The Wisdom of Trees

by Max Adams

  Would that we had such an office in the twenty-first century.

  A few words on paper

  The paperless office was supposed to end the senseless use of paper and save our forests. Here are two myths in one: that trees grown for pulp to make paper are a bad thing; and that we might stop printing and writing on paper just because we have email and the internet, e-readers and social media.

  Use more paper, I say; and buy more boxes of matches and more furniture made from native oak and ash and sycamore; and get rid of your UPVC windows and doors and replace them with double-glazed wooden ones. And get a wood-burning stove. And use British charcoal. Woodlands and forests survive because they are useful. All the forests grown to make paper and matches are replanted and then some (Scandinavians take great care of their trees). Woods and forests that make money are the best guarantors of their own survival. When we fail to value trees for their economic benefits, when we over-sentimentalize them without bothering to learn how they work, when we grub up forests and woodlands to grow more fodder crops for animals or for pasture—that is when we lose them. So don’t shed a tear for the tree whose wood was pulped to make this book. Save a forest: buy another copy.

  How to buy a woodland

  It’s a good question. Many people with a bit of money to spare think it would be fun to own a wood. Look on the internet and you’ll find a few woods for sale. Mostly, private woodlands have been bought up by the Woodland Trust to ‘conserve’ them. I don’t think there is much point in conservation unless woods are managed productively, for reasons which should be obvious by now. The Woodland Trust and I agree to differ. Most of the other woods that come up for sale are derelict conifer plantations. I say ‘derelict’ because when conifer plantations are established they are deliberately overstocked, with many more trees per acre than will ever mature; they ‘nurse’ each other to be straight, and many would die naturally anyway. The idea is to progressively thin them, as you would with carrots or spring onions, until you are left with the best trees at the optimum spacing for timber growth.

  After the Second World War many hundreds of plantations were established. (Governments tend only to worry about trees in wartime, or when trees start dying in huge numbers; usually after it is too late.). Then, there was a period when wealthy landowners received tax incentives to plant trees—even today you don’t pay income tax on the proceeds from timber sales—so it seemed like a good idea to plant trees in places where nothing much else would grow, such as areas of the North, Wales, and windy hilltops. All very well if the landowners are conscientious; but tree-planting motivated by a tax break rarely encourages conscientiousness. So most of these plantations of Sitka spruce, Norway spruce or Western hemlock—none of them native, and none of them much good for wildlife—have been left unthinned for forty or more years. The ground beneath the trees is now dead and acidic; little else grows there; the trees, when they haven’t all blown over, are weedy and no good even to make pallets with. They are not worth thinning now, even if it weren’t too late. So, these woodlands come up on the market. Some enterprising chaps have bought many of them, parcelled them up in individual lots of a few acres at a time and sold them as ‘amenity’ woodlands. As I say, these are basically derelict plantations with a lifetime of hard labour ahead for anyone who cares to buy one. And they are not cheap. My first wood cost £25,000 for forty acres. We were the first people in the UK to get a mortgage on a wood, from the decent people at the Ecology Building Society. Nowadays even a derelict upland plantation on boggy acid soil can set you back more than £5,000 an acre.

  But don’t let me put you off. Buying a wood is a great thing to do, especially if you can club together with energetic friends who will plough their hearts and souls into thinning conifers and replanting gradually with more benign and interesting trees. In any case, many of these abandoned plantations have been around long enough that some good trees have infiltrated the blanket of dark green. Owners who take the trouble to learn something about how woods work and, above all, are patient, will reap the benefits. Give the broadleaves and the native conifers some air and a chance to reproduce. Go ahead: get yourself a wood or a share in one; build tree houses and cabins; make charcoal, sell firewood and Christmas trees to the locals, and bring some life back to the hills. The land will thank you. And so will your grandchildren.

  SPRUCE

  One is tempted to call the spruce a nasty, ecosystem-killing, ill-judged import. Its planting in upland areas unsuitable for agriculture has given it, and the forestry industry, a bad name. But its natural boreal forest habitat is just as vulnerable and precious as any other.

  Forest gardens

  Part of the woodland that I now look after in County Durham is to become a forest garden, producing fruits and nuts, berries and herbs. The forest garden movement is as old as humanity, because in its simplest form it is merely harvesting what nature provides so abundantly in the forest. In Britain the movement was pioneered by Robert Hart who, in the 1960s, set out to determine just how productive a small patch of land on Wenlock Edge in Shropshire might be. He began with about a tenth of an acre and, finding that he and his brother Lacon were physically unable to garden in the traditional way, forever digging-over soil and weeding, he let a small patch of perennial vegetables and herbs have their way. He found that this patch was both productive and undemanding of labour: he had created a very small, self-sustaining forest (an excuse many gardeners make when they can’t keep up with the weeding). At that time, straight-row, bare-soil gardening was very much the orthodoxy; indeed, I remember having my own allotment, designed on the lazy principle, and being drummed out by the committee for having an ‘untidy’ garden.

  Robert Hart was one of those ingenious people who do not understand the herding principle, or the idea of social and physical convention. Rather like Thoreau, he did what he saw fit and, if he liked the results, he carried on doing it. He transferred the principles observed in his perennial jungle to a small orchard. A permanent ground-cover of low herbs and root vegetables drew moisture and nutrients from the soil and prevented it drying out; they made those nutrients and water available to other, taller, plants, and what is known as a guild system developed in which plants mutually sympathetic to one another maintained the health of the whole by suppressing bugs and fungal attack. Mesoamerican Indians long ago discovered that one of the most productive of such guilds comprises maize, beans and squash. Hart began to see plants in terms of seven layers, from roots all the way up to trees via shrubs and climbers; and he believed that isolating plants in rows and by species, in a manner quite unlike the ecosystems in which they thrive in the wild, was counter-productive.

  In the forest garden a harmonic, self-sustaining community of plants looks after itself. So, in the County Durham wood where I am trying to establish something similar, there will be fruit trees of various sorts to attract pollinating insects; a shrub layer of raspberries, currants and gooseberries, then a herb layer with wild garlic and wood sorrel, then ground-huggers like wild strawberry. There will be beehives in time. The ecosystem of a wood which until now has been dark and gloomy ought to benefit; and so will the larder.

  Indigenous Amazonians would wonder what all the fuss is about; they have been doing it for as long as they have been there. In Asia forest gardens are called ‘home gardens’, and in the Indian state of Kerala the garden traditionally surrounds the home, providing shade, fruit, wood, medicine and a spiritual sense of wellbeing which does not have to be described or accounted for, so innate are its qualities.

  Ashington

  Dennis Turner is Chairman of the Friends of Ashington Woods. He is also a member of the Association of Pole-lathe Turners and Greenwood Workers (see ‘Bodgers’) and therefore one of those gratifying individuals whose names are cultural relics of our national heritage. I am tempted to call him Dennis the Turner. He hails from South Yorkshire and worked for much of his professional life as a purchasing manager for a gas company. When we meet on a thor
oughly bracing February morning on the edge of Ashington he is rounding up a group of health-walkers for a ramble in the woods. Woods are good for people’s health. The three-hundred-or-so acre Ashington Woods are big enough to get lost in. Their size is a reminder of what they replaced: the vast coal and slag heaps of Ashington Colliery, fifteen miles or so north of Newcastle upon Tyne on Northumberland’s North Sea coast.

  The wind is diamond-tipped; there are still traces of unmelted snow on the ground, but the sun is out. We are soon nattering about trees: the purple-grey catkins of alder swelling in anticipation of warmer and longer days to come; the insulating furriness of Scots pines, just fifteen or so years old but already tall enough that when we reach the first ‘viewing point’, the only view is their tops, shivering in the breeze. Life is coming back to this poisoned land, and not just trees, birds and insects. In a clearing brashed out by the Friends’ group of volunteers we meet Paul Downs, a woodsman and teacher who is running a forest school for a local primary-school class. The children, six or seven years old at the most and wrapped head to toe in garishly coloured hats, jackets, wellies and gloves dangling on lengths of elastic, are running around building lean-to shelters out of pine branches, screaming their heads off in delight. Their headteacher thinks that the benefits of getting her children out into the woods are obvious. Look at them, she says: they love it. Peter and a couple of assistants set to with the children’s teachers to dish out lunch: a chicken stew ladled out from a huge thermo-box, while the adults get a cup of steaming tea made with a storm kettle—like a volcano burning twigs.

  Dennis and I talk about how to engage communities in sustaining their local woods, and he confesses that it sometimes feels like an uphill struggle. There are people who have lived in Ashington all their lives but don’t know the woods are here, he says. But we agree that the trees should echo with the sounds, not just of contented nesting birds and buzzing bees, but happy, engaged children who don’t even realize what they are learning about themselves and the landscape while they are here.

  LIME

  There are two species of lime found naturally in Britain. The small-leaved lime was an important coppice species and a key indicator of ancient woodland. It is not native in the north of Britain but much planted, and it is easy to spot because of its candelabra outline and its tendency to produce large numbers of fresh shoots at the base.

  It’s not long before we are discussing the merits of certain styles of billhooks; of the pole-lathe and our mutual addiction to it. Working with green, unseasoned wood is always a delight, once discovered never forgotten. The smell of bitter sap; the rasp of a sharp tool working with the wood rather than against it; the simple pleasures of splitting, whittling, shaving and shaping—all these are shared by the fraternity. But there is very little in the woods as satisfying as the firm resistance of the springy ash tree against the foot-treadle; the mesmeric to-and-fro rotation of the billet on its simple jig; the fine-tuned sensitivity of the gouge or chisel in the hand as it almost magically transforms a small quarter-log into a chair leg, bowl or candlestick. I rather like the fact that the handles of my turning tools were turned on my own pole-lathe: there is a rightness to it shared by the blacksmith forging his own hammers and tongs.

  Later, in the warmth of a community café, over coffee and scones, we talk about futures: communities taking ownership of woods; schools adopting and managing woodland compartments as outdoor schools; local markets for woodland products like hurdles and charcoal, firewood and furniture. Yes, there is a future, if we only grasp it. But the conversation, although pleasant, is almost pointless. We are each preaching to a convert.

  Winter

  I ought, I suppose, to write something about winter in the woods. But that is not as easy as it seems. Autumn tasks run through the coldest, darkest months into February and March; spring buds are there to see from October onwards. The first green shoots appear in January; so in some senses winter is meaningless to the woodsman. Until it snows. Then the woodland floor is invisible, sometimes for weeks on end. All seems quiet. It seems as though even the honest work of coppicing would desecrate the fluted columns, echoing aisles and towering vaults of nature’s choirs, chancels and chapels. And so I like to leave the winter forest to its own devices. But I can’t resist walking through a snowy wood, just after a blizzard when the trees’ anatomy is picked out so perfectly, black against white. Now is the time to gauge a tree’s true character from its skeleton: the rowan’s sly, snaking, intertwining willowy branches; the candelabra imperiousness of the lime; the slender naked modesty of birch and the massive solidity and cantankerous architectural complexity of oaks, beeches and Scots pines. It’s also a great time to show children how to learn their tree species from winter buds: the coal-black tight-fisted tips of ash twigs; the pen nib of the beech; the bursting cluster of the oak, and the furry purple of the rowan.

  Snow on the ground also betrays the passage of the wood’s winter inhabitants: deer and squirrels, stoats, rabbits and hares, foxes, pheasants and other passing travellers. Sometimes you can hear a rustling beneath the snow as a rodent uses the white blanket as cover. Foxes and owls have hearing easily good enough to track these chancers, and sometimes you will come across a disturbed patch of snow that tells you where a kill has taken place, talon or claw plunging through the crust to take its unwitting prey. During that terribly wintry February and March of 2013 I saw my first ermine, a stoat whose coat had turned marvellously white, apart from the black tip of its tail. Even if I am not busy with billhook or chainsaw, the woods are alive in their apparent dormancy. If you are lucky enough to live in a wood you get to see all these things from the comfort of an armchair; and it’s in the armchair, warmed by last year’s seasoned firewood, that I feel justified in my winter indulgence: reading.

  There are plenty of books that show you how to identify trees. The Collins Complete Guide to British Trees is clear and has excellent photographs. My personal bible is the Complete Guide to Trees and Their Identification, published by Macdonald Illustrated—the entries contain all sorts of extra information that I like to chew on, such as the uses to which timber and underwood can be put, which parts of the tree are poisonous or edible, and so on. Richard Mabey’s magnificent Flora Britannica is a treasure house of natural and cultural history and should sit, well thumbed, on a bookshelf in every household. For an understanding of trees and woods in the landscape and in history, and their role in shaping the countryside in partnership with humans, the pre-eminent historian is Oliver Rackham, any of whose books are well worth reading for their charm, erudition, myth debunking and dry wit. For natural history, if you have the patience, there is Colin Tudge’s magisterial The Secret Life of Trees, or, on a more concise and handy scale, Peter Thomas’s Trees: Their Natural History. There are some very good woodsman’s handbooks out there too: that produced by the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV), Woodlands: A Practical Handbook, is excellent as an introduction; and I love Oliver Tabor’s Traditional Woodland Crafts. For the cultural, artistic and woody spirit of tree culture I can highly recommend Roger Deakin’s beautiful, provoking and very personal odyssey through a lifelong love affair with trees, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. I am very fond of John Stewart Collis’s gentle, perceptive wartime memoir The Worm Forgives the Plough; of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, and especially of Walter Rose’s charming and deceptively simple The Village Carpenter.

  ASH

  A quintessential timber and coppice tree of temperate woods, the ash is nevertheless seen as weed in many gardens and has been so shamefully neglected by governments that, like the elm, we may yet lose it altogether.

  One day I look up from my book and the snow has melted. The woods are alive again, and there is not a moment to be lost. It is already spring.

  TREE TALE

  The Ash

  The ash is very tall, dear to mankind,

  Strong in its position, it holds its ground rightly,

&nbs
p; Though many men attack it.

  Thinking of this ancient English rune poem and writing about ash, I have the awful feeling that I am penning an obituary, for we now know that we may lose them from the British countryside. It is an avoidable tragedy, symptomatic of governments’ reactionary attitude towards trees and woodlands. Chalara fraxinea, the fungus that threatens to kill off one of our most conspicuous and important trees, has been around for twenty years, spreading devastation across Europe and all but wiping out the species in Denmark—where, culturally, its importance as the Viking Ygdrassil or World Tree means that its loss is equivalent to our losing our oaks. And yet, we have continued to import ash saplings from Europe for our nursery industry. It has been a supreme folly. All may not be lost, though. We do not yet know how resistant our native ash may be, and there are plans (somewhat too late) to develop new stock from naturally resistant trees.

  Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) was once a vital component of the economy. It grows fast and straight and its wood has a very high tensile strength for its weight. Tough and springy, it was used for tool handles and spears, for rafters in ancient roundhouses and any place where strength and flexibility were required. It was traditionally cut on a twelve- or fifteen-year cycle, often interspersed with hazel. The wood is greyish, the more so as it seasons, but its smooth straight grain is valued in furniture when the trees are left to mature. As gardeners know, it self-seeds readily: turn your back on a patch of weeds and there is an ash sapling, a foot tall before you know it. It is a common tree of hedgerows but does not naturally form great woods. Individual specimens can grow to around a hundred-and-thirty feet: two champion examples grow in County Tipperary. But while it can survive a couple of hundred years, it does not belong in the same league of longevity enjoyed by oaks and yews unless it is regularly coppiced or pollarded.