QUEENS OF THE FOREST
Despite our affection for the Christmas tree, the conifer often gets bad press among lovers of the countryside. Phil Gates asks whether we should learn to better appreciate these tough and beautiful trees
A pine is the centrepiece of our seasonal festivities, but conifers have caused some controversy in the countryside. Phil Gates urges us to better appreciate these beautiful trees.
Christmas Eve, and all around the country the centrepiece for celebrations will most likely be a conifer, festooned with fairy lights, surrounded by presents. Over eight million of these evergreen trees, whose resinous aroma contributes so much to the sense of wellbeing that surrounds the festival, are grown for the Christmas market every year. We have taken them into our hearths and hearts, even though bringing boughs indoors is a relatively recent British tradition, originating in Germany and popularised by Queen Victoria and her German consort Prince Albert.
In the minds of many, that affection for conifers doesn’t extend beyond the festive season. In recent decades conifer forestry has often been mired in controversy, thanks to insensitively placed commercial plantings. Many see densely spaced geometrical plantations in much-loved upland landscapes as an abomination. Worse still, confrontations between conservationists, landowners and politicians over commercial forests covering large areas of Flow Country in the far-north of Scotland, which involved draining bogs that are critically important habitats for nesting wading birds, endangered wildflowers and rare insects, gave conifer forestry a bad name.
COMMERCIAL SUCCESS
We have only three native conifer species. They are all evergreen trees with needle-shaped leaves, but only one – the Scots pine – bears the woody cones that are typical of the family. The other two – yew and juniper – carry their seeds in fleshy, berry-like structures. Natural conifer forests do not loom as large in our landscape as they do in continental Europe, Russia and North America, due to accidents of climate and the way in which our islands became isolated from the European mainland soon after the end of the last glaciation.
But many of the conifer species that form the great evergreen forests of
the alpine and boreal regions flourish in our climate. In comparison with native deciduous trees, they grow rapidly and produce straight, commercially valuable timber, often in soil conditions where few native trees thrive. Their conical shape and smooth needles simply shrug off heavy snowfalls and, being evergreen, they make the most of short growing seasons in high altitudes and latitudes.
Non-native conifers have been cultivated in this country since the 16th century, with Norway spruce – the archetypal Christmas tree – being one of the earliest to be imported, from the European alps sometime around 1500. But it was European larch that really began to transform the landscape. Introduced into Britain from the Austrian Tyrol in 1620, it supplemented the dwindling supply of native oak, first for ship building and later for wooden pit props, shoring-up the roofs of the coal mines that fuelled the industrial revolution.
Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, successive Dukes of Atholl planted 14 million trees covering 10,000 acres of their estates in Perthshire. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that, in 1788, such was the 4th Duke’s enthusiasm for recreating alpine larch forests on his land, that he once authorised estate workers to scatter larch seed by firing it in canisters from his ceremonial cannons on to inaccessible rock faces.
Whether true or not, there was soon an explosion in the use of nonnative species in large-scale conifer forestry, over large areas of Britain’s uplands that were unfit for any other form of agriculture.
Throughout the 19th century, as intrepid plant collectors, such as Archibald Menzies and David Douglas, trekked westward across North America, they sent back stories and seeds from virgin conifer forest of almost unimaginable grandeur and commercial potential. Douglas fir arrived in 1827 and Sitka spruce in 1831; both would become mainstays of commercial conifer forestry here.
In the 20th century, two world wars that threatened to cut off imported timber supplies encouraged planting of more fast-growing timber. In the peacetime that followed, governments favoured conifer forestry with generous tax breaks for corporate and celebrity investors, sometimes at the expense of the natural environment.
WINTRY WONDERLANDS
It would be a pity, though, if their controversial commercial history should undermine our appreciation of these majestic trees from far-off places. At their best, conifer forests can provide exhilarating opportunities to walk off those Christmas excesses, ideally on a crisp, still winter’s day with a light dusting of snow.
Contrary to popular opinion, they are not wildlife deserts. My local forest in County Durham, Hamsterley, is a
fine winter location to watch flocks of crossbills, whose curved beaks scissor cone scales of Sitka and Norway spruce to extract the seeds. Later, in summer, there are nightjars, and fungal forays here are an autumnal delight.
But coniferous tree species are best appreciated when grown as solitary trees, given space and time to reach their full potential. Cedars of Lebanon, whose huge trunks and layered branches bearing barrel-shaped cones are centrepieces on lawns of many stately homes, can be awe inspiring.
FROM FOSSILS TO GIANTS
Collecting and growing exotic conifers for their intrinsic beauty has long been a passion of wealthy landowners, which is why there are now so many fine mature specimen trees in our public parks, gardens and arboretums. And many of them have a story to tell.
Chilean pine, or monkey puzzle – sonamed by the Victorians who thought it would puzzle a monkey to climb it – with cones as large as coconuts, was first introduced here in 1795 from the Andean foothills. It has been described as a living fossil with a 300-millionyear history; its ancestors were once grazed by herbivorous dinosaurs.
Giant sequoia, which, in its native Pacific north-west US is one of the tallest (at 91 metres) and longest-lived (at 3,200 years) trees, has been grown here since 1853 and there are some magnificent examples in tree collections. When first introduced, there was tussle over its scientific name: the British called it Wellingtonia, after the hero of Waterloo; Americans countered by proposing Washingtonia, after their own national hero. Eventually, the name Sequoiadendron was agreed, with honour satisfied on both sides.
Non-native conifers have a long history in the British Isles and our national passion for collecting them is by no means over. Until 1994 ,Wollemi pine was only known as a fossil. Then it was discovered by an Australian park ranger in a remote gorge in New South Wales. Considered by many to be the botanical find of the century, it is the latest conifer addition to botanic gardens in Britain.