The Wisdom of Trees
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ORIENTAL PLANE
Famously, if erroneously, called by the English the London Plane (which is, in fact, a hybrid), this tree sheds its bark (and urban pollutants) in large scales to create beautiful patterning on its trunk. I have sat under the plane tree on Kos beneath whose branches Hippocrates taught medicine. I doubt if the same tree has been there all the time; but it still provides wonderful shade from the hot Aegean sun.
Brown and sticky
‘What’s brown and sticky?’ ‘A stick’. So goes the children’s joke about the humblest of playthings. It is amazing what you can do with a simple stick. Chimpanzees use them to tease ants from holes, so it’s a fair bet that the very earliest humans used sticks for all sorts of useful jobs. A few animals employ sticks in one way or another, but only humans have ever learned to dig for luscious edible roots with them, turn them into spears or arrows, or rub them together to make fire.
Sticks are also very useful for measuring things. Have you ever wondered how tall a tree is? You aren’t allowed to chop it down to find out, so what do you do? First, find a stick, about the same length as a ruler, or a bit longer. Stand back from the tree you want to measure, close one eye and hold the stick out in front of you as far as you can in one hand. With your eye, line up the bottom of the stick with the bottom of the tree and the top of the stick with the very top of the tree. You might have to move nearer or further away, until you get it just right.
Now, rotate your hand ninety degrees so that the bottom of the stick is still in line with the bottom of the tree, but the stick is now parallel with the ground. Get a friend to stand at the bottom of the tree with their back against the trunk. Then, tell them to walk directly away from the tree at right angles from your line of sight until you see that they are in line with the far end of the stick. Ask them how many paces they have walked. The distance they have covered is the same as the height of the tree. If you want to be really accurate you could measure how far they have walked with a long tape, or work out the average length of your friend’s pace. To double-check, swap roles to see if you and your friend get the same result.
This might seem a trivial use for a stick. But early navigators realized that, with a similar method, the sailor could achieve an idea of distance and speed by measuring the changing size of a landmark at sea and its relationship to the ever-cycling angles of sun, moon and stars.
Trees of liberty
The tree, which spans the gap between the underworld and heaven, between birth and death, ignorance and wisdom, has provided a potent symbol through all the human ages. Genesis tells how the first people, Adam and Eve, were expelled from the Garden of Eden for tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: that is to say, knowledge forbidden them by their master. This is not a tale of sin, but of wilful disobedience and the desire for humans to liberate themselves, as Prometheus did when he stole the secret of fire. But the tree represents more, much more, than mere knowledge. As a sacrificial scaffold it is older than Christianity. The grim irony of identifying the skull of a defeated enemy or criminal, impaled on a stake, as a fruiting tree taps into a very ancient and dark iconography that runs through the Christian crucifixion and the martyrdom of Northumbria’s seventh-century King Oswald at Oswestry (‘Oswald’s tree’, or Croesoswald in Welsh) to the medieval gibbet and gallows and, in more recent times, to the Strange Fruit hanging from the Southern poplar trees, in Billie Holliday’s tragic lament for the African American. Each time, it is a sacrifice for the freedom of a greater humanity, as Odin sacrificed himself on Ygdrassil, the great World Tree (an ash) of Norse mythology.
The tree has also been appropriated by revolutionaries seeking a more concrete form of liberation than Adam and Eve, whose curiosity was theoretical. In 1765, beneath an elm tree that stood close to Boston Harbor, a group of radicals calling themselves the ‘Sons of Liberty’ congregated to demonstrate their hatred of British tax laws. They hanged an effigy of a British government representative from the branches of this tree, and their ironic inversion of the gallows as a symbol of death into an icon of freedom stuck when they nailed a sign to it: ‘The Tree of Liberty’. In 1787, in a Paris simmering with insurrectionist tension, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ And so sacrifice and ultimate freedom, the grim twin sides of knowledge, are combined in the tree. Liberty elms were planted in many communes across France, and in American towns. For Scots poet Robert Burns, tapping into this idealistic sentiment in his own Tree of Liberty, such freedoms were not yet to be found in the country buttressed by the wooden walls of its navy...
Let Britain boast her hardy oak,
Her poplar and her pine, man,
Auld Britain ance could crack her joke,
And o’er her neighbours shine, man.
But seek the forest round and round,
And soon ’twill be agreed, man,
That sic a tree can not be found
’Twixt London and the Tweed, man.
WHITE POPLAR
A line of these tall, elegant trees shades my garden in the evening. Their leaves, in early spring, have the colour of verdigris; but the white poplar is not a native of the British Isles.
In a James Gillray cartoon of 1798, Satan—a serpent in the guise of Whig Opposition leader Charles James Fox—tempts John Bull, the honest soul of England, with luscious fruit bearing the labels ‘slavery’, ‘treason’, ‘atheism’, ‘plunder’ and so on, growing from branches inscribed with the ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Profligacy’, which sprout from a withered, stunted trunk of Opposition. The marvellous ironies of James Ward’s portrait of An Ancient Oak are lost here beneath suffocating polemic. The roots are ‘Envy’, ‘Ambition’ and ‘Disappointment’. But loyal John Bull already has his pockets bulging with juicy pippins, the fruits of honest labour. In the background stands a noble royal oak (a reference to Charles II) with a trunk labelled ‘Justice’; its roots are ‘Commons’, ‘Lords and King’, its fruits ‘happiness’ and ‘freedom’.
The metaphor stuck. During the Great Reform debate of the early 1830s, a cartoon entitled The Reformers’ Attack on the Old Rotten Tree took an easy swipe at the notorious ‘rotten boroughs’, whose electors were and had always been ludicrously unrepresentative of the population as a whole. (Old Sarum in Wiltshire, for example, returned two members to Parliament; but the constituency was home to no humans at all, only cows and sheep, it being the long-abandoned remnants of an Iron Age hillfort.) In the etching, the king and his cronies sit on Constitution Hill, looking down on the Reformers—a motley collection of Whigs, Unionists and general rabble-rousers—taking their axes to the tree, while on the opposite side stand the conservative supporters of the status quo: the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and the like. That political tree was cut down in 1832, when the Great Reform Bill offered the promise of a reformed Parliament, an end to corruption and a much-expanded electorate; but a sapling grew in its place which looked very like it.
Foresight
We do not plant trees for ourselves, but for the generation after next. In Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, the Laird o’ Dumbiedykes advises his son: ‘Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye’re sleeping.’ It is a matter of the greatest satisfaction to find that trees grow even when I am not looking at them.
Literature provides other encouragements, too. The wise men who created the Hindu text Matsya Purana sixteen-hundred years ago wrote that ‘if anyone plants at least one tree, then he will be able to stay in the heaven of Indra for thirty-thousand years’. Giles Winterborne, Thomas Hardy’s ill-fated Woodlander, ‘had a marvellous power of making trees grow. Although he would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly there was a sort of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak or beech that he was operating on.’ His unrequited admirer and heroic fellow-woodswoman, Marty South, was so sensitive
to the trees’ inner life that when ‘she erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger, the soft musical breathing instantly set in which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled—probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves’.
Admiral Lord Collingwood understood the Royal Navy’s reliance on oak trees better than most. After one of his ships, constructed as it turned out by a corrupt shipwright, virtually sank beneath him as he sailed, he remarked that he had been afloat for six months with nothing but six inches of planking between him and eternity. An early, exemplary conservationist, he famously walked the hills and lanes of Northumberland with a pocketful of acorns, planting them in hedgerows and patches of waste ground so that Britain’s navy should not want for oak trees; he adjured all gentlemen to do the same. His oaks still grow in those hedgerows, just in case we ever need them. In 2010, on the bicentenary of his death, his great-great-great niece Susan Collingwood Cameron planted a new Collingwood oak at the mouth of the College Valley in Northumberland, in sight of a plantation that the admiral commissioned from afar during his last, fatal, seven-year deployment as commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean.
John F. Kennedy was fond of telling a story about the French Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied: ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’
Alfred the Great reigned from 871 to 899, at a time when the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex was under the direst threat of destruction by Viking armies. But in later life he was able to contemplate some of the simpler joys of life in the preface to his translation of St Augustine’s Soliloquies:
I then gathered for myself staves, and stud-shafts, and cross-beams, and helves for each of the tools that I could work with; and bow-timbers and bolt-timbers for every work that I could perform—as many as I could carry of the comeliest trees. Nor came I home with a burden, for it pleased me not to bring all the wood home, even if I could bear it. In each tree I saw something that I needed at home; therefore I exhort every one who is able, and has many wains, to direct his steps to the self-same wood where I cut the stud-shafts. Let him there obtain more for himself, and load his wains with fair twigs, so that he may wind many a neat wall, and erect many a rare house, and build a fair enclosure, and therein dwell in joy and comfort both winter and summer, in such manner as I have not yet done.
TREE TALE
The Birch
I have been cutting birch this last winter. It is a woodsman’s pleasure, pre-eminent among many others. Birch trees grow slender single trunks for the most part; and since their branches are admirably angled at forty-five degrees to the trunk, when you trim them with a billhook a single satisfying thwack does the trick: you are left with a clean, smooth straight trunk to be cut into four-foot lengths. These are stacked in cords, four feet wide by eight feet long by four feet high. At one end the logs rest against the trunk of a tree; at the other a stake is driven into the ground and a cord (hence the name, perhaps) is tied between it and the tree. A cord of hardwood, when dry, weighs about a ton and has been the forester’s measure of underwood for centuries. Walking through a well-managed wood among ripening cords is immensely satisfying. Birch wood burns hot, although it can spit on an open fire and is best kept for stoves. It makes good charcoal and the wood has often been used to make light-sounding, resonant drum shells (I have a lovely birch snare-drum) as well as charming rustic furniture.
After the cord wood has been stacked, the long thinning remnant of the main stem goes onto a neat pile destined for the stove in the cabin. The feathery tops can be bundled into faggots to fire an oven or kiln; they can equally be used to make the broom heads called ‘besoms’—the traditional witches’ broom—or sold to racecourses for their jumps; in Scotland they were traditionally cut short and used as whisks. Nothing is wasted. Even the leaves can be used to make a green dye.
The birch will grow again from its stump, this time with several shoots, and meanwhile the leafy earth has been opened up to the light and next spring all sorts of plants will make use of the sun: primroses, wood anemone, ramsons and, if we are lucky, bluebells. I leave plenty of the older trees in, because they play host to all sorts of insects; a really mature birch tree will have holes in its trunk to accommodate nests, and when dead and hollow it makes a terrific drumming tree for any woodpecker after a mate or wishing to advertise a territorial claim. My aim is to nurture a birch wood with trees of differing ages, otherwise there would be, in a generation or so, lots of dying trees and none to replace them. Unlike an oak or beech wood, birch woods tend not to self-regenerate in the long term because the seeds prefer open, disturbed soil to germinate successfully and the trees are eventually shaded out by oaks and beeches, the bullies of the woodland playground. One must think ahead: woods are a gift for our grandchildren.
BIRCH
This modest tree has often been undervalued as a component of our woods; but I like to think that if it were ever in danger of disappearing, our poets would come to its rescue.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the silver birch (Betula pendula) as the ‘lady of the woods’ and, to be sure, at its best it is a most elegant creature, wonderful to watch in a breeze in late spring when the leaves are fresh and delicate. But the lady does not mature like an oak or beech; birch forests are the forests of the far north. Graceful it may be, and hardy too, for birch is a colonizer of broken ground like railway embankments, or previously frozen lands, and was the first tree to arrive in Britain after the last Ice Age; but once its job of preparing the ground for other trees is done, it surrenders to them, rarely living beyond eighty or a hundred years. The pollen is spread by wind and so are the tiny, prolific seeds—the birch has no need of animal or insect partners in its reproductive cycle. Because it is not prized for construction timber it has often been undervalued as a component of our woods; but I like to think that if it were ever in danger of disappearing, our poets would come to its rescue.
Even so, birch is prized in other ways. Hunter-gatherers of the northern lands have used birch bark as a strong, flexible and durable material for making lightweight canoes and punts as well as delightful boxes and baskets; the tree can be tapped in spring for an ‘interesting’ sugary wine. Indeed, the name ‘Birk’, found frequently in Scotland (including Birk Hall on Deeside, once owned by Prince Albert, now by Prince Charles), records such ancient value of the birch to small communities. The shiny white or light-brown outer bark peels in a satisfying way like sheets of paper, a use to which it has been put in the past. This peeling layer allows the tree to shed pollutants and clean out its breathing pores. For the woodsman it has the crucial property of storing waxy resins. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Star Carr, North Yorkshire, used pitch from birch bark to glue arrow-points to their shafts. On a recent walk off the beaten track across the Anglo-Scottish border I carried a very small compact wood-gas stove, which I was able to fuel with sticks as I found them; but I carried a waterproof bag of precious (and almost weightless) birch bark to make sure I would never want for an instant, very hot, firelighter. In almost two-hundred miles it never failed me, rain or shine.
What we learn from the modest birch is that someone has to put the hard work in first before all the glory is reaped; but also that being good at a few small things is just as important as being the showstopper on the big stage. Birch is our set-builder. Perhaps its most unusual and showiest role in the grand theatre of history was as the material with which ninety-five per cent of Howard Hughes’s notorious—and mis-named—Spruce Goose wooden flying boat was constructed. It flew just once, in 1947. At the time it was the largest aircraft ever built, bigger than a Jumbo jet.
Britain’s tallest birch, according to the Tree Register of Great Britain and Ireland, is a triple-trunked specimen growing at Gray House in Liff, Angus. At
about eighty feet it’s an impressive beast, but it is unlikely to make it past the end of this century.
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Ingenious trees
What trees do—Trees with latitude—Family tree—
TREE TALE: THE ROWAN
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men... trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.
JOHN MUIR
What trees do
TREES ARE SO COMPLICATED and so unlike animals that scientists are only a very small part of the way towards understanding them at the most intimate level. They are biological marvels. But it is worth starting with the basics. What does a tree do? I have heard that clever engineers are trying to construct from ultra-modern materials a device that will trap carbon dioxide, harvest sunlight and not pollute the planet. (Good luck!) In case these engineers want some idea of how to go about it, here is a specification for such a device. The task is to construct a manufactory in which sunlight, water and air are harvested and sugars are produced and refined. Production must be sustained indefinitely; the machine should be able to replicate itself. Here are the necessary competences: