Country Mouse
‘To plant trees,’ said the distinguished landscape architect and Sufi mystic Russell Page, ‘is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.’
That better world has already arrived for me, as I enjoy the fruits, nuts and firewood from a plantation I started 30 years ago on a de-natured prairie. I have also delivered shelter from the wind and shade from the sun.
I am particularly proud of an ash tree which has so far shown no sign of chalara, or ash dieback. I happened to like the name – Westhof’s Glorie. It is a selected, or improved, version of the common or garden ash tree.
Mary used to object to my being outside all day, until her friends reminded her that it was the number of men who were suddenly not outside the house all day that ended with the phenomenon of Lockdown Splitters.
‘It could be worse,’ she conceded. ‘At least you’re not interested in sport. But you need to widen your horizons – otherwise you might become institutionalised after all these months on your own territory. How about that dinner you are invited to in London?’
No, thanks. That would be a bridge too far. Better for me to re-enter the wider world cautiously and by degrees.
Consequently, I lowered the bar by setting off for my local, ancient woodland, armed with a notebook and binoculars. I knew that the said place was due to undergo an imminent ash-tree health check from a so-called expert. A pre-emptive inspection could be my opportunity to build bridges with the local landowner. Not, Mary warned, to make more trouble.
‘It is said that since trees have no voice, we humans must speak up for them,’ I reminded her.
A troubling prospect greeted me when I arrived in the hilltop wood, as branches were clattering and shedding twigs in a hellish, unseasonal, drying wind from the north-east – and yet it was hot, in late September. Only ash trees clatter like halyards in a boatyard and I found it intoxicating standing beneath them in their frenzy. They looked very lively to me and full of mistle thrushes, but many were presenting bare branches, which rang alarm bells.
Ash dieback disease most likely came to these shores from saplings grown abroad. The idea that you can achieve a wood only by planting a bog-standard mix of saplings in serried ranks with plastic tubing persists among landowners and farmers. Or, more likely, financial incentives are measured in months and years, not the decades of patience needed for the full expression of natural regeneration and vegetative succession.
Some ash trees in my local wood may be suffering from ash dieback but I would not want the living, healthy specimens to be destroyed as well in a foot-and-mouth-style overkill.
Some people anthropomorphise trees. By calling them ‘senile’ or ‘overmature’, jobbing tree surgeons can be chainsawhappy. But, as dead wood, old trees are invaluable to biodiversity.
As Benedict Macdonald describes in Orchard (2020), dead wood attracts a huge variety of insects. Woodpeckers, and the holes they bore in it, are used as nesting places by many other species – dormice, toads, stoats, hornets and tawny owls. They are also havens for fungi.
Either way, my ecological antennae were bristling at the prospect of more ecocide. The last chainsaw massacre came in 2008, after a human was felled by a falling branch. That sparked a nationwide safety review, whereupon many fine specimens were condemned to oblivion.
This despite the fact that, as the Deputy Chairman of the Country Landowners Association pointed out at the time, ‘the average risk of a tree causing a death is about one in 150 million for all UK trees or one in 10 million for trees in public places’.
Trees can never, of course, be made completely safe. However, tree consultants are often under unrealistic pressure to certify them as such. This in turn leads to their being too cautious and prescribing excessive, invasive remedial work.
We are too impatient to remember that any piece of land below the tree line, left alone without any human interference or expense, will undergo a natural growth via scrub to become a fully mature forest of properly native trees.
Some 15 million trees came down in a single night in the Great Storm of 1987. Trees that had merely fallen or tilted were assumed to be dead and written off as so much rubbish.
It was an entirely natural disaster of the kind our woods will have recovered from repeatedly over the centuries. But it was assumed to be reparable only by human intervention, as if trees were an invention of humankind or, worse, a kind of pet.
The late Cambridge botanist Oliver Rackham noted the same as he observed the wooded embankments lining the route of his railway journeys to and from London. ‘To prevent trees from growing,’ he noted, ‘calls for constant effort.’
‘I’ve got my conclusion as to what the landowner should do about ash dieback,’ I said to Mary as I re-entered the cottage.
She was relieved to see me, as it was dark outside and I’d been gone some time. She looked almost affectionate. ‘He should do nothing.’ She nodded, saying, ‘That’s the story of your life.’