
The replacement was an oak, a young maiden tree carefully excavated from the earth of Epping Forest with its root-ball intact. It has not yet acquired the same mythic status of the great elm and perhaps never will. It’s just over roof height and at Christmas is covered in twinkling lights. Only those who know village history understand its significance.
For Ramsbury’s elm was as socially significant as any memorial or carved stone. It linked the past with the present and, like Tennyson’s brook, seemed to say that ‘men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.’ To assert that the tree was valued is to understate the case: it lay at the very core of village identity. The tree, in that sense, was us”.
FEAR OF THE NEW Forest ~Philip Hoare is an award-winning writer, born in Southampton where he still lives.
“Recently, I flew home from Scotland to Southampton. The plane slowed as it approached southern Hampshire and its coast, as if to acknowledge the approaching sea. In that moment, the motorways and towns of middle England gave way to acres of the trees and heathland of the New Forest. It was remarkable to see how ‘empty’ this space was, even as it was so close to what we might call the Home Counties, as if there were any other kind.
I had many childhood experiences of the forest. My grandmother lived in a bungalow, a dark place made darker by the veranda that ran around it, like a shady ledge. The forest lay next to the house itself: a beautiful but foreboding site, to which access was magical, and trepidatious. In my grandmother’s back garden, with its neat gravel paths and enclosed by a tall privet hedge, was a gate at the far end which opened on to the forest.
Walking through that gate was a transformative act — not least because we had been told not to stray. So of course we did. Through that gate, the suburban garden suddenly segued into wilderness. On the gravel path, we were in safety; one step into the forest, and we might as well be lost like the babes in the wood, their pathetic dead bodies covered with leaves by a blood-red robin. Later, driving back through the forest, I watched from the back seat of the car as a pure-white hart leapt out of the undergrowth, its eerie shape held heraldically in the bracken. I was, as you can tell, a child with an overactive imagination”.
TINY TO TALL, SIZE DOES Matter ~ Germaine Greer, one of the world’s best-known feminist thinkers, is also a devoted naturalist, spending her life savings on 60 hectares of rainforest in a quest to save it from destruction.
“We all know a tree when we see one. Yet we are often bedeviled in our attempt to unscramble the mystery that is a tree, a mystery as familiar to us as the mystery of the blueness of the sky and as unfathomable. The definition most tree scholars recognise is ‘a woody plant with a single erect perennial trunk that reaches at least three inches in diameter at breast height (DBH) when mature’.
This would deny tree status to the mallees of Australia, multi-stemmed eucalyptus that grow to a height of ten metres or so. Mallees comprise nearly half of the known eucalyptus species.. The world’s smallest trees are probably bonsai, kept small by perverse human ingenuity.
It seems that when it comes to trees, size does matter. The tallest trees in the world, the redwoods of the west coast of the U.S., are conifers. The tallest known at present is Hyperion, a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) at 115.72 metres, which is about as tall as any tree will ever be. The largest trunk volume, however, is to be found in a related species, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Sierra Nevada. The oldest of these trees is thought to be more than 3,000 years old.
Indeed, to clear a forest is to lose thousands of years of natural selection and to destroy a galaxy of microclimate. The grown tree is an individual that supports and is part of a colony of other creatures, from beneath the ground to the summit of its crown. Indeed, trees are the armature supporting thousands of other species, from the humblest algae, moulds and fungi, through the bryophyte assemblages (mosses and liverworts) to vines, creepers and mistletoes.
Then come the armies of invertebrates, mites, moths, hoverflies, bees, ladybirds, snails, spiders, weevils, crickets and beetles. The older the tree the greater the number of organisms that depend upon it and the more varied their ways of doing so. Even when its heartwood is eaten out, the tree continues to support a vast ecosystem. We are losing animal and bird species all over the world because of a shortage of hollow trees.
Plantations felled regularly will not solve this problem. Even the dead tree continues to support an array of other creatures, animal and vegetable. Yet most of the trees growing on this planet in the 21st century will not live out their potential life career as habitat trees. The vast treasure house of the primordial forest has been trashed for human convenience.
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Reference ~ Richard Fortey: The Guardian, February 2017. Maureen Brookbanks: The Daily Mail, December 2019.
Tree Weaver 