Woodlands

This is not a book about the Environment. It does not pretend that trees are merely part of the theatre of landscape in which human history is played out, or the passive recipients of whatever destiny humanity foists on them. This is a book about Ecology. It deals with trees as actors in the play, and with the multiple interactions between trees and the environment, trees and other trees, trees and other plants, trees and fungi, trees and animals, and trees and people. Unlike my previous books, it deals more in investigations than in results. For good or ill, I have no particular theory to promote.

I begin with chapters setting out the essential properties of trees, what woods are and how they work and why they are not all the same, before embarking on the thematic chapters that form the body of the book. Much of this has been said many times before, but it still needs saying. Knowledge, even of elementary matters, accumulates; it is now difficult to get ahead of the ever-increasing flow of publications and finish a book!

This is not a successor to Trees, Woods and Man, published by my great predecessor, H.L. Edlin, as New Naturalist volume 32, fifty years ago. He wrote as a then rather old-fashioned modern forester who still remembered something of the distinction between woodland and plantation. Timber prices were high, and forestry was the science of planting and growing trees rather than the art of selling them. Through the new technology of getting trees to grow on peatland, it then seemed possible to plant enough forestry to yield a substantial part of the country’s entire timber consumption. Although Edlin appreciated natural woods and understood the importance of woodland history, for him the future of woodland lay with modern forestry, and he had little to say about woods that were unsuitable for it.

I am not a forester. I am a general practitioner of science, trained as a botanist – at first specialising in plant physiology, in how plants (especially woodland herbs) functioned. Cambridge had a tradition of plant ecology, including such illustrious names as Sir Arthur Tansley, Alexander Watt and Sir Harry Godwin, and my own teachers Clifford Evans, David Coombe, Peter Grubb, Max Walters, the mycologist Harry Hudson, and the tree pathologist John Rishbeth. David Coombe in particular directed me into historical ecology.

I write as a now rather old-fashioned botanist, concerned with woodland as an ecosystem with a life of its own, in which human agency is one among many environmental factors. In this book trees are themselves wildlife, rather than merely a habitat for wildlife.

Times have changed even since my own earlier books. Modern forestry is in decline, partly because the economic basis on which it was justified has collapsed. It will, no doubt, continue in a modest way, but it no longer dominates the woodland scene, and an ecologist need no longer be apologetic about having little to say on the ecology of plantations. Popular affection for woods and trees flourishes as never before, albeit sometimes embarrassingly ill informed. There has been a revival of the historic love of ancient trees, which were unfashionable in Edlin’s time to the point that he regretted their existence.

I shall not be as comprehensive as Edlin. This is a book about woods rather than trees. I deal with trees in wood-pasture (as in Richmond Park) as well as woodland, but do not cover hedgerow, garden, or orchard trees.

I have always been concerned with the history of woodland – with the histories of individual woods, rather than the history of generalisations about woodland. This is not merely my own inclination: woodland by its very nature can be understood only in terms of historical processes. To describe it only at a moment in time, or in terms of a three-year PhD study, is like expecting to understand how a cornfield functions after one day’s observations.

I was brought up on such classic New Naturalist books as London’s Natural History by R.S.R. Fitter, Mushrooms and Toadstools by John Ramsbottom and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. In that tradition I deal mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades. This book, I hope, may be useful to the growing number of people who have acquired woods and want to know what to do with them. (Woodland history has come to influence the estate agent’s trade!)

New Naturalist books are traditionally about Britain and Ireland. Here, too, times have changed, and many readers are able to study woods and savannas in other countries. Although this book is still mainly about Britain, I have not hesitated to set it in a world context.

Woodland history is an international field of study. Much of what I say can be transferred to other countries. There are Forest History Societies in North America and Australia, and a News of Forest History published in Vienna. Not all these studies are ecological. Some are concerned with the mechanics of the first European exploitation of what were thought of as ‘virgin forests’ in other continents; others with forestry legislation, more prolific in other countries than in ours.

I draw attention to the work of Peter Szabó in Hungary. I would not have put Hungary high on the list of countries favourable for the study of historical ecology. It has had a succession of violent takeovers by outsiders – by the Magyar themselves, Mongols, Turks, Habsburgs and Soviets – each of which destroyed much of the archives and might have erased most of the evidence in the landscape itself. This ingenious and resourceful young scholar has found a remarkable amount of evidence still surviving, and has made the most of it in ways that are used in this book.

International comparisons are helpful in working out the effects of trees or people in the functioning of woods. The differences between England and Scotland are partly to do with Scotland having a different tree that behaves unlike any English native tree (Chapter 16). It is instructive to compare the interaction of broadly similar human cultures with much the same trees (England versus France) or with a broadly similar range of trees (Britain versus the British in North America), or an independent human culture with a broadly similar range of trees (England versus Japan), or a broadly similar human culture with an utterly different range of trees (Britain versus the British in Australia), or (as on another planet) an utterly different human culture with an utterly different range of trees (Australian Aborigines).

TABLE OF DATES

APPROXIMATE YEARS AGO

4,600 million	Origin of the earth
1,000 million	Green plants
500 million	Land plants
420 million	Vascular plants; clonal growth; mycorrhiza
340 million	Big trees (Archæopteris)
300 million	Trees that will burn
270 million	Four-footed herbivorous beasts
140 million	Broadleaved trees¹
70 million	Present genera of trees
2.5 million	Hominids
2 million	Beginning of Pleistocene glacial cycles (glaciations and interglacials)
200,000	Present human species
10,000 BC	End of last glaciation; beginning of present (Holocene) interglacial; beginning of woodland history in Britain
6200–3800 BC	Atlantic Period; fully developed wildwood; Mesolithic people in Britain
3800–2000 BC	Neolithic in Britain; beginning of cultivation and woodmanship
2000–750 BC	Bronze Age in Britain
750 BC – 40 AD	Iron Age in Britain
40–400 AD	Roman England
400–1066 AD	Anglo-Saxon England
1066–1536 AD	Middle Ages (England)
c.1900 AD	Oak Change
1950–75 AD	‘Locust Years’

Dates BC are derived from radiocarbon dates, calibrated to real calendar years, and will change slightly in future as the calibration is refined.