More trees

Descending from Box Hill (see last posting) and White Hill into Mickleham, English oaks at their best. For me this is classic countryside as I've always imagined it.

Trees on Box Hill

Reading Oliver Rackham has made trees more interesting. On the heavily wooded Box Hill, which I went up the other day, fallen trees had been left lying and not cleared away. (The pics look much better if you click them.)

Rackham’s right. They grow again from the upturned root.

On that chalk hill a typical underside looks like this – it’s surprising how shallow tree roots often are:


But looking along the length of the fallen trunk the root mass seems like the source of whole new thicket.



David Hockney was sad recently on returning to a small beech wood in East Yorkshire that he regularly painted to find it had been felled by the owner .

Hockney saw this as a permanent loss to the landscape. But one of Rackham’s most insistent points (one also made by some respondents to the article) was that you don’t destroy a wood by chopping it down; only by grubbing out the roots. Provided you keep deer away, fresh shoots grow from the stumps and in a few years you have another wood. Indeed, most woods until a few generations ago were regularly felled because the main need was for the smaller growth that was used for firewood, poles and fencing. This was coppicing (see John Medway's blog on this).

Then the trees were allowed to grow again. Only certain trees were managed for their timber; that is, the mature trunks and branches that provided material for construction (furniture, buildings, carts etc.). The language made a clear distinction between timber and the smaller, more consumable wood that came from the younger growth.

I'm not sure if this is the wood in question – but it’s certainly the artist:

[source]

Hockney, of course, went to Bradford Grammar School, but that’s another story.

Late winter in the Peaks

Today it’s spring in London, but in Derbyshire a couple of weeks ago it was still winter.


You can see on one tree, though, that winter will soon be ending. (A sycamore, I think.)


Being in the middle of Woodlands by Oliver Rackham (see my earlier posting) I paid special attention to trees. This landscape would I think count for him as savannah – grassland with scattered trees -- though not at all like our usual image. Here’s a wood, too, which Rackham would know how to date (with historical documents, geography and botany).

The tree that’s blown over would, in Rackham’s experience, probably go on growing.

Everywhere are dry stone walls, the ones, I assume, by which the Enclosure Acts were implemented. The presence of grazing animals and free-standing trees make these valley fields seem like parkland.

Oliver Rackham on Woodlands

What a lovely book. It’s number 100 in Collins New Naturalist series. Lovely cover, lovely paper, lovely illustrations and lovely printing (done in Britain, too, by Butler and Tanner of Frome).

And a text that’s sheer pleasure. Oliver Rackham writes beautifully and draws on his knowledge as scientist, historian, teacher, traveller and observer. He seems to have been to most of the world’s environments, poking about wherever there are trees. (Australia comes out as a case on its own: it ‘might as well be another planet’.)

The science appears to be bang up to date, with theories and hypotheses and evidence presented, as well as his own views. He tells us what his students have suggested as explanations of this, that and the other. He gives us a history of woodland in the British Isles (wildwood, wood, wood-pasture, forest and Forest are all distinguished). It never seems to have been dense forest; woodland was often more like savannah – grass with sporadic trees. Everything changes over time – the type of tree, the health of trees (see the Oak Change of c.1900 when oak lost the ability to propagate in existing woodland.) There was probably little more woodland in Roman times than until quite recently. He includes lots of maps and lots of quotations from charters and surveys. He has a good go at the misapprehensions of many conservationists. He’s great on coppicing and pollarding, fire, cattle and deer and royal hunting.

It’s a nature book that gives huge intellectual pleasure. Here’s a sample couple of double pages spreads.

Monarchs of the Burbs

Inveterate Londoner that I am when I'm not sick of the place, this afternoon I engaged in one of London’s traditional urban pursuits.

Along the north side of the Thames at the western edge of London is a wide alluvial plain, conspicuously destined for early and permanent inundation.

Within this flat expanse one large area, fronting the river, was grabbed for the Tudor Hampton Court Palace and its ground; north of it is the even more extensive Bushy Park where a twenty-minute bike ride delivered me (from Surbiton, lower right), and within which another hour’s cycling on different paths was afforded. And deer-stalking.

Here, under the shade of well-spaced oaks

and amid the bracken, the deer doze or graze or thread their way between picnicking families and careering kiddy-bikes.

But I also brought back some sad pictures: those autumn tints in the row of horse-chestnuts near the Lion Gate are actually a wasting disease that’s afflicting the species in Britain, and that already half the trees have caught.