The Wisdom of Trees

by Max Adams

  The new Iron Age’s mental and cultural transition can be seen else-where, in the even more obscure skills of the toolmakers. Henry Maudslay (1771–1831), the greatest of them, was the son of the carpenter at Woolwich Arsenal. In Maudslay’s youth, machines such as lathes were still made primarily from wood by carpenters: the edge tools that machined new tools, bespoke screws, bearings and steel pistons were metal inserts or were bolted on. Maudslay was the first to make machinery completely from bronze, brass, copper and steel, realizing that the stability and precision of the tool-making machine must lead to greater precision—the precision for which he became legendary—in the tools themselves. It was to Maudslay that Marc Brunel (French royalist exile and father of Isambard) came, in about 1802, to construct a series of machines that would mechanize the apparently unmechanizable process of manufacturing wooden ships’ blocks. The Royal Navy at that time, in the middle of its deadly duel with Napoleonic France, was making a hundred-thousand of them a year by hand at its Portsmouth dockyard. Maudslay took Brunel’s ideas and fashioned them into forty-odd machines of the most exquisite functionality and beauty. Many survive (they were still in use in the 1960s), and you can see some of them in the Science Museum in London. Maudslay also designed and constructed the revolutionary boring machine that the Brunels used to excavate their pedestrian tunnel beneath the Thames from the 1820s to the 1840s (long-delayed by flood, gas and debt).

  Ironically, the devastatingly effective marine worm Teredo navalis played its part here too. It chews through ships’ wooden hulls within its own hard exoskeleton and excretes the debris from its rear—giving Brunel the idea for his tunnel-boring machine.

  How to spot an ancient wood

  I have been spending a bit of time recently trying to identify North-umberland’s ancient woods and understand why they are where they are, how long they have been there, and how they have survived. There are not many left: most cling to the sides of the county’s steep-sided denes, places where the plough has never turned a sod. But some friends in a Lifelong Learning programme have been poring over maps and records and delving among the bluebells and anemones of their local woodlands, and we are getting somewhere. Northeast England is much less wooded than, say, Kent, and there is less evidence of coppicing or the industries supported by managed woodland. Much of what we know about ancient woodlands in Britain comes from the work of Oliver Rackham (b. 1939), the indefatigable historian whose books on trees, woods and their landscapes enlighten and inspire. But in this part of the world the study is in its infancy, and anyone with a sharp eye and energy to spare can contribute. For the armchair detective who likes to get out once in a while, and for the curious walker, discovering ancient woods can become an addiction.

  Woods that once graced the land, but which are now long gone, can often be identified by a place-name. There are plenty of tree names preserved in villages, fields and rivers. Leven is the ‘river of elm trees’; Derwent the ‘river of oaks’. Native trees crop up in places such as Acton (Ac is the Old English word for oak), Thornton and Elmham, although sometimes these names may refer to single, well-known trees, rather than woods. Some of the best evidence comes not from the names of trees, but from words that record their removal: the Old English leah, as in Oakley, would preserve the memory of a clearing in an oak wood. Hirst and frith names similarly record the former presence of woodland, and since such names were formed in the Anglo-Saxon period, we can be reasonably sure that those woods were in existence before the Norman Conquest. Hagg, hangar and shaw are names that say something about where woodlands were in the landscape or what shape they were, while spring is the old English word for a coppice. Spring Wood (not an uncommon name) may not have a stream running through it; but it has probably been managed for a thousand years and more. The term ‘coppice’ comes from the French coupé, ‘cut’. Gussie, as in Kingussie, is a Scots word for a pine wood. Stock in a name such as Stocksfield suggests that the woodland has been removed and that only the stumps remain.

  In Britain you can take an Ordnance Survey map—one of the yellow or orange walking maps, which show fields and woods at a good scale—and, using these names, imagine the distribution and pattern of woods that are no longer there. But what of woods that exist in the present? How can we tell if they are old? The first thing the historian turns to is the early edition of the Ordnance Survey, first carried out in the middle of the nineteenth century and always available at County Record Offices. If the wood you are walking through wasn’t there at the time of the first edition, it’s not ancient (although the land might have been wooded several times in the past). In some places older maps may survive, and they are well worth looking at. The earlier the map the better, and many great estates had surveyors draw maps of their lands in the seventeenth century: these are absolutely invaluable.

  The woods to take a closer look at are those on your map which have curvy boundaries, those that lie on parish boundaries (lines of small dots on the 1:25,000 maps), and those bearing names that are also names of villages or parishes (such as Whittingham Wood) or which are called things like ‘North Wood’, ‘South Wood’, ‘Great Wood’, and so on. These are good places to start: curved boundaries suggest that woods have not been laid out or planted, but have been enclosed along their natural edges. Woods that lie on parish boundaries, and which bear the name of the parish or local manor, suggest that these woods belonged to the local lord and so their management may have been continuous since the formation of the parish.

  Then it’s time to pull on the wellies and have a look on the ground. In winter it is easy to see if there are any surviving earthworks: wood banks with accompanying ditches, which would have had hedges or palings on top to keep deer out. Sometimes you find these inside woods, where they show that the wood is now larger than it once was; if you find the walls of old fields in a wood, it rather discounts it as ancient. The trees themselves might give a clue. Many trees of the same species, which have multiple trunks growing from the ground, have probably been coppiced in the past; and on their boundaries one often finds rows of pollarded trees—which have been cut at head-height to prevent the grazing of fresh shoots by deer and cattle. Oddly enough, most ancient woodlands don’t have that many ancient trees in them—they have been managed, and trees over a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty years old will probably have been periodically removed for timber.

  Go back to the same wood in spring, and it is time to look on the ground again, this time for flowers. Woods that have been established over many centuries and have been managed in the past tend to host a suite of flowering plants that share two main characteristics: their seeds drop to the ground next to the parent, so they do not spread quickly; and they tolerate, or require, periodic light and shade. In other words, these are the plants that have adapted to the cycle of periodic coppicing. Such flowers include bluebells, wild garlic, wood anemone and wood sorrel, woodruff, lesser celandine and the splendidly named ‘opposite-leaved golden saxifrage’. None of these on its own is diagnostic: it is the suite of plants that gets the woodland historian interested.

  Once you think you have a good candidate for an ancient wood, go to the local County Record Office and get the archivist to point you at the sort of documents that will confirm your idea: old legal records, tax accounts and wills, for example. It is worth starting with a County History and with a volume of the English Place Name Society. Those parts of the country lucky enough to possess the records of great estates will often yield maps of fantastic beauty packed with information about the landscape history of the last four-hundred years or so. These, above all other sources, show us the glories of a wooded landscape.

  Anglo-Saxon woodland was extensive but not unbroken. The great wooded areas of the Weald in Sussex and Kent, of Selwood in Wessex, of Dean in Gloucestershire, or Epping in Essex and Sherwood in the Midlands exist today as mere fragments. But their presence loomed large in the economies and culture of the early medieval period—in song and poem, in law and custom.
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br />   Our delvings into the ancient woodlands of Northumberland are gradually revealing that the county was cleared for farming early on; that in the centuries after the Romans left there was a fragmented pattern of small woods, which were a crucial resource for firewood and timber and for grazing pigs in autumn; that woods survived because they were woven into the fabric of life, until the great arable boom of the eighteenth century: a period of enclosure and of grubbing up the commons. One great Northumbrian wood, which was called Cocwudu and which seems to have formed a belt between the rivers Coquet and Wansbeck, may have acted as a sort of Dark Age borderland, a territory of brigands, outcasts and wild animals. Much of it may have been what is called secondary woodland; that is, it was largely formed after the abandonment of pasture and arable lands—perhaps at the end of the Roman period—by trees self-seeding from established areas of woodland. Nowadays it is a landscape of broad pastures and wheat fields, copses and hedges, small woods, winding lanes and open vistas: a civilized landscape with a secret, much wilder past.

  TREE TALE

  The Elm

  FEW PEOPLE under the age of fifty in Britain—unless they live in or visit Brighton, Edinburgh, Aberdeen or Dundee—will have seen the magnificent outline of a mature hedgerow elm tree, with its soaring crown peppered with rooks’ nests, in winter skeletal and melancholy, in summer an exploding green firework-glory of the skyline. They are nearly all gone, killed by the ascomycete fungus—which originated in Japan, not Holland, and was spread by the elm bark beetle. It looks as though we are about to go through the same grieving process with the ash tree and the Chalara fraxinea fungus: it is almost inconceivable and absolutely heartbreaking.

  Elms are peculiarly prone to being wiped out by disease, because they are for the most part clones and, just as in humans and other animals, inbreeding creates genetic vulnerabilities. In spring you might see the greeny-yellow round seedcases in bunches on their slim branches, for there are plenty of elms around still—they just don’t get to reach maturity because at about thirty years they become susceptible to attack by the bark beetle and the game is up. But those seeds are generally infertile; the trees reproduce by suckering from their roots, and so the child is the identical DNA-clone of its parent. Clones are prone to epidemic infestation, because natural immunity is either present in all trees, or in none. The Brighton elms, including two called the Preston Park Twins, which are thought to be the oldest surviving English elms in the world, are carefully protected in a disease-control zone. They are both hollow; both more than four-hundred years old. Their survival there relies on the clean, fungus-free prevailing southwest breezes of the English Channel and the protective embrace of the South Downs.

  ELM

  You never miss some things until they are gone. Yet, despite the best efforts of the elm bark beetle and ravages of fungal infection, the elm hangs on.

  There are two major species of elms native to Britain: the wych (or Scots) elm (Ulmus glabra) and the English elm (Ulmus procera); and many minor variations, most of which seem to be vulnerable to the Dutch Elm fungus. Some natural hybrids are resistant to the disease, and many others have been grown in research stations with a view to repopulating. Our grandchildren may judge the results; but elms will not provide a source of inspiration for poets or artists for another few generations. Some palynologists believe that a drastic decline in the elm-tree population in Britain and parts of the European continent during the fourth millennium BC might have been caused by a previous outbreak of a similar disease.

  Elm wood has a dense, swirling-patterned grain, and it is perfect for furniture and other uses where its strength, rot-resistance and pliability are valued. It has been used for pier piles, for coffins, for making longbows (where yew has been hard to source) and, in the great battle fleets of the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail, for pumps. Solid trunks of elm were bored with a giant auger—a feat of staggering strength—to produce hollow tubes, effectively very long cylinders, into which wooden or leather pistons could be inserted. The word boring, as in ‘tedious’, comes from the negative reputation of the job.

  I can testify to the hardness of elm. In the crypt of Christchurch, Spitalfields, in London’s East End, I spent a couple of years with other archaeologists excavating interments of the area’s Huguenot weaving community, who had been buried there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the coffins had been made from elm wood and, when encased in a lead casket, the wood was ‘tanned’ by the body juices of the decaying inhabitants. The bodies were studied and reburied, but the coffins had to be taken away to be incinerated, and that meant sawing them up to fit them in a small skip. No ordinary hand saw could make any impression on these iron-hard one-inch boards; we had to resort to a powered circular saw of the type commonly used to cut concrete. The smell was appalling.

  What lesson should we take from elms, and from their decline? First, I think, that it’s hard to wipe out a species of tree: elms survive, and will continue to do so. Second, that ecosystems are vulnerable to small changes—a sort of butterfly-effect principle, in which an apparently stable set of habitats is catastrophically altered by the introduction of one small, new variable. Above all, the story of the elm is a reminder of how important the architecture of trees is for the shape of the world we inhabit.

  As a postscript I must add that, since I wrote this piece, I have seen a mature elm tree, of about forty feet, in a garden on the banks of the River Tyne: amazing.

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  Tree futures

  Heroes—A few words on paper—How to buy a woodland—Forest gardens—Ashington—Winter—

  TREE TALE: THE ASH

  The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demand for its sufferance and extends generously the products of its life activity; it affords protection to all beings, offering shade even to the axe-man who destroys it.

  THE BUDDHA

  Heroes

  MY FORESTRY HERO is Mr S. M. Raju, Divisional Commissioner in one of India’s poorest states, Bihar. On World Environment Day in 2009 he and the people of seven-and-a-half-thousand villages set out to plant trees. Poverty, overpopulation and unsustainable clearing of forests for agriculture have taken their toll in the last hundred years or so. Soils are being eroded; there is insufficient fuel for cooking and heating; habitats have been irreplaceably destroyed. In Mr Raju’s scheme, quick-growing timber and wood-producing trees were planted alongside roads, vulnerable river and canal banks, and outside government buildings and other offices. In the villages, fruit trees were planted. Mr Raju’s idea was that trees are good for everybody: they protect against flooding, provide fuel, offer secure employment, produce fruit, give medicine and shelter, and ameliorate the climate. It is hard to disagree. Raju did plenty of homework and realized that planting trees was only going to be part of a bigger initiative that would bring benefits to both community and environment over a long period. He saw that in previous schemes less than one-fifth of the trees that had been planted flourished and stayed healthy. So Raju took advantage of a rural employment scheme to pay his villagers not just to plant the trees but also to care for them for three years afterwards, ensuring that the villagers retained a stake in their future.

  That first day, they planted something like 10 million trees: a world record. And they have not stopped. The Indian government has expanded the scheme; social forestry is now firmly on the world environmental agenda. There is a plan to plant a forest right across the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Trees and humans, marching hand in hand? Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t make a difference. Imagine if we planted 10 million trees in a day across Britain; and then did it again… and again. And then imagine that we knew what to do with them all.

  We shouldn’t be surprised that such a brilliant initiative began in India. The Indian cultural relationship with trees is ancient and intimate. Two-thousand years ago Kautilya, the Indian equivalent of Machiavelli, wrote a political treatise called the Arthas
hastra, which described how the state should function. No detail was left unaddressed in his discussion of defence, spying, government, law, revenue collection and social management.

  One of the most fascinating aspects of the Arthashastra is its attention to forestry. There was to be a Superintendent of State Forests (at a time when British society was tribal, Julius Caesar had not yet arrived, and the Romans were busy cutting down all the trees across their empire and beginning to regret it). His responsibilities included organizing the collection of forest products by rangers, constructing factories to process those products, collecting fines and administering forestry laws. He was required to know all the trees in the forest (and India has many, many more native species than Britain does), their products, their poisons and the animals that interacted with them. Also intriguing was the proposal that forests should be planted on borders and that elephants should live in them, both to ward off enemies of the state and to provide elephants for war. Above all, the superintendent was to protect trees as a strategic resource for the state.