by Max Adams
Strangely, most of the ancient yews of Europe are to be found in British churchyards, but no-one has yet been able to explain whether the yews were there first, and formed sacred sites for worship, or were planted there after the churches were built because of their natural association with everlasting life and sacrifice. The wood is found in ancient burials: two of the Anglo-Saxon buckets buried with East Anglia’s King Raedwald in his ship mound at Sutton Hoo were made of yew.
The yew is well defended. Its wood and needles are well known to be poisonous, producing compounds called ‘taxanes’ (from Taxus). A synthesized version has been used for the last two decades or so as a powerful agent in the fight against human cancers. Oddly enough, the flesh of the dangerous-looking red covering (aril) of the seed of the yew is edible; all other parts are highly toxic, although deer seem to be tolerant of the needles and birds can eat the seeds without releasing their poisons. The yew is also most unusual for a conifer in that it will respond to coppicing; and the wood is harder than some hardwoods.
The yew is also at the heart of that most English of weapons, backbone of libertarian legend and patriotic history: the longbow. This staple of Robin Hood and Agincourt was traditionally made of a section of yew containing both heartwood and sapwood, for the maximum combination of tensile strength and flexibility. But it was not always cut from English trees, which were considered inferior to Spanish yews.
These secretive, age-weary ancients, which have always had a mystical significance, teach us that old age is not to be confused with weakness; and that wisdom, perhaps, might be sought in unlikely places.
YEW
A symbol of longevity, everlasting life and sacrifice, the yew’s funereal looks and toxic constitution have largely relegated it to a place in churchyards and cemeteries.
5
Trees in company
A palette of forests—Life in the woods—Saint Columba’s coppice—The rarest tree—Woodwards and Pallisters—
TREE TALE: THE SCOTS PINE
In the company of flowers we know happiness. In the company of trees we are able to think, they foster meditation.
JOHN STEWART COLLIS
A palette of forests
‘FOREST’ IS A LOUSY TERM for a bunch of trees—it means and can mean too many different things and it carries all sorts of folksy connotations. In Britain it was customarily used to define a set of laws and penalties pertaining to royal hunting parks—landscapes that might not contain many trees at all, let alone the sort of expanse that the word ‘forest’ conjures. And yet, we seem wedded to the idea of using it to mean a bunch of trees. Very well, then, let ‘forest’ mean a bunch of trees. But there are forests and there are forests, each type and sub-type a palette from which the great landscape panorama of life is painted.
Where to start describing them? I choose to think of them as habitats. Every individual tree in the world is both self-contained organism and habitat—for insects and other plants, for nesting and foraging animals. Forests, or whatever we want to call them, are super-organisms and super-habitats. So I have taken a leaf, as it were, from the World Wildlife Fund, in looking at the world’s forest palette.
If we were to take two extremes of forest habitat, we might instantly think of the tropical rainforests that we call jungles, and the great taiga coniferous belts of the far north. Tropical rainforests are ecosystems characterized by warm, moist climates lacking distinct seasons. These, the most diverse habitats on earth, are found on or close to the equator, and the largest remaining areas are found in the Amazon Basin and in the African Congo. The trees of these forests are evergreen or semi-evergreen broadleaves—there is no point shedding leaves that soak up those equatorial rays three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year. Growth in plants in these environments is explosive—almost twenty feet a year is not uncommon—and a square mile may contain well over a thousand species of tree. They are rarely of the gregarious kind. From the top of the jungle canopy to the forest floor there are several layers of vegetation, each forming a niche or set of niches exploited by an equally diverse range of insect and vertebrate fauna. In plant and animal life they are the most precious and ecologically rich places on the planet; and any fool knows that they are under the severest threat from agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction, urbanization and unsustainable timber extraction. They are vulnerable and not easily replaced. Even so, it is a mistake to think that they have formed unbroken belts around the world for millions of years. The Amazon is beginning to reveal evidence that human populations have been exploiting it intensively for more than ten-thousand years.
If the Amazonian jungle is one extreme of the forest palette—an expressionist, vibrant, multicoloured palette at that—the other is the apparently monochrome taiga or boreal forest, the great, formerly almost unbroken, swathe of conifers and birch trees that rings the sub-Arctic lands of Canada, Russia and Northern Europe like a monk’s tonsure. Trees here must cope with low levels of light, a short growing season, extreme cold and, paradoxically, the drought that accompanies permafrost and snow at times of the year when no liquid water is available to their roots. The large fauna of these regions, which until ten-thousand years ago included the magnificent woolly mammoth, is now dominated by vast herds of migrating reindeer and caribou. These are places of austere magic, of Rocky Mountain bears and salmon rivers in British Columbia, of Siberian shamans and transhumant Saami in Scandinavia’s Arctic Circle. As the planet warms, we cannot say how resilient these forests, the largest organisms on the planet, will be.
Temperate rainforests—most famously those of the Pacific Northwest of America—are dominated by the open canopies of giants like the redwoods (Sequoias) whose phenomenal growth (more than six feet a year) relies on mild winters and high rainfall. Many of these forests are dominated by conifers, but they can also include broadleaved trees and, in adapting to local conditions, they have their own special diversity—from the west coast of Ireland to the Himalayas, the highlands of Japan (dominated by oak and beech) and Tasmania to Turkey, Iran, New Zealand and Chile (where the great southern beech Northofagus thrives). Each is distinct and rich, not so much in numbers of species but in their relationships with their landscapes and the human and biological cultures that they foster.
Where tropical and temperate rainforests merge with coastal lands and mountains they form what is called montane or cloud-forest environments, in which much of the moisture is obtained from mist and cloud rather than rain. Montane forests, with their very high levels of humidity but relatively low temperatures, are beloved of mosses. Like islands they tend to support isolated, specialized flora and fauna—most famously the mountain gorillas of the volcanic mountains of Central Africa.
Forests of the sub-tropics are adapted to periodic drought. They are found where the climate is warm year-round and where there is plenty of rain but where that rain is distributed unevenly. By and large, trees in these forests are deciduous, shedding their leaves during the dry season when there is little moisture, and allowing a thick brush layer to develop beneath them. The great sub-tropical forests are to be found in Mexico and the Bolivian lowlands, in Southeastern Africa and Madagascar, and in New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean. They are vulnerable to fire and to encroachment from hunting and over-exploitation of permanent water sources. As super-organisms, they do not function well in isolated pockets: piecemeal encroachment and climate change are their greatest challenges. Fragmented habitats are mere zoos, as champions of Asia’s great cats know only too well.
CEDAR
There are many varieties of this magnificent conifer, widely planted for its architectural splendour and for its excellent timber. I once lived in a wooden cabin clad in cedar; it had been built in the 1920s, and the wood was still as sound as if it were new, even in the British climate.
Along the coasts of the Mediterranean, of Western Australia and California, and of the Cape province of South Africa and Chile in the dry season, heat-adapted forests of mixed broadleaves and ever
greens predominate. In Spain, Portugal and France cork oaks are typical of the resilient drought-resistant trees that grow here; but pines are also well-adapted. The growing season is short, and fire is a constant risk as well as a means of fending off competition. Specially adapted trees such as the eucalyptus are vulnerable to over-logging, agricultural encroachment and urbanization.
Temperate forests belong in our Goldilocks environments: those where there is enough rain but not too much; where it is rarely too warm or too cold. The great forests of the Eastern United States and of Central and Western Europe, East Asia and South America are the lands of the oak and beech, aspen and maple, ash, lime and elm; but also of pines and yews, cedars and larches, which are happy to tolerate such mildness. They don’t have the same biodiversity as the tropical jungles, and many of their large fauna—wolves and bears, bison and deer—have been marginalized. They rarely form unbroken cover, but instead play a patchwork role among prairies, wetlands, arable land and pasture. They, at least, are tolerant of this fragmentation. Their biodiversity has developed more than any other forest environment in partnership with humans, and the two communities, human and sylvan, are mutually dependent for their health. Cycles of clearing and re-growth, of light and shade, canopy and understorey, are perhaps the ultimate testimony to nature’s resilience and adaptability. They play a crucial role in the cultural histories of many of the great civilizations of the West and may do so again if we value them well and exploit them with care.
Life in the woods
We in the West don’t need to live in the woods any more. But some of us choose to. I tell people, when they ask, that one doesn’t miss mains electricity or the flushing toilet; far less television and the supposed comforts of urban or suburban life. When my partner and I lived in a caravan in the woods and we needed a shower we would make sure the pot-bellied stove was on to heat the water up. It was a Heath-Robinson affair of copper pipes but hellish effective: twenty gallons heated in an hour-and-a-half to proper hot-shower temperature. Then we’d shin up the small wooden frame behind the caravan to pump water, using an old-fashioned cast-iron village crank-handle thing, from the rainwater tank to the oil drum which acted as a header tank. A few strokes of that and you needed a shower anyway. We never ran short of fuel, naturally enough: it grew on trees and we had tens of thousands of those.
Then there were the ‘facilities’. The dunny was modelled on a Vietnamese twin-vaulted dry-composter: it took a couple of weeks to build and, after a bit of practice, even the visitors became accustomed to using it.
No-one has written about the woodland living experience, what it means and how it changes one’s life, better than Henry David Thoreau, who went to live for two years in the woods that fringed Walden Pond in Massachusetts in the 1840s: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ Wake up on a perfectly still, white winter’s morning with snow on the ground and the only signs of life a red squirrel chewing on pine cones or a deer browsing for lichen, and it’s hard to argue with that sentiment. Woodland life is lived at a pace that adopts the rhythms of wind and rain, sun and moon, spring and autumn. For three years I knew exactly what phase of the moon it was, took the state of the wind and the sky as our weather forecast just as any sailor does. We cut trees for timber, to sell and for our own buildings, for charcoal and firewood, and for furniture (rather shabby, rustic stuff, I admit): in all cases to improve the biodiversity of the woods. We went to the woods for no other reason than that it seemed fitting, and fun, to do so.
Thoreau wrote: ‘If a man is alive, there is always a danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.’ That is why some people dream of adventure and others plan it, then do it. There was a particular place in the wood, in which I felt I knew every tree, that struck me as so magical that I wanted to spend more time there. It was a spreading beech tree, not terribly old but always beautiful, which shaded a three-way joining of footpaths, the sort of place where a poetic metaphor is liable to strike at any time, where a novelist like Hardy might have a heroine meet a hero by chance, or guided by fate. My idea was that it would be marvellous to come upon this place in autumn, a little before leaf-fall on a drizzly evening, with the leaves turning orange and yellow, and be taken aback by a magical moment. So I conceived of building a room there, made of strong glass: roof, walls, door, the lot. The room would be just big enough for an armchair and a small table to hold an oil lamp (we got used to the lovely reading light that oil lamps give off: nothing like it, and the smell of paraffin). The walls would be double-skinned and filled with water. Small, brightly coloured fish would swim as if among the trees, and a reader (me) would sit there enjoying the passing of the hours. What a delightful thing to come upon. One day I will build my magical room in the woods.
I went to live in the woods with my partner when our son Jack was three months old. It was in the middle of a blizzard in February 1996, and shortly after the caravan was towed into the clearing we had made, we found that the back wall was rotten through and through. It had to be rebuilt before we could do anything else. The infant child was oblivious to all such distractions. We had forty acres of woodland, some of it broadleaved, much of it consisting of densely planted conifers which needed drastic thinning. It was typical of the sorts of former plantations that come up on the private market these days, because in order to make them productive and ‘profitable’ they need huge amounts of labour to counter the neglect; so many of them have been planted with little thought for how or when they might be managed. We bought an ancient Fordson Major tractor, not much use for hauling because it got stuck in the mud everywhere, but it drove, via a scary-looking belt, our even more ancient saw-bench, a monstrous beast of cast iron with a twenty-two-inch blade. It took time and patience to tame the thing, but it cut many a plank and I learned its foibles without losing any limbs of my own. We made charcoal in old oil drums, built small wooden buildings for people, sold some timber and firewood, turned tool handles and such on a pole-lathe and generally enjoyed the simple virtues of the uncomplicated life. Like Thoreau before us, we never wanted for visitors, who mostly came unannounced because there was no way of announcing, save for turning up. They were idyllic times.
Almost. One hesitates to ruin a good story, but I should say that my partner and I split up after two years and I stayed in the wood for a year more, struggling to cope single-handed. I mounted a fight with the local planning officer (a man of small mind and no desire to enlarge it) to let me build a wooden house with my own timber and live there for good. He laughed: who the hell did I think I was? Then I got beaten up by a couple of junkies who came to riffle through the paltry contents of the caravan. I never went back. But it wasn’t woodland living that was wrong; it was just the wrong wood; or rather, the wrong people around it.
Saint Columba’s coppice
There is a splendid tree story in an ancient hagiography of Saint Columba, otherwise known as Colm Cille. He was the monk who founded the monastery on Iona, the small Scottish island off the west coast of Mull, in about AD 565. There was little or no natural woodland on Mull, so Colm Cille’s monks had to acquire their material needs from other islands or the mainland. On one occasion they went off by boat to gather withies for a building planned for the monastery. (Withies here might be either willow or hazel rods, perfect for weaving into hurdles, wall panels and floors.) The returning brethren reported that the owner of the wood where they had cut their withies was not all that pleased. A bit of a public-relations faux pas, to be sure. The presence of withies implies a managed woodland—and management implies a manager. You would have thought that the monks might have made enquiries and offered some sort of payment. Colm Cille had to pay the man off with a bushel of a superior type of grain; the story is portrayed as
a miracle, with the grain ripening in three months.
What’s particularly interesting about the tale is that it accidentally provides historical evidence for coppicing, which archaeologists otherwise can only infer from the rare preservation of cut rods and poles in crannogs or peat bogs. Sometimes place-names offer a clue. Dublin, on Ireland’s River Liffey, is Baile atha-cliath in Gaelic: ‘the town of the ford of hurdles’, made from woven coppiced hazel rods and used not just in fencing and housing but in revetting river banks and constructing weirs, dams and fish traps.
The medieval period was a supreme age of woodcraft and woodland management. One only has to dip into contemporary records of life on the great English estates to sense how embracing the woodland economy was at all levels of society. In Boldon Book, a twelfth-century equivalent of the Domesday Survey for the lands of the Bishop of Durham, we read, for example, that the villeins (tenant farmers) of Wolsingham held three-hundred acres between them. As well as paying rent and reaping and carting the bishop’s corn crop, they also had to carry a hundred-and-twenty cartloads of firewood every year to keep the bishop warm. Three turners in the same Weardale township had to provide the bishop with more than three-thousand bowls, which makes one wonder how they ever earned a penny for themselves. One of the centrepieces of the year was the Great Chase, a hunting and feasting festival for the pleasure of the bishop and his court. Every year the villeins of Aucklandshire were expected to construct a hall for the bishop in his hunting park. The hall was to be sixty feet long with butchering facilities, a store-house and a chamber with privy: so if you think the flat-pack or pre-fab is a new thing, think again. The villeins were also required to build the bishop a chapel forty feet in length and make part of the enclosure around this temporary mini-palace. Firewood, building timber, billets for turning—these and hundreds of other products used by the villeins or rendered as taxes to the great landowners of the Middle Ages were produced in sustainable quantities from woodlands belonging to parishes across the country. It is a myth that such men cut down all our forests for charcoal or for ships. They looked after their woods for themselves, and for their children and grandchildren.