The Wisdom of Trees

by Max Adams

  TREE TALE

  The Oak

  Oak is the nourishment of meat on the earth,

  For the children of men; often it travels,

  Over the gannet’s bath

  And the spear-sea tests

  Whether the oak keeps faith nobly.

  The oak, as this Old English rune poem testifies, is the quintessential English tree. At least, we think it is. The distinctive lobed leaves are one of the few that almost everyone recognizes. Acorns are part of our cultural inventory of symbols. The oak stands for our island fortress. Nature and culture being what they are, though, all is not as it seems.

  There are more than two-hundred species of oak worldwide, but just two of them are native to Britain: the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and the sessile oak (Quercus petraea). I use the mnemonic ‘sessile SALL’ to remind me which is which. The pedunculate oak bears its acorns on long stalks, while its leaves sprout direct from the twig. In the sessile oak the leaves are on long stalks, the acorns not (hence SALL: Short Acorn, Long Leaf). Confusingly, the two species hybridize like mad, so many of our oaks are neither one nor the other.

  Like the inveterate Admiral Collingwood, and the allegorical hero of Jean Giono’s charming and lyrical allegory The Man Who Planted Trees (L’Homme qui plantait des arbres, 1953), I have been out in the autumn woods planting acorns. I use a metal rod to punch a small hole in the woodland floor, drop the acorn in and wait to see what happens next spring. Acorns are generally a good bet for planting: they are packed with energy, are quick to produce a robust shoot and taproot, and have a high germination rate, so I expect twenty or thirty per cent of them to sprout. After that, as the admiral would have said, let them take their chance.

  Oak is Britain’s most massive tree—not to be confused with tallest—and, apart from yew and some very ancient coppice stools, our longest-lived. It is a keystone plant, supporting more than three-hundred species of insect and, in its several life stages from sprouting acorn to withered wreck—via great domed cathedral and stag-headed dinosaur—it is the most recognizable plant in our landscape, whether it stands alone or as part of the towering canopy of a forest. It has always been the chosen timber for great buildings. Our largest and most complex wooden structure, HMS Victory aside, is the fourteenth-century roof of Westminster Hall, pre-constructed from six-hundred oak trees and then assembled on site. Oak wood is tough, and gets tougher as it seasons. Oak-framed buildings are still constructed using wood that is not yet seasoned, so that as it dries they shrink and brace themselves ever tighter—and protected against rot, they will easily last a thousand years. Even so, to think of oak purely as a timber tree is to forget that it has been one of our foremost coppice species, cut every twenty or twenty-five years or so to produce substantial poles of great strength and durability. Most medieval houses were constructed not from timber but from underwood. And Oak bark, stripped from felled trees in late spring, is still valued at several hundred pounds per ton in the leather-tanning industry.

  OAK

  Admiral Lord Collingwood famously walked the hills and lanes of Northumberland with a pocketful of acorns to plant in hedgerows, so that England’s navy should not want for oak trees. He adjured all gentlemen to do the same; and his oaks still grow in those hedgerows, just in case we ever need them.

  Acorns are one of the most nutritious sources of food known. The reason we don’t eat them is that they must be crushed and washed to remove poisonous tannins; and because they have an astoundingly boring flavour. But quite why we don’t fatten pigs in oak woods any more is a mystery, because pigs like them just fine.

  Oaks are present in our historical record from its beginnings: in law codes and title deeds, place-names and professions. Even so, it is only in the last few hundred years that the national identity of the English has been so intimately tied to the king of the forest. That is at least partly due to the restoration of Charles II to the throne after his lucky night’s stay in the Boscobel Oak (a pollard in a wood pasture) after losing the Battle of Worcester in 1651; and partly due to the jingoistic identification of Britain’s defence with the Royal Navy, against Napoleonic invasion. David Garrick’s ‘Heart of Oak’, which became the Royal Navy’s marching song, is as stirring an anthem as the age could produce, with its fist-thumping chorus (from an 1809 version):

  Hearts of oak are our ships,

  Hearts of oak are our men,

  We always are ready, steady boys, steady,

  To charge and to conquer again and again.

  There is no nudging the oak from our conscience. Walter Rose, the great recorder of a lost age of woodsmanship, wrote with a more understated wisdom of the oak beams used in mills:

  I have always felt that the service fulfilled by those beams, those strong stays and that large post, was worthy of oak, and I would reflect on their long years of silent growth in the forest, under sunlight and warm showers, fierce storms and gales, all of which had combined to produce that marvellous strength, that dignity before which I was dumb. Yet it was man who had placed them there; frail man at grips with the power of nature, man whose intelligence had succeeded in harnessing even the wind to serve him.

  It is this partnership between trees and humans that stands as continual reminder: that although we neglect our trees, the cultural and biological lessons they have to offer have not diminished in importance. The oak teaches us some of the secrets of robust long life and fertility; of solidity and wisdom; of partnership; that survival is a long game.

  11

  Tree pasts

  How old is it?—Trees of Middle-earth—Chesapeake—End of the age—How to spot an ancient wood—

  TREE TALE: THE ELM

  We had better be without gold than without timber.

  JOHN EVELYN

  How old is it?

  HOW OLD IS THAT TREE? The most accurate way to find out is to chop it down and count the rings, one dark and one light for every year of growth: the science of dendrochronology (see ‘Seahenge’). But a living tree can’t just be cut down for the sake of finding its age. The best estimate can be made from measuring the circumference of a tree trunk with a tape (the fabric ones that tailors use). Unless it is very young or very old, a tree will put on about an inch of circumference a year, so a tree that is a hundred-and-twenty inches in girth (at chest height) will not be far off a hundred-and-twenty years old. Some trees are quicker or slower than others, but as a rough rule of thumb it works. Trees in woods grow more slowly than this, however; maybe about a half to three-quarters of an inch a year.

  The oldest oak may be more than five-hundred years old. Some very slow-grown trees, in the far north or on exposed hillsides, could be as old even if they have never grown very big. Yews may reach two-thousand years. The oldest trees in the world are the bristlecone pines of the high mountains of California, where some have endured, growing very slowly indeed, for as many as ten-thousand years.

  Trees do not live a long time for a purpose; they just do. And in species in which the trees do not begin to reproduce until they are fifty or sixty years old, it makes sense to stick around for a while. When they do finally die, trees are recycled by bugs and bacteria, and dead trees create space in forests: new opportunities for other plants to establish themselves for a while until the canopy closes once more.

  Trees of Middle-earth

  Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien will know that in his fictional world of Middle-earth exotic trees grew. The mallorn was a marvellous beech-like tree of the elven forest of Lothlórien. It had smooth silver bark, a single trunk, pale-green leaves that turned gold in autumn, and golden spring blossom. There was the oilairë of Númenor, a fragrant evergreen whose branches were used to bless ships. There were also those wondrous, mythical semi-floral beings, the ents: half-giant men, half-trees, they could—when roused from their slumber—speak and even move. The name ent is an Old English word for ‘giant’, and there are many ancient European myths about trees that are part men, or cursed men, or who can talk—t
he origins, perhaps, of the unsettling Green Man symbols, which one sees carved in ancient churches. And at the heart of Tolkien’s Shire, in the village of Hobbiton, grows the noble, spreading party tree beneath which Bilbo Baggins lays on a feast for many guests before his triumphal and ill-fated disappearing trick, at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring.

  The film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings reconstructs Tolkien’s world with great attention to detail. But for the naturalist, there’s no hiding the fact that director Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth is, in reality, New Zealand. As it happens, the tree flora of that Antipodean paradise is suitably exotic. Having been geographically isolated for 80 million years, New Zealand’s two islands have developed forests of remarkable diversity, even weirdness. There are the five species of southern ‘beech’ (Nothofagus), some of the relicts of the ancient super-continent of Gondwana; species of Nothofagus can still be found in Australia, Chile, Argentina, New Guinea and, a very long time ago, in Antarctica. Superficially similar to those of the northern hemisphere, these beeches are genetically quite distinct. Some of them are evergreen; and where they grow in ancient forests and are covered in great drooping fronds of epiphytes and lichens they look as mysterious and magical as anything in Middle-earth’s Old Forest or Mirkwood. The rata tree (Metrosideros robusta), a relative of the myrtle, has startlingly red flowers and begins life as an epiphyte, eventually sending its roots to the ground and enclosing its host like a python swallowing a crocodile.

  New Zealand’s most emblematic tree, the kauri (Agathis australis), would perhaps make a suitable model for an ent. A long-lived giant conifer, it once formed vast forests; but its use as a timber tree, particularly in house- and boat-building, contributed to a drastic decline during the nineteenth century. Now protected, and recognized as a keystone species supporting many other flora and fauna, its prize specimen in the Waipoua region on North Island is called, in Maori, Tane Mahuta, the ‘Lord of the Forest’. More than a hundred-and-seventy feet tall, and a colossal forty-odd feet around the trunk, it is probably fifteen-hundred years old. Records of early European visitors show that much larger, much older specimens once existed to rival any giant redwood of North America. Rather appropriately, in the Maori worldview the ancestral progenitor, Tane, had authority over all the forests and the animals contained in them; it was ‘taboo’ to fell a tree without his permission, and so the forests of New Zealand have a deeply sacral meaning to the first inhabitants.

  The two islands of New Zealand are justly famous for their ‘podocarps’, that is, native hardwood conifers (which seems a contradiction in terms): the matai (Prumnopitys taxifolia), which looks rather like a Scots pine; the kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), which provides the country with its tallest tree at 218 feet, in North Island’s Waitako region, near Hamilton; and a dozen others, all remnants of Gondwanaland’s megaflora. They would look, actually, more at home in Jurassic Park than in the leafy Shire woodlands of Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon fantasy world.

  Visit the Kaitoki regional park, fifty miles or so north of Wellington, and you will find the real-life natural backdrop to the film scenes, which re-created the elvish palace of Rivendell so beloved of Bilbo Baggins and his fellow hobbits: forest-draped hills, sylvan glades, rocky canyons and rope bridges. No mallorn tree here, but New Zealand’s native trees—and New Zealand has many more native species than Britain—provide a suitably atmospheric and tranquil setting.

  And what of Hobbiton’s party tree? Peter Jackson found just what he was looking for, and the backdrop to the mythical Hobbiton, when he was flying across North Island. The area around Matamata is dairy country, all rolling green hills and pastures, perfect for the Shire. And on the farm owned by Ian Alexander he found an enormous spreading tree, which then formed the focus of the party scenes in both the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I have to admit that I couldn’t tell, from the films, exactly what species of tree it was; a non-native pine, I reckoned. But my kind correspondents at Matamata-Piako District Council have done the legwork for me and run it to ground by getting in touch with the owner. It is a Monterey pine (Pinus radiata), a native of the Mexican and Californian coasts but evidently thriving on the other side of the Pacific. In any case, it is a truly magnificent beast, fit to grace any film set. The Hobbiton set now forms a permanent exhibit, with its hole-in-the-ground houses, bijou gardens, bridges and the Green Dragon Inn. Only the tree got there naturally rather than by design.

  Chesapeake

  In 1812 Britain got embroiled in a war with the young United States of America. It should have been a straightforward, over-before-Christmas sort of a war. Britain had a huge navy of battleships, cruisers, sloops and gunboats; America had six frigates. For twelve months British frigates—under-armed and old-fashioned—were outgunned by their technologically superior counterparts, the most famous of them being the USS Constitution. The American vessel was nicknamed ‘Old Ironsides’, because she had been built with a revolutionary system of internal bracings, which made her hull more or less impenetrable. She survives, and in 2003 I saw her sail out of Charlestown naval base on 4 July for Boston’s Independence Day celebrations.

  On 1 June 1813 a measure of revenge was achieved for this post-colonial humiliation when HMS Shannon, a 38-gun frigate commanded by Captain Philip Broke, challenged USS Chesapeake (with its 44 guns), commanded by Captain James Lawrence, to a single-ship duel—the sort of action beloved of penny-plain cartoons and the jingoistic scribes of the British press. In a very short but bloody engagement off the coast of Massachusetts, Shannon defeated Chesapeake and, after her repair at the naval dockyards in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the captive Chesapeake was sailed triumphantly to England as a prize. The war against America ended in 1814 after one more desultory year, with no great advantage on either side. The Napoleonic Wars were also nearing their end, having witnessed a titanic conflict between the wooden-walls ships of England and France. Chesapeake was now taken into the Royal Navy, so that the sailing and fighting characteristics of this new breed of fast and tough heavy frigate could be studied, and copied, and she served until 1819 before being broken up. The great age of sail was almost at an end.

  OCCIDENTAL PLANE

  Otherwise known as the American sycamore, this transatlantic import was widely introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century, though it is now hardly seen. In its native landscapes of the central and eastern United States, it may live up to five-hundred years and grow a hundred-and-sixty feet high.

  Some years ago, students of architectural history from the University of St Andrews, on a research visit to a Hampshire flour mill called Chesapeake Mill, which had closed in the 1970s, came to realize that the building had been constructed in 1820 using many of the bloodstained and shrapnel-scarred decking beams and ceiling planks from the American warship. It is an extraordinary survival and reminder of a supreme age of workmanship, adventure, bravery and folly; of the peak of wooden craftsmanship and the enduring qualities of great timber.

  There is another unexpected survival of that war. A year before the action off the mouth of Boston Harbor, the USS Constitution had defeated a British frigate, HMS Java. Java had been on her way to the East Indies, and in her possession were plans to build a Leda-class frigate of Indian teak in the Bombay yard of a very famous shipwright called Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia. But Java sank under tow, and the plans sank with her. More plans were sent out, but it was not until 1817 that the ship that was built from them, HMS Trincomalee, was launched. As a result, she missed the wars against both Napoleonic France and the United States, eventually serving as a patrol ship before almost getting a piece of the action in the Crimean War of 1854–6. For much of her existence she was ‘laid-up in ordinary’ or used as a training ship or dockyard hulk. By chance she survives today, one of the very few original floating warships of the era, along with the USS Constitution. She is to be found, impeccably trim, as the majestic centrepiece in Hartlepool’s historic dockyard in County Durham. I was lucky enough to watc
h while her hull was coppered to prevent the marine boring worm Teredo navalis eating her timbers. Oddly enough, British sailors did not like serving in ships built of teak: they believed that teak splinters caused wounds to become septic.

  The end of the age of sail did not quite mean the end of wooden ships in the world’s navies. During the Second World War, the Royal Navy revived wooden construction for its minesweepers. Today, the US Navy’s Avenger-class minesweepers, which patrol the Strait of Hormuz off the Persian Gulf, are wooden-hulled, constructed from oak or Douglas fir. Wood has obvious advantages for such vessels: not only do they not attract magnetic mines, they are also more inured to the shock waves of a sub-ocean mine detonation.

  End of the age

  The Iron Age proper began in 1779, when a bridge made of iron was built across the Severn Gorge at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. Something of the fervid, almost satanic atmosphere of the Industrial Revolution is still present here, and in the famous painting Coalbrookdale at Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg, which evokes its furnaces and chimneys against a livid, fiery backdrop. It always makes me think of William Blake’s orange-and-black striped ‘Tyger’, and I often wonder if that is the ‘awful symmetry’ that he had in mind.

  Wood and iron are very different materials. Iron’s potential in its malleable form, as wrought iron—to make a tool with an edge, to be strong in compression yet tensile—was obvious long before Abraham Darby III built his all-iron bridge. The great swordsmiths of Europe, India and China had perfected steel in their pattern-welded armaments far back in the mists of time. Even so, iron had never supplanted wood as the primary material for construction until that symbolic and iconic bridge. After that, iron was supreme. But take a close look at the bridge and you will see that new technology had not entirely displaced old. Or at least, the old mindset—that accumulation of thousands of years of knowledge, feel and sensibility—had not disappeared overnight. Not yet. For Darby’s Iron Bridge, originally designed by Thomas Pritchard, was put together with a distinctly woody hand. The joints are fashioned in iron but copied from carpentry: there are mortises and tenons, wedges and blind dovetails, trademarks of the oak-frame builder. The brain and hand of the woodsman are preserved there, just as the first ironsmith smelting with charcoal is commemorated in Darby’s grandfather’s introduction of coke to replace charcoal.