From the Forest (6 page)

Perhaps partly because they grow so finely here in what is seen as the iconic English landscape, beech trees in Britain are held in very high regard. In particular they are seen as somehow a quintessential female tree, in elegant but delicate contrast to the sturdy, manly oaks. Fine ancient beeches are called ‘queens’ (while similarly ancient Scots pines are called ‘grannies’). Based on no real evidence beyond anecdote, I believe that the beech is the species that people are most likely to be able to identify on sight, and the one which is most often named as their ‘favourite’ tree. Even more than the oak tree nowadays, the beech is valued, even loved, as having a kind of national status.

Thinking about beech woods, I realised we have several layers of complicated history: the actual history of our woodlands and the actual history of our fairy stories, neither of which we fully understand. But more to the point, at the level of our emotions and imagination these two histories have both fostered each other, and at the same time confused us all. We end up believing that because we love forests we also we know everything about them – that beech trees are peculiarly British, for instance, and that ‘once upon a time’ the forest was continuous and dense across the whole country. (There are other examples that will emerge elsewhere in this book.) We act as though the forests of fairy story, of the imagination, are entirely real, and anyone who challenges our slightly sentimental account of the woods is behaving like a wicked witch, out to destroy small children. Oliver Rackham, with justified irritation, has drawn attention to our collective fantasy about woodland. No matter how much biologists and historians research and write about what is actually happening, we prefer our own fairy stories and legends. Rackham writes:

The anthropology of woodland has come to be a fascinating subject in itself. Why does the public believe a complete pseudo-history that is at variance with the real history? Why is there . . . ‘a hunger for false information’? Why does pseudo-history grow to accommodate new events that ought to explode it?
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I suggest that it is not a ‘pseudo-history’ in the sense he experiences it, but a profound confusion between two histories that do not know themselves or each other. Our deep but unconscious desires have created stories about forests and fairy stories that make walking in the spring sunshine in Saltridge Forest feel so rooted in fairy-tales that we cannot see the trees for the wood.

This is quite odd. There is nothing particularly British about beech trees. In fact, beech spreads all across western, central and southern Europe – from the south-east of England and the north of Spain to the western shores of the Black Sea, and from southern Norway to Sicily. Across mainland Europe it is the principal tree of broadleaf woodland in upland areas, which means it was the dominant large tree in central and southern German forests where the Grimm brothers collected their stories. In France it is used extensively in commercial forestry, as it never is in Britain. England is at the very northern limit of its natural range – the geographical areas where it will germinate and mature spontaneously. Ancient beech wood is fairly restricted in Britain, confined to Epping Forest, the Chilterns, the Cotswolds, north Norfolk, the lower end of the Severn valley, the New Forest, and sporadically along the south coast as far west as Dorset.
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Even within its natural range in the south, the beech is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately. Indeed, until well into the twentieth century there was an ongoing debate as to whether it was a native species at all. ‘Native’ trees are deemed to be those that were growing in Britain before it was cut off from mainland Europe. Any species that arrived later must almost certainly have been imported and deliberately planted. Sweet chestnut, for example, is not native; it was introduced by the Romans, along with rabbits, nettles and ground elder.

About 10,000 years ago, when trees began to crawl north following the retreating ice cap, the first pioneers were birch and then pine. These were followed by hazel – although, mysteriously, this seems to have spread
southwards
from north-west Scotland. Oak, alder and lime (at one point the dominant tree over much of England) came next, then elm and ash. Finally, holly, maple, hornbeam and, it is now generally agreed, beech made it into southern Britain in about 7,000 BCE, just before the land link between Britain and the rest of the European continent was flooded by the rising sea levels.

The history of trees and woodland is tortuous, and parts of it still contested. Many people know we can tell the age of individual trees by counting their ‘rings’, the dark circles on a cleanly cut trunk, as a new ring is laid down for each year of growth. However, not all trees make clear rings – holly, for example, does not – and until recently this technique could obviously only be used by cutting down the tree, although it is now possible to take a ‘core’ out of a living tree without destroying it. With living trees, size and general health are not very reliable as trees mature at different rates depending on very local (and even individual) conditions – although where the tree has been coppiced regularly, the size of its bole is helpful in determining its age.

Establishing the age of a wood, rather than a tree, is even trickier, because in a healthy wood the age of any particular tree is not relevant: the wood might have grown up around an older free-standing tree, or the wood might be a great deal older than any of the trees in it. The term ‘ancient woodland’ (or, more technically, ‘ancient semi-natural woodland’) describes woods that are known to have existed before 1600 in England and Wales, and before 1750 in Scotland.
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Landscape historians have developed various methods for deciding where ancient woodland was and what trees were growing in it. Direct documentary references (in the Domesday Book, for instance) are reasonably conclusive, and place names provide strong clues. Unfortunately, in the case of beech this is not reliable because the word itself gets too easily confused with ‘beach’, ‘book’ and ‘buck’.

A more favoured approach has been to look for what are known as ‘indicator species’ – these are not trees, but ground plants that, for one reason or another, are found only (or predominantly) in ancient woodland. They are often plants that either need shade to flourish or have inefficient methods of dispersing their seed, so they do not readily spread to new habitats. The more of these indicators (appropriate to soil and climate) that are present, the more firmly the dendrologists can assert that a particular wood is ancient. But this is not straightforward: the lists vary according to the region, and if you take all the lists together, a grass –
Melica uniflora
– turns out to be the only ‘universal’ indicator, although the sweet woodruff (
Galium odorata
), flowering so elegantly in Saltridge this April, appears on every list except the one for Cornwall. Nor is there full agreement about which species should be on any particular list.

Modern scientific methods have demonstrated the presence of beech from before the cut-off date of around 7000 BCE. In particular, pollen analysis has enabled us to know what trees were around and when. Since beech pollen is not well dispersed by wind and is therefore unlikely to have blown in across the Channel, its presence in sites dated to 9,000 years old proves that beech is in fact a native tree.

Nonetheless, the high status of beech in Britain is fairly recent. In
Sylva,
his 1664 book about woodlands, John Evelyn is dismissive of beech, claiming that it is ‘good only for shade and fire’. The main function of the beech woods of the Chilterns was to provide fuel for London, until in the later eighteenth century improved transport made coal a more attractive option. Even in strong beech areas, beech wood was never used for timber-framed houses – oak was always preferred. Beech had few traditional uses, except that the beech mast was used as pig fodder – and its botanical name,
fagus
, derives from the Greek verb
fagein
(= to eat) because of this. Later, it was sometimes roasted as a coffee substitute.

Appreciation of the beech’s charms grew in the nineteenth century – partly because it was pleasing to painters, as they moved out of their studios and began to paint
en plein air.
Individual beech trees are distinctive, but the round groves of beech trees on the tops of hills proved even more attractive to the landscape artist; they make a useful focal point in wide views of grassy downs. Paul Nash (1889-1946), who painted the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire repeatedly, said of them, ‘It was the look of them that told most. They were the Pyramids of my small world.’
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Now everything about beech trees is honoured: the pinkish-white colour and compact grain of the wood has become popular with contemporary joiners and wood turners.

Today, the ascendency of beech trees and beech woods is firmly established. In Saltridge, in the sunshine, I could entirely understand this – there was a joyful magnificence in the huge trees and the clear ground beneath them. But I still find myself oddly resenting beech woods. I know some of the reasons why. Part of this comes from the deeply embedded irritation that most northerners, and Scots especially, feel about heavy cultural and national value being attached to any phenomenon which only occurs south of the Humber. But in the case of beech trees there is a socio-political edge to this annoyance. Although its natural range stops in East Anglia, beech will in fact flourish throughout most of Britain if it is planted. It will grow well as far north as most other trees. Perhaps because having beech trees required positive action and so demonstrated ownership and power, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century beech became the ornamental species of choice. The aristocracy and ‘gentry’ planted it in avenues and parks and inserted it into their home woods and plantations even as they enclosed the old commons and common woodland. Tommy Donnelly, the ancient tree specialist for the south-west area of Scottish Natural Heritage said to me that whenever I saw old beech trees in Galloway, I should ‘look for the mansion’. They would prove to be someone’s idea of poshing up their landscape, and they speak to me not only of southern dominance, but of Landlordism, of Enclosure and Clearance. (This political reading of the beech’s social standing is probably reinforced by an often-repeated little slogan of my father’s: ‘Tyranny is like a beech tree; it looks very fine but nothing grows under it.’ He certainly did not mean this to be taken as a comment on the tree rather than on his own strong democratic beliefs, but it has stuck in my mind.)

The coupling of oak and beech as king and queen of the forest, male and female, is another cause of irritation; it is an unusually silly anthropomorphism. At the same time, I also resent the fact that the beech has usurped the throne of the birch tree, which, in earlier times, was seen as the ‘queen’ of the forest – ‘the majestic sceptre of the wood’, according to the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Gruffydd ap Dafydd.
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And as late as the early nineteenth century, the poet Coleridge described the birch tree as ‘The Lady of the Woods’.
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Birch trees have as delicate and graceful, as ‘feminine’, an appearance as beech, and are far less grandiose. They were the first trees to return to Britain after the last glaciers retreated, and they flourish higher up and further north than other trees dare; their natural range covers the whole of Britain. ‘Birch’, often in the form of ‘Birk’ or similar, is the commonest place-name prefix in the country. They are still pioneers, the first trees to move into clear-felled forestry land or to push their way into heathland or neglected fields. Beech is shade bearing, but birches love the sunshine and open spaces. Birch pollen is produced in abundance and carries widely on the wind, so birch can appear anywhere – and does. Despite their fragile appearance and relatively short life span (seldom more than 80 years), individual birch trees are immensely tough – Rackham reports specimens that have fallen over collapsing cliff edges, tumbled to the bottom and then simply re-rooted and carried on growing. They are highly resistant to frost, capable of flourishing on the poorest soils and serve to consolidate loose earth on bare slopes, preparing it for other species. Recently, birch has been earning the respect of commercial foresters for this reason: it will plant itself, saving time and energy; is just as profitable for pulp as the more laborious conifers; and improves the ground rather than acidifying it as spruce and even larch do. While the spread of beech may well be, at least in part, responsible for the reduction of other species, particularly the lovely lost limes which were once the most common tree of our ancient woodlands, birch creates new territories for trees. Birches begin their season with long catkins, and their looser crowns and more waving fingers mean that the sun-dappling effect, ‘more golden than under any other native tree’,
¹¹
lasts much deeper into the summer. In autumn their leaves turn a bright yellow. Their trunks, too, are smooth and peel into thin sheets, and are a radiant white colour (the adjective ‘silver’ in relation to birch seems to have been coined by Tennyson in the late nineteenth century). Though less imposing than beech trees, birches have their own particular charms.

There are two further cultural reasons for restoring the birch to her ancient throne. Birch, unlike beech, good only for ‘shade and fuel’, is a remarkably useful tree. It has been utilised throughout the United Kingdom, and especially in the Highlands of Scotland. John Loudon (1783 – 1843), the botanist and landscape architect, extolled the usefulness of birch wood:

[Highlanders] build their houses, make their beds and chairs, tables, dishes and spoons; construct their mills; make their carts, ploughs, harrows gates and fences, and even manufacture ropes of [birch]. The branches are employed as fuel . . . the spray is used for smoking hams and herrings. The bark is used for tanning leather and sometimes, when dried and twisted into a rope, instead of candles.
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