The Wisdom of Trees

by Max Adams

  The seeds of the ash tree form in bunches of ‘keys’, very distinct in their green clusters in summer, and even more so in winter when they stay on the tree, sometimes for a whole year. In winter ash is the most easily spotted tree because of the unmistakeable matt jet-black buds. Ash will burn unseasoned; its leaves were a traditional fodder crop for cattle. One of the latest trees to come into leaf, it is not greedy for light like oak or beech and allows other species to establish themselves in its partial shade.

  One can only hope that the ash’s elegance and resilience, its splendid timber and agile wiriness will still be there to enjoy in a hundred years’ time. If not, it will have been a lesson hard-learned. In the meantime, let that annoying sapling grow: it may be a genetic life-raft for the ash.

  THE GREENDALE OAK

  (south-east view)

  In 1727, the Countess of Oxford had some of the innards of the disembowelled tree turned into furniture; but in honour of the wood’s origin, the oak tree was depicted on a cabinet, in inlay, accompanied by some appropriately arboreal lines from Ovid and Chaucer. In its heyday, the tree was but the most majestic of several mighty oaks in this part of the old Sherwood Forest.

  Epilogue

  Woodlanders

  Having turned off from your road and entered the wood, you have really gone through a gate which is now closed behind you, and your ordinary world is shut out with all its noise and sorrow and care.

  JOHN STEWART COLLIS

  ONE OF THE MANY attractions of the woodland life is its simplicity. When Thoreau went to live in the woods on the edge of Walden Pond in the 1840s, before America was torn apart by its civil war, he was not sentimental:

  My purpose in going… was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles… Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods… nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.

  When he wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods, many of the trees that flanked Walden Pond had been felled by ‘woodchoppers’ and its banks were bare to the sky. But felling trees is not the same as deforestation. Thoreau inspired the modern conservation movement, and since 1922 Walden Pond has been a Massachusetts State Reservation. Its shores are still clothed in pine, hickory and oak. The site of Thoreau’s cabin has been preserved, and a reconstruction stands not far away—it has become a place not just of curiosity, but of pilgrimage. Thoreau is an idealist hero of a sort of pioneering freedom that still underpins America’s self-conscious identity. Walden Pond lies near Concord, and twenty miles to the southeast, near Boston Common, an unprepossessing plaque records the site of Boston’s original Liberty Tree (see ‘Trees of liberty’).

  A generation after Thoreau, Thomas Hardy chose to place his story of rural change and class tension, The Woodlanders, in a community that still relied on its trees for survival. His tragic hero was Giles Winterborne, a man of deep natural faith and fateful simplicity, no longer good enough for his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury, who had been sent away, to be ‘improved’, by her ambitious father. Hardy’s Wessex of the late 1860s, long after iron had superseded wood economically, gives us a glimpse of a world whose affinity with trees was at once viscerally superstitious and innately sympathetic. Winterborne coppices woods for various owners, supplies timber to merchants, plants trees on great estates and, every autumn, carries his cider press to the orchards, large and small. We meet him first tying down a specimen apple tree to his gig, on the way to market to advertise his many services and products. His love of trees is self-evident, and no more so than when he and his devoted admirer, the peasant girl Marty South, are planting trees together.

  The two are united in their empathy with trees and wood. She, caring for a dying father, works through the night to fulfil an order for thatcher’s staples, using only a billhook that is too big for her:

  On her left hand lay a bundle of the straight, smooth hazel rods called spar-gads—the raw material of her manufacture; on her right a heap of chips and ends—the refuse—with which the fire was maintained; in front, a pile of the finished articles. To produce them she took up each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length, split it into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous blows, which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that of a bayonet.

  Giles sees her as a fellow-craftsman, a soul-mate (although, being emotionally illiterate, he fails to read all the other signals she is giving off and dies tragically ignorant of her devotion).

  Hardy gives us more than mere love of trees: he offers us a window seat, looking out on the actual workings of a whole landscape: the auction of standing timber in a great wood, as much a social occasion as hard business; the great timber wagons with their huge wheels and free-rotating axles, which lift immense trunks of felled oaks and carry them to the sawpit. We are witness to the injuries that woodsmen suffer; to the hyena-like scavenging of a great oak for its bark, brashings, limbs and timber; to the changing pace of the seasons and the emotional intensity wielded by storms, drought, ice and flood. Above all, this is a landscape of shared interests and bonds fractured by the injection of modernity: ideas of evolution and social mobility, innovation, greed and a carelessness for what might be lost. It is, in a typically Victorian way, artistic sentimentality. There is an obvious hint of Turner’s famous 1839 nautical painting The Fighting Temeraire in the description of Melbury’s yard, in which ‘the four huge waggons under the shed were built on those ancient lines whose proportions have been ousted by modern patterns, their shapes bulging and curving at the base and ends like Trafalgar line-of-battle ships with which venerable hulks, indeed, these vehicles evidenced a constructive spirit curiously in harmony’.

  Yet Hardy’s woodlanders look after their trees because the trees have, primarily, an economic value; and if we wish to bring back some of the benefits of an active wooded landscape to Britain, there must be sustainable economic and social benefits.

  Since poets / artisans like John Stewart Collis last wrote about living and working in woods during the Second World War, the British public has, I think, come to believe that woodland living is somehow primitive, backward-looking or in some way retrograde—for hippies dropping out of an ordered society; that it is threatening to the rest of us. For many, that changed when the Channel Four TV series Grand Designs featured Ben Law’s cruck-built woodland house in Sussex. Here was a dwelling of immense natural beauty built by a woodsman whose purpose, like Thoreau, was not to prove a point but to live simply and transact some private business—that is, to work with wood: coppicing, making charcoal, reviving the harmonious cycle of the tree-covered landscape of southern England and, perhaps, sending a message about the utility of wood as a material resource. It seemed, to the programme’s viewers, that Law had hit upon a perfectly natural way of life. And so he had; but it shouldn’t be a novelty.

  I would like to see more people living in woods. I would like to see planners and engineers appreciate the qualities of the material, its strength and adaptability, the sense in taking wood from the forest and creating homes from it where those trees grew. We need woods, and woods need woodsmen (of both sexes); and that means men and women living among them. Woodsmen don’t earn much: that is not the point of what they are doing. They do it because it is right. Britain manages very few of its woods productively or for biodiversity; the public sentimentalize trees (especially after they have been felled) and fail to understand the ecosystem in which they are the keystone. Woodsmen, living in woods and managing them for an overall social, cultural and ecological benefit, are building a lifestyle, a social project even, which ought not to be considered eccentric or primitive. In fact I believe that, like the organic movement of the last quarter century, wo
odland living ought to be subsidized in its delicate early stages when it might fail to root. Those who own large areas of woodland, or large numbers of small woods, should encourage woodsmen to live in and work them for us all. Rural communities need people grafting away in the landscape; urban and suburban dwellers need to know that they are there and need to value the products that come from the land. That is not to say that we shouldn’t have some wild, untouched woods, left more or less alone to do their own thing; but in an overcrowded island, even a wildwood would need active protection.

  We should plant more trees. Britain’s forest and woodland cover is well below the European average. Governments recognize that we need to devote more land to their cultivation, and various schemes are periodically proposed to plant many thousands of acres with native species. Good. But there seems to be no coherent thought given to what we might do with all these trees once they are grown. Wood is no longer seen as a strategic resource. An overwhelming majority of broadleaved woods are in private hands, and very few of them are managed to actually produce anything. In our collective panic over climate change we have perhaps forgotten the need to concern ourselves with cultural and biological diversity; and the ages-old partnership between humans, trees and woods offers benefits that our forebears understood well but which we have forgotten. But trees are patient. They will wait for us to come to our senses, to reignite our ancient partnership with them for our mutual survival.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  The next fascinating book from Max Adams, Admiral Collingwood: Nelson’s Own Hero will be released in spring 2015

  For an preview of Max’s hugely popular The King in the North read on or click here.

  For more information, click one of the links below:

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  ~

  Max Adams

  More books by Max Adams

  An invitation from the publisher

  Preview

  Read on for a preview of

  A charismatic leader, a warrior whose prowess in battle earned him the epithet Whiteblade, an exiled prince who returned to claim his birthright, the inspiration for Tolkein’s Aragorn.

  Oswald of Northumbria was the first great English monarch, yet today this legendary figure is all but forgotten. In this panoramic protrait of Dark Age Britain, archaeologist and biographer Max Adams returns the king in the North to his rightful place in history.

  I

  Queen’s move

  Soð bið swiðlost...

  and gomol snoterost

  Truth is the clearest thing...

  and the old man

  is the wisest*1

  The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter’s hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward off dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more—or less—virile. Soothsayers, poets, and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.

  Historians, bards and storytellers alike were tempted to improve on the truth, as they are today. But you can forget pale hands emerging from the depths of lakes offering swords of destiny to passers-by. You can forget holy grails and messianic bloodlines. Bloodlines mattered as political reality, it is true, but they were traced from the ancestral tribal gods of Britain and Germany or the last generals of the Roman Empire, not from the crucified prophet of Nazareth.

  One of The Wonders of Britain, from a list written down at the beginning of the ninth century but surely recited to children and kings for hundreds of years before and after, was an ash tree that grew on the banks of the River Wye and which was said to bear apples.1 Such poetic imaginings are easily dismissed by academics as fancy; and yet the distinguished woodland historian Oliver Rackham has recently shown that the famous tree in question must have been a very rare Sorbus domestica, the true service tree, which has leaves like a rowan or ash, and which bears tiny apple- or pear-shaped fruit.2 In 1993 one was found growing on cliffs in the Wye Valley in Wales. Early Medieval Britain was full of such eccentricities—the Severn tidal bore and the hot springs of Bath fascinated just as they do now—but the people who survived the age were, above all, pragmatists and keen observers of their world. Their knowledge of weather and season, wildflower and mammal, shames the modern native. They were consummate carpenters, builders and sailors. The monk Bede, writing in the year 731, knew that the Earth was round, that seasons changed with latitude and that tides swung with the moon’s phases.

  Love and romance must have played their part in life, although few men writing during the three hundred years after the end of Roman Britain thought to mention them. For the most part life was about getting by, about small victories and the stresses of fretting through the long nights of winter, about successful harvests and healthy children.

  The vast majority of people in the Early Medieval British Isles, as across Europe, are invisible to us. We know farmers and craftsmen existed: we have their tools and the remains of their fields. Sometimes their houses can be located and reconstructed; rather more often we find their graves. Very, very rarely we hear their names. Sometimes they encountered seafarers and travellers from strange lands who brought tales of exotic beasts and holy places. The countryside was busy with people, nearly all of them to be found working outside in their fields or woods, or fixing something in their yards; ploughing, milking, weeding, felling, threshing and mending according to the season. We have their languages: the inflexions, word-lore and rhymes of Early English, Old Welsh, Gaelic and Latin tell us much about their mental worlds. We can guess at numbers: somewhere between two and four million people living in a land which now holds fifteen to thirty times that many. Their history is recorded in our surnames and in the names of villages and hamlets. With care, their landscapes can be reconstructed and at least partly understood. The hills, rivers, coasts, some of the woods and many of their roads and boundaries can still be walked, or traced on maps. And through pale dank sea-frets of late autumn King Oswald’s Holy Island of Lindisfarne still looms mysteriously across the tidal sands of Northumberland’s wave-torn coast.

  Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or ‘Blessed arm’ of legend, he won and lost his kingdom in battle. He was the first English king to die a Christian martyr. He is the embodiment of a romantic hero: the righteous exiled prince whose destiny is to return triumphant to reclaim his kingdom. More than that, he is almost the first Englishman (the other candidate is his Uncle Edwin) of whom a biography might be written.

  We do not know what Oswald looked like except that, like all warrior kings of the age, he probably wore his hair long and sported an extravagant moustache. Even by the standards of the day his was a short and bloody rule, his end summary and brutal. In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have taken place where he fell and in later times his relics (rather too many of them, in truth) were valued for their
virtue and potency right across Europe.

  Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political legacy was in part responsible for the Crusades and for Henry VIII’s break with Rome; and for the idea that Britain is a Christian state. He was the model for Tolkien’s Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. If popular history needs a heroic figure from the age of Beowulf, there is no need to invent, or re-invent one. Oswald was the real thing.

  There are songs and memorial inscriptions and a substantial body of poetry surviving from the so-called Dark Ages, some of which celebrate the lives and deaths of ordinary folk: ceorl*2 and dreng, husband and wife. The written history of the period is very much concerned with kings and queens, with exiled princes, warriors and holy men; but the politics are instantly recognisable as that of any group of competing elite families: sibling rivalry, marital rows, betrayal and plotting for dynastic advantage are all there. Oswald was the product of such rivalries. He was born in about 604 into a family where politics were played for the highest possible stakes. For no-one were those stakes higher than for his mother.