The Wisdom of Trees Read online

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  To Jack and Flora, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The wisdom of trees

  1

  Thinking about trees

  Enlightenment—Autumn—Brown and sticky—Trees of liberty—Foresight

  TREE TALE: THE BIRCH

  2

  Ingenious trees

  What trees do—Trees with latitude—Solar panels—Family tree—Pioneers

  TREE TALE: THE ROWAN

  3

  Offspring

  Sex before insects—Spring—Making babies—Pioneers—Massive oak—The human hand

  TREE TALE: THE APPLE

  4

  Trees at war

  This means war—Conventional weapons—Plan B—Battle of the trees—The wood of life

  TREE TALE: THE YEW

  5

  Trees in company

  A palette of forests—Life in the woods—Saint Columba’s coppice—The rarest tree—Woodwards and Pallisters

  TREE TALE: THE SCOTS PINE

  6

  Innovation

  Useful lessons—Getting the point—Terraforming Ascension Island—The luthier

  TREE TALE: THE HAZEL

  7

  The Wood Age

  Axe, adze and wedge—Summer—The first carpenters—Stonehenge decoded?—The Nobel Prize-winning woodworker

  TREE TALE: THE BEECH

  8

  Engineers

  Hormones—Machines—Hydraulics—Bodgers—How tall can a tree be?—Standing up straight

  TREE TALE: THE HAWTHORN

  9

  The Charcoal Age

  Material gain—Making charcoal—The sword in the stone—Seahenge—Riddley Walker—Colemen and Colliers

  TREE TALE: THE HOLLY

  10

  Architects

  Size matters—The first house—Houses for the dead—Firewood—At home with Saint Columba

  TREE TALE: THE OAK

  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

  12

  Tree futures

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

  TREE TALE: THE ASH

  Epilogue

  Woodlanders

  Preview

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About this Book

  Reviews

  About the Author

  Also by this Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE GREENDALE OAK

  (north-west view)

  This venerable oak tree used to grace the estate of Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, on land enclosed from Sherwood Forest. So vast was the tree’s girth that its owner, the Duke of Portland, decided to gut it in 1724; he promptly won a bet that a coach and six could be driven through it. Sadly, his drastic sculpting set in an inevitable decline and, like an enfeebled invalid, the once virile oak came to depend on crutches in its later years.

  Prologue

  The wisdom of trees

  Truly trees are beings. We feel that to be so. Hence their silence, their indifference to us is almost exasperating.

  JOHN STEWART COLLIS

  HUMANS HAVE a natural empathy with their fellow creatures. They will rescue a stranded ladybird and fish a carrot out of their pocket for a lonely donkey. They know that dogs like to play and be part of the gang; that cats look down on them; that pigs regard them as equals. Things have their place. Heaven knows, humans can be sentimental about even the most unprepossessing animals: we credit them with all sorts of emotions and intelligences on the basis that they too can feel pain, conceive of the world around them and have some sort of attachment to their offspring. We think, therefore we are; animals are, therefore they think.

  What about trees? Trees are an alien life-form. Like all living things they breathe and reproduce, but do they feel pain like animals? Do they think? The answer is simple: they do not think, because they have no brains; they do not ‘feel’, because they have no nervous systems. They cannot, in any sense, be described as intelligent. They have no plan or strategy for defence or reproduction; they cannot choose their sexual partners, nor decide where to live their lives. Trees do not make choices. They share no organs with members of the animal kingdom, unless one offers the superficial analogy that bark is like skin. Trees know, literally, nothing. And so the whole idea of trees possessing wisdom is pathetic fallacy.

  And yet, a lifelong admiration and affection for trees, woods and forests can hardly dispel the impression that they are damned clever. Those ‘plants with a stick up the middle’ (in Colin Tudge’s words), sixty-thousand species of them, are chemically and mechanically sophisticated, sometimes dazzlingly so. They are more resilient than any animal, and some live for several thousand years. Their reproductive capacities are so subtle and refined that it is hard not to credit them with cunning. Trees communicate with one another and strike up partnerships and alliances that one yearns to call ‘strategic’, or ‘purposeful’. There are rumours in the scientific community that they may be able to manipulate sunlight in quantum parcels to make their leaves more efficient.

  Hundreds of generations of humans have regarded trees as a source of wisdom: they have been consulted by holy men, by kings, queens and wise women. They have been thought of as sacred, as embodying the spirits of dead ancestors. They are deployed as metaphors for youth and old age; for solidity and sagacity; for fertility, virility and sterility, and for ancestry and evolution. Trees can seem chaste, like the graceful, slender rowan on a rocky hillside; irascible, like an ancient stag-headed oak standing apart in a field; magnificent, like a hundred-foot-tall beech tree with its elephantine muscular grey trunk. In Allouville, Normandy, the chapel of Chêne is built into a living oak tree which is more than eight-hundred years old. On the slopes of Mount Etna the Hundred Horse Chestnut is so vast that it could shade in its hollow trunk the hundred men of a mounted party in a thunderstorm (hence its name). More modestly, the writer and woodsman John Stewart Collis used a favourite ash tree as a summer tool shed. In Africa baobab trees have been used as prisons and classrooms, sanctuaries and water reservoirs; in Ireland, hollow trees became hermitages for Dark Age monks seeking solitude. In Germany, early Christian missionaries cut down trees that had been sacred to the native pagans, as if afraid to let them live. In India, the fig tree is not only sacred but also an embodiment of the human psyche and a dwelling for the gods: the tree beneath which the Buddha gained enlightenment. Trees have their practical uses, to be sure; but they are never just practical. Our affinity with them runs deep, and it is complex.

  It is a mere two hundred and fifty years since wood was superseded by iron as the fundamental material on which the great human experiment was founded, and for almost all of our cultural history trees and woods have played the role of provider and teacher. Only in that last quarter of a millennium have we begun to look beneath the bark of the tree with instruments unavailable to our curious prehistoric forebears, whose interest was intimate but largely practical. They knew that you could split a log lengthways but not across its grain; that you could work it green, and bend and shape it with fire and steam. They knew that some woods burn better than others, while some are more useful for building. They knew which t
rees and woods were poisonous or tainted food and which could be processed for medicines such as those we call aspirin and quinine. They knew which trees came into leaf and fruit at different times and which attracted different birds and insects. Knowing trees and their materials was our first survival tool and it was a knowledge acquired empirically. Trees behave, and our hunter-gatherer ancestors were keen observers of behaviour in the natural world. Since the eighteenth century scientists have begun (but only begun) to decode the secrets of trees’ success. It turns out that they are more subtle and extraordinary than we could have imagined.

  If you live in a packed modern city like Hong Kong you might manage to live much of your life without seeing trees. Even in the leafy cities of Europe you could be forgiven for not noticing them—until they are felled or die. But for much of our shared past, trees and the materials we harvest from them have been intimate, even decisive, partners in our own cultural and physical evolution. Our prehistoric ancestors came out from the forests of a drying Africa to embark on their remarkable biological and cultural journey towards a new species, so in a sense we are the children of forests. If trees are not our teachers, we are at least their pupils. They have given us shelter, medicine, shade, food and fuel in great abundance. Forests are the earth’s lungs and climate-regulators, habitat-protectors and the greatest reserves of biodiversity. Most importantly, I think, the brilliance with which trees have evolved and adapted over the last 200 million years and more offers us an open-air interactive classroom and laboratory from which to learn about survival and defence, partnership and sustainability, conservation and the endless creative possibilities of nature.

  This book is called The Wisdom of Trees not because trees are wise, but because we would be wise to learn from them.

  1

  Thinking about trees

  Enlightenment—Autumn—Brown and sticky—Trees of liberty—Foresight—

  TREE TALE: THE BIRCH

  Then I spake to the tree Were ye your own desire What is it ye would be? Answered the tree to me I am my own desire; I am what I would be.

  ISAAC ROSENBERG

  Enlightenment

  EMBARK ON A TOUR of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and you might get a little bored, if you take it in chronological order, looking at all those idealized portraits of madonnas with their improbable-looking child. It is worth the tedium, though, because when you get to the room in which the Botticellis hang, it stops you in your tracks. Primavera, the Florentine artist’s 1482 masterpiece depicting a stellar line-up of Venus, the three Graces, the goddess Flora and assorted wood nymphs, is quite stunning. As with all great paintings, you really have to see it in the flesh. Here is the essence of the Renaissance distilled into heady spirit; here, for the first time since the faded glories of the Roman Empire, the female form is painted not as an objectified icon but as sexy, fertile, provocative and alluring. The portrait of Flora, the goddess of plants, bedecked in flowers and heavy with child, seems to mark something new in art, a step-change in enlightenment: human, imperfect, utterly real and absolutely recognizable and attractive to the modern eye. One of the many fascinating aspects of the painting is its portrayal of plants—more than a hundred-and-fifty species, according to those who have studied it. But looking at the trees in the background the arborist must be disappointed: they are mere stage scenery. If the Renaissance rescued humans from an unattainable medieval ideal of sinless piety, then trees had to wait another three-hundred years, at least in Europe, for their artistic liberation.

  Move on three-hundred years. James Ward’s much more modest watercolour sketch of An ancient oak, painted perhaps in the early years of the nineteenth century (and now in the Garman Ryan Collection at Walsall Art Gallery, West Midlands) does for trees what Botticelli’s Flora did for women. So far as I can tell, it is the first portrait of a real tree in the Western art tradition. This is no idealized representation of the tree as a metaphor for anything so crude as fertility or liberty; it is no wistfully Romantic natural furniture, of the sort that decorates much early British landscape painting. This is a tree shorn of its setting in the years of its dotage: stag-headed, lightning-blasted, stunted and hunched, a crabby geriatric bearing few branches and fewer leaves, and which reminds one of nothing so much as the ageing Voltaire, sculpted by Houdon in marble in 1781, during the grand philosophe’s last years; he is dying but still full of fire and, like Ward’s decrepit oak, deeply wise. The similarity is perhaps intentional: maturity and its twin, decline, evoke sympathy and admiration, pity even, and the Age of Enlightenment was an age of pity and compassion as well as of revolution. It was also the age of the individual, an era of reflection in which thoughtful men and women pondered the question: what has all this change brought us? What have we gained… and what have we lost?

  James Ward’s ancient, knowing oak might easily have grown from an acorn dropped from a tree during the Renaissance.

  Autumn

  It is autumn: one of the most beautiful that I can remember. Every shade and hue in nature’s paintbox is on display, all saturated by the low sun or by each passing shower. The days are shortening, and from beneath the dripping rain-soaked yellow and orange leaves of a spreading beech tree the woodsman looks out on a damp, musky, mizzly world, which appears—to the casual walker—as if it is shutting down ready for winter, like an ice-cream parlour at the seaside. A gust of wind barges through the canopy and a shower of raindrops clatters onto the bed of leaves covering the woodland floor. All the colours from yellow to brown, red and purple, faded green to orange are there in an artless, unrepeatable pattern. Then, silence; at least, for a minute, until the ear tunes into another range, more subtle. The wood is not, as it first seems, silent. Nor is it passively waiting for the snow and ice of January. It is a busy place; and the woodsman has a billhook in hand.

  Animals and birds are in a race against time: fighting over bright red berries on holly trees, rowans and whitebeams, on hawthorns and guelder rose, over shiny black sloes on blackthorn (if the sloe-gin makers have not beaten them to it) and over the hard red hips of the briar. Pigs, if we allowed such beauties in our woods once again, would be snuffling under leaves for beech mast and acorns. In their place, squirrels are burying hoards of hazelnuts, and jays—those splendid, squawky, blue-flashed robbers—are prodding acorns into the ground in small clusters. Without these animals there would be no natural oak or beech woods; they are unwitting partners in the cycle of reproduction in which trees rely on the rest of nature to do their work for them. And as if to reinforce the message, another gust of wind brings down a veritable squadron of helicopters, as sycamores shower the rides and glades of the wood with their propellered seeds.

  Small mammals like hedgehogs and dormice are fattening up ready to hibernate; others are on the prowl and missing the summer vegetation that gives them cover. Badgers, especially this year’s young, are enjoying the drawing-in evenings and are out foraging for worms, nuts and anything else they can get their greedy claws on. Many summer-breeding birds have flown to milder lands; but tits and chaffinches are gathering into winter flocks and will take any opportunity throughout the cold months to feed on whatever insects they can find. Robins begin to stand out with their red breast feathers and penchant for human company; wrens in pairs are looking for discreet nesting sites. Occasionally, two-footed animals can be seen basket in hand, picking berries off brambles or looking for mushrooms that have emerged mysteriously in the night. In my first wood, where my partner and I lived for three years in a caravan with our baby son, we jealously guarded the secret of a patch of parasol mushrooms, which used to grow under a very broad, dense holly tree just next to a footpath. People often used to come in and take holly for their Christmas wreaths; that was alright, so long as they didn’t find the mushrooms, which we fried in butter: they tasted like the juiciest steak.

  Trees are busy too, if one takes a careful look. The colours in those autumn leaves are produced by bespoke recipes of hormones designed to extract the
last sun-kissed sugars and nitrogen before a lethal dose of abscissin seals off the leaf stem from the twig and allows wind or rain to pluck it away. Broadleaved trees get so little light in our northern winters that it is not worth their expending the energy needed to keep their leaves until spring. Besides, as every good sailor knows, in a dangerous wind one reduces sail: trees are taking in a reef, so that the deadly blasts of December gales do not bring them down. The only great storm of my lifetime, and I remember it vividly (windows and doors blowing in; chaos on the streets of South London; dazed people standing in the road and staring at the aftermath), happened during October 1987, before the trees were ready for it.

  Trees are not just getting rid of leaves and dispersing seeds. They are preparing for the following spring. Take a close look at a twig which still has leaves on it and you will see that next year’s buds have already formed—tiny, green and shiny on sycamores and hazels, orange on the little knuckles of oak buds, and like fine pen-nibs on the beech, or, in the case of the ash tree, jet matt black. It takes a lot of energy to create the bud, and that is done with the last of the autumn’s solar power. It must be done in good time so that buds harden off before the first heavy frosts. Come spring, the tree gets a head start as it draws on reserves of sugars and fats stored in its wood and roots to turn those buds into leaves.

  For the woodsman, this is a time of anticipation. Summer is a season for making and mending, building and selling; for leaving the trees to get on with what they do best. Once the leaves have fallen it is time to cut wood: to stack and season it for the following autumn when it will be used as firewood; or for the spring after that, when it can be burned in a kiln to produce charcoal. Most broadleaved trees will, when cut clean down to the ground, grow again; but timing is all. Coppicing, as it has been called for at least a thousand years, is best undertaken when the leaves have gone: the trees are easier to get at with billhook or chainsaw; the woodsman can see better to decide which shoots to cut and which to leave to grow into mature timber trees. And then, one must be careful not to disturb trees’ natural rhythm. Cut too early and the stump will produce shoots that then don’t have time to harden off; cut too late in spring and, aside from the possibility of disturbing nesting birds, the tree will have used precious energy on sap which it needs for re-growth and which the woodsman doesn’t want in the log (or on the hands or clothes). So I wait impatiently for those damp, dank days of November when I can join the rest of the woodland community quietly, or not so quietly, going about our mutual business.