Know A thing or two... TREES

ARBOREAL LORE AND LEGEND – IN A NUTSHELL

On a quick tramp through the park last autumn, I was stopped in my tracks. A flame of red seemed to blaze among a bank of non-descript greenish trees. As I approached I saw it was a gum, a liquidambar, magnificently living up to its name with its maple-like leaves running the gamut from orange and scarlet to burgundy and copper. I was on a mission and shouldn’t have dallied, but the sight held me there, muting the nearby traffic and the urban snarl. Such is the power of trees.

Perhaps it’s not surprising. Our history, literature, myths, our very lives, are bound up with them. They provide the oxygen we need to breathe and absorb the carbon dioxide we produce. Through the centuries they have offered shelter, food, medicines and the means to make fire, and to build tools, boats and houses. The largest living thing in the landscape, and often the oldest (oaks can live for over 1,000 years and some yews have been found to be more than 3,000 years old, pre-dating even the churchyards they are often found in), they provide a connection to the past and to the future. And, in their seasonal renewal – or enduring verdancy – they’re a potent symbol of rebirth, regeneration and immortality. Consider too their determination to live: most broadleaved trees (and yew) cut almost to the base will reshoot. No wonder religions and mythologies all over the world consider them sacred.

That said, you might be surprised at how little ancient woodland there is in the UK ( just under 13%) and how long ago we chopped it down. Brought up as we are on tales of Arthurian knights, Robin Hood, Shakespeare’s midsummer wood faeries and AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, there’s a tendency to imagine that we have only relatively recently stopped being woodland dwellers ourselves. Yet as early as 1000BC, Bronze Age farmers had felled much of Britain’s original wildwood and by 1086, just after the Norman conquest, the Domesday book recorded woods as covering only 15% of England. To put that into perspective, the Forestry Commission estimates that around 50–60% of Britain would have been wooded in 3000BC, and many of our European neighbours today have coverage levels of around 37%.

ANCIENT INDUSTRIES

What happened next didn’t diminish the woodland, but it did make it harder for ordinary people to access it. William the Conqueror redistributed Anglo-Saxon land to his allies, and enclosed vast areas as royal hunting grounds. Gone was the commoner’s right to gather firewood or to pannage (the grazing of pigs on acorns or beech mast). And woe betide them if they were caught poaching a deer or boar.

The Charter of the Forest, issued in 1217, aimed to reinstate and protect these rights, but growing early industrialisation (and social change – Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries placed millions of acres in the Crown’s ownership) meant the woodlands were under pressure as never before. Charcoal production was one of Britain’s first industries and necessitated vast supplies of timber to make it. By Tudor and early Stuart times, the demand for charcoal to fuel the burgeoning iron and gunpowder industries had rocketed and, even though most woodlands were coppiced at this point, it resulted in large areas of deforestation.

Trees and coppice wood not used for charcoal were in high demand for other industries, too – for boat building, for house building and, later, for railway sleepers, pit props, and in the trenches of the First World War. By 1700, Britain was dependent on imports for her timber and by the end of the First World War, tree cover was at an all-time low.

Trees provide a connection to the past and to the future and are a potent symbol of regeneration

A WOODLAND REVIVAL

Happily, those days are now behind us and woodlands are now on the increase, albeit very slowly. What is growing much faster is our new-found appreciation of our woods. Last November, on the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest, a new Charter for Trees, Woods and People was launched, bringing together over 70 organisations, from the British Druid Order to the National Trust, to try to ensure that we retain and increase our connections to the woods. Bearded lumbersexuals are springing up in cities everywhere. Books about wood splitting and stacking (Lars Mytting’s Norwegian Wood) and making (Robert Penn’s The Man Who Made Things

Out of Trees) are flying off the shelves. Woodland crafts, many of which almost died out in the 60s and 70s, are making a comeback and it seems we’re all discovering an urge to weave, whittle and bodge (working with green wood). If you can wait no longer, good places to start include the Greenwood Guild (thegreenwoodguild.com) in London, Small Woods (smallwoods.org.uk), set in the woods around Ironbridge Gorge, and Greenwood Courses ( greenwoodcourses. com), held in Westonbirt Arboretum.

WOODS FOR GOOD

If you’d rather just enjoy the woods as they are, there is plenty you can do, too. This summer’s Timber Festival, in the National Forest, brought together writers, poets and musicians to champion trees and all that they stand for and the forest continues to run a packed programme of events from bushcrafts to foraging and cooking courses. Woodland camping is always a good way to get back to nature but if you want to feel even closer to the trees, Canopy & Stars (canopyandstars.co.uk) has some extraordinary treehouses to hire. Or you could try the Japanese habit of ‘forest bathing’, which our less refined language might simply call ‘going for a walk’– a pastime credited with reducing the stress hormone cortisol, lowering blood pressure, and improving sleep, even in as little as 15 minutes (see issue 70). Breathe deeply, focus on the depth of the silence and feel the power of the woods. »