by Max Adams
Their strategy for managing woods, which evolved over hundreds of years, was what is called the coppice-with-standards system. A dozen or so trees in every acre, specially chosen for their straight, knot-free trunks, were grown to full maturity, at least a hundred years. These were capital assets, to be nurtured generation after generation until demand or economic necessity marked them for the sawyer and barker. The bread and butter of coppicing was a tried-and-tested scheme in which hazel was cut every seven or eight years for rods to make hurdles and laths; ash was cut every twelve or fifteen years to make poles for building and tools; and oak was cut perhaps after twenty-five years to make the frames that are the hallmark of the English medieval house. Most broadleaved trees can be cut regularly to produce a consistent crop of straight poles, over hundreds or even thousands of years: it’s the ultimate sustainable land-use scheme.
WHITEBEAM
The whitebeam is much loved of town planners, because it doesn’t make a mess and looks neat on architects’ drawings; but the whitebeam belongs in woods, too, where its berries make a fine autumn display and are a good source of food for wintering birds.
Under a series of laws from the Dark Ages onwards, woods and their trees were protected from over-exploitation and from ‘assarting’—the practice of eating into a wood to create new ploughlands. It is a perverse testimony to the fertility of our soils and the labour of our farmers that we now have virtually the least woodland cover in Europe.
The rarest tree
Britain’s rarest native tree can only be found in a remote glen on the Island of Arran, off Scotland’s west coast. There are just two wild specimens, plus a domesticated third, carefully nurtured in the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh. It was only named in 2007. This is the almost mythical Catacol whitebeam (Sorbus pseudomeinichii), named after a local village.
As its Latin name suggests, the Catacol whitebeam has rowan in its genetic heritage; but it also has characteristics of the whitebeam. Botanists have deduced that it owes its existence to a series of chance hybridizations. First, the widespread rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) cross-pollinated the rock whitebeam (Sorbus rupicola) to produce a fertile hybrid called the Arran whitebeam (Sorbus arranensis). While the rock whitebeam no longer grows on Arran, the new whitebeam lives alongside the rowan and they, too, have hybridized over the millennia to produce yet another fertile offspring, the Arran service-tree (Sorbus pseudofennica). Most recently, the rowan has cross-pollinated with this already very rare species to create the Catacol whitebeam.
All these trees have the same, slender, form in common with their more ancient ancestors, but each successive hybridization has created leaf forms that lie between that of the rowan’s leaflets and the oval lobes of the whitebeam. Because the original rock whitebeam was apomictic (that is, it can produce viable seed without being pollinated), all the hybrids are also fertile without being pollinated. It makes you wonder why trees bother with sex at all if they can get up to these sorts of reproductive oddities. As you might imagine with such a rarity, the small nature reserve where the Catacol survives, with one specimen already over fifty years old, is watched over very carefully by Scottish Natural Heritage.
Woodwards and Pallisters
Woods being, over the last few thousand years, the equivalent of our great DIY superstores, it was always necessary for them to be subject to supervision so that they should not be over-exploited. Rights to timber (mature, standing trees), underwood (coppiced wood and faggots for firing ovens; cordwood for charcoal and so on), animal grazing and foraging for dead branches (‘by hook or by crook’—that is, excluding cutting living wood) were jealously guarded. Kings claimed hunting rights over large tracts of land. Many charters speak of pannage, the ancient transhumant seasonal custom of turning pigs and cattle into woods in the autumn to fatten on acorns and other nuts. Other traditional rights to extract produce from woodland included haybote (fencing materials) and ploughbote (wood for fixing agricultural tools). Such customary rights tended only to be written down long after the custom had been woven, unspoken, into the cultural fabric. But medieval texts are full of lawsuits and the imposition of fines for infringing rights.
Many of our surnames derive from woody occupations: Barkers, Coopers, Hoopers, Arkwrights (makers of chests), Kellogs (keepers of pigs) and Turners among them. Professional managers such as Woodwards and Pallisters, whose job was to maintain fences around estates, formed almost a middle-class caste in society. Occasionally a family of managers might rise above its station: the Stuart dynasty began as stewards to their lords.
These wood-workers did not go to work in vast, unbroken primeval forests. Much ancient woodland was not in the form of continuous tree cover, but existed as commons, or wood pasture, land where animals and trees or shrubs mixed in an uneven, variable and evolving landscape. Some of our great surviving ancient trees are pollards, lopped above head height so that they might survive the predations of grazing animals and now standing isolated in otherwise grassy meadows.
State protection of woods and forests begins with the early eighth-century Laws of King Ine of Wessex, and with the tenth-century Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) in Wales. Edward IV issued a statute in 1483 protecting enclosed woods, and Henry VIII passed an Act in 1541 for the preservation of woods: both suggest that pressure on woodland, not for charcoal or wood but from agricultural clearance, was recognized as a threat to a national resource. The most comprehensive ancient text dealing with trees as a resource is an Indian work on statecraft, written for early emperors, which prescribes punishments for the illicit cutting of trees and provides for forest superintendents (see ‘Heroes’). Rome—perhaps the most efficient of early empires—had constantly to expand, as its insatiable demand for trees as fuel and for arable land progressively denuded its landscapes of woodland cover, prompting a need for new territories until the whole system imploded under its own massive inertia. Pre-arable communities, like the native wood-living population of America’s northeast coast, never reached such population densities as to destroy their apparently ever-sustaining woods.
TREE TALE
The Scots pine
No architect or sculptor could improve the form of Britain’s most important native conifer. The Scots pine comes in many shapes and sizes depending on its inherited genes, where it grows and how isolated it is from others. In youth it can look dense and bushy. Overstocked in a plantation and genetically selected for timber, it grows fast and straight, and if you only ever saw it there you might wonder what all the fuss was about. When growing alone and stunted on a wind-blasted hillside, it does not attain its full majesty but, like some medieval house which has accreted outbuildings and extra wings and suffered the whims of many an owner, it seems to embody the passing of time and the tides of transient human cultures. It demands respect and, perhaps, the attention of the architectural historian. Every now and then, when walking or riding among the hills and valleys of the Borders, I feel obliged to stop and make the acquaintance of one of the noble chieftains of the clan Pine, standing proud like a Landseer stag on its moor; or crouched like a leashed-in hound reflecting blue-green in a peaty loch.
The Scots pine can be a haughty beast, its clouded bursts of fine feathery needles soaring so high that they merge with the haze of a deep blue sky or are lost in the proverbial Scotch mist. The rich squirrel-red of the bark is like no other colour in the landscape; the waft of that dense musky resinous scent in early summer is as intoxicating as the water of life. A whole forest of Scots pines, when they are allowed the elbow room to grow to their full sinuous, tigerish potential, is a sight like no other. Age is kind to the tree; as it gets older the bark splits, like smooth scales ruptured, and becomes deeply fissured. A single tree, planted in 1792 at Ballogie in Aberdeenshire, and at the latest measurement a hundred-and-twenty feet tall with a trunk fifteen feet in circumference, may be Britain’s champion Scots pine. Oddly, although we are used to seeing them stand alone, they are gregarious trees. They grow happiest when th
ey are together. This is not some misty sentiment, but hard scientific fact.
Like many other tree species, the Scots pine benefits from a subterranean partnership with mycorrhizal fungi, one of the symbiotic marvels of nature. These fungi act as tiny filaments, which, attaching to the root fibres of the trees, allow them to farm nitrogen from impoverished soils, effectively increasing the surface area of the root system. In return, the roots supply the fungi with sugars, so everyone gains. Even more marvellously, these fungal microfibres link the root systems of clusters of trees so that the benefits are shared. The trees are not exactly holding hands, but they are playing footsie with one another.
SCOTS PINE
Britain’s most important conifer yields fine light timber and its beauty graces any landscape. Alone or in company, the Scots pine, liberated from the plantation, is one of our natural treasures.
The Scots pine has no enemies among humans. It is valued as a timber wood, especially when slow-grown, with a smooth, sometimes pinkish grain. Unlike imported conifers it also supports an impressive range of insects as well as the much loved and much missed red squirrel. In the County Durham wood that I used to inhabit and manage, we were lucky enough to have two families of red squirrels—not quite the last in the county, but even in the 1990s the red squirrel was a native mammal whose days were numbered. There are none there now; they have lost their territory to the bigger greys. But on the edges of the moors of the North Pennines, and in Northumberland, where there are well-established and in some cases ancient stands of Scots pine, you can still see the red squirrel if you are patient. Their last outposts in the south are in Thetford Forest (in Suffolk and Norfolk) and on the Isle of Wight.
No-one is quite sure if the last remnants of the Caledonian Forests of the Grampians are direct successors of the wildwood that established itself after the last Ice Age, and which once covered almost all of Britain. In some ways it does not matter. What does matter is that here, and in one or two spots elsewhere, the full genetic range of this great tree is being maintained. If governments and agencies get smart, Britain’s conifer plantations will gradually revert to a native species that brings benefits to all, not least the many birds that rely on its seeds. These are easily collected by humans in late summer by picking up the tactile, compact cones that the tree sheds annually and which, when they are left on a mantelpiece at home, will open up so that the little seeds can be tapped onto a sheet of paper. Pop them in the fridge in a paper bag for a few weeks and then plant them in compost with a sprinkling of sand on top. If you can, treat them to a handful of soil taken (by permission) from beneath their parent; then they will get a good start from the mychorriza, which they need to thrive.
From the Scots pine we might take the lesson that nature works on her own terms and scales. We cannot keep the odd beautiful tree in a park and call it a forest. Trees belong in their landscape, and when we treat our uplands with contempt by planting the wrong trees in the wrong ways, selecting genes as if they were cows, we do our most splendid tree, and our cultural heritage, a disservice.
6
Innovation
Useful lessons—Getting the point—Terraforming Ascension Island—The luthier—
TREE TALE: THE HAZEL
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
CHINESE PROVERB
Useful lessons
HUMANS ARE UNIQUE in that we do not necessarily learn knowledge to solve a particular task: we continue to learn for the sake of it, without knowing where it might lead, and that is why humans can see the almost infinite potential of their kind and of the resources around them. Naturally it helps to have good teachers, and trees and animals are really very good teachers, if one pays attention. Here are a few of the more obvious lessons we have learned by paying attention.
Beavers fell trees with their teeth; we learned to make and use an axe and a saw, a similar tool to a tooth. Beavers also make dams, useful for diverting streams, catching fish and generally manipulating water flow. Birds showed us what to do with twigs and branches: the essence of nest-building is weaving flexible materials into something rigid. It sounds simple, but the basket, the hurdle, the mat and the coracle might well have been inspired by the nests of birds. The prickly bush is a natural defence: surely an inspiration for hunters and gatherers on the savannah. Resins show us the potential for glues; bark and climbers for rope, fruits for nutrition and medicine; and then there is rubber, and the paper made by wasps to construct their nests with. Trees are masterclasses in engineering and architecture; from shelter to arches, brackets to canopies, trees are the primers and textbooks for a curious, adaptable race to follow.
All these lessons can be learned by watching. After that, the human must take the initiative; and that means taking a sharp edge and banging it with a hammer against the cut end of a log. Splitting to reveal the grain of wood was a great intellectual experiment, did our ancestors but know it: the first step on the way to exploring what lies beneath, to testing materials by destruction and predicting the fundamental properties of matter, which led to metallurgy and chemistry, architecture and the construction of the first machines. But humans did not split the first log in order to embark on a pre-planned journey of intellectual culture. They did so because they could.
Getting the point
A stick is a handy thing. Chimpanzees may catch ants with them, and crows have a trick or two up their sleeves (as, I suppose, birds generally do in the manner of nest-building); but no creature apart from humans learned to use sticks to dig for edible roots. That puts us ahead of the game. There’s no way to tell when the first game of Pooh-sticks was ever played, though it must surely come early on in our cultural evolution. But a stick is still just a stick until it has been modified, and in the various improvements invented by humans over a million or so years it is possible to measure the cumulative genius of man, woman and child in all cultures.
I was reminded forcibly of this marvellous climb up the cliff-face of progress on a recent visit to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. (A crannog is a lake-dwelling of brilliant conception and great technical beauty; but more of that later.) The Crannog Centre has all sorts of interesting Iron Age gizmos to entertain and enlighten. Some of them I have replicated and used myself: the pole-lathe is one of the great machines; others, utterly simple in their design but brilliant in their imaginative potential, like the spindle for teasing wool into yarn, I merely watch and marvel at.
Here, I think, is how we came to harness one of the crucial secrets of nature: that energy can be remodelled, transformed from one form into another—force into heat; lateral motion to rotary; rotary to reciprocal—and it is all laid out here in the British Iron Age, step by step, as a reminder of all the independent, curious, innovative minds who saw the potential in the stick and released it with the joyful, unique-to-humans cry of ‘Aha!’ Take a stick and sharpen it with something harder: the edge of a stone. Already the stick has many uses, from pinning an object down to hanging something up. Sharpen a stick and you can catch a fish (with a lot of practice). Get a really long stick, straighten it (fresh-cut sticks contain much water—they can be bent or straightened over a fire, effectively steamed into shape) and you can tackle a deer, rabbit or bird without coming too close. For the first time there is weaponry at a distance. The stick also acts as a lever to move large objects that shoulder-power alone would not be able to budge. And, as we all know, a tree trunk with no branches rolls rather gratifyingly—until it hits another tree. Trees may not move, but we (and elephants and beavers, too) can move them around to modify our landscape.
My suspicion is that the next step, the first on a long journey to scientific and engineering enlightenment, came about more than once, just as—later on—the idea of working metal was invented not once but several times, or as the idea of helping nature by sowing seeds and tending them developed. This is how I imagine it: a hunter takes the long sinews out of a captured animal and finds that they
are useful for tying and bracing things—sewing must have come early, must it not?—and then a child gets hold of a bit of this sinew and, as children must, she stretches and twangs it: the first ever bungee-burn. ‘Stop it,’ says grandma, ‘go and play with a stick instead.’ So the child, experimenting in the way chastened children do, cuts a notch in each end of a bendy stick with grandma’s best flint knife (serves her right) and stretches the sinew from one to the other. Yes, the child had invented the bow, and long in the unknown future the Sheriff of Nottingham’s fate is sealed. And as with all such things, an adult comes along, takes the new toy away and thinks about it for a moment before coming up with the bow and arrow and claiming the inspiration as their own.
