It is early summer in the woods above Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The silver birch leaves are turning a deeper green, their bark a smooth, tender shade of white. Snug among the leaves, the pale green catkins are furled and ripening like a million caterpillars trembling on the brink of release. There is only a narrow strip of birch here, by the edge of the path, a sprinkling of young trees standing at a crossroads in the heart of a gloomy expanse of conifer plantations, but enough light has reached the woodland floor at this point to mean that there is also grass, bracken, red campion and even a dash of bluebells. Butterflies waltz in the sunlight. And beyond the birch, the conifer plantations are spread far across the hillside, the forest floor dark in the midday sun, dead brown needles lying thick on the dismal ground.
I am gazing at a newly erected National Trust sign:
Visitors to Croft Castle and its surrounding woodland may be surprised to see a number of trees being felled over the next six months, but this is a major step towards reinstating the beauty spot’s historic wood pasture.
The Forestry Commission is removing 70 acres of non-native conifers from the central part of Croft Wood as part of its planned woodland management.
Conifer plantations conflict with how the landscape looked up until the mid-20th century.
Over the decades, many of us have learned to hate conifer plantations. Even the Forestry Commission now seems to regard them with a glum and sheepish dissatisfaction, despite the fact that it was they who were responsible for most of the planting in the first place. Certainly, in the decades after 1919, when the commission was formed as a response to a wartime shortage of pit props and trench cladding, it was unstinting in its efforts to secure the national supply of timber. ‘Non-native’ conifers were selected – they are fast-growing and regular in their habits – and were spread with aggressive abandon across the country. Neglected farmland was chosen first, followed by remote expanses of peat and the thin-soiled uplands, before the commission finally turned its Sauron-like gaze on Britain’s last isolated remnants of broadleaved woodland. Nothing was safe (there was almost no legal protection), as ancient woods across the land were grubbed out, drenched in chemicals, uprooted and replaced by orderly rows of Sitka and Norway spruce, Japanese larch and Corsican pine.
We know all this now – although anyone who was paying attention also knew it at the time. R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet who preached and brooded just across the border from Croft Ambrey, had his own bleak perspective of the plantations:
I see the cheap times
Against which they grow:
Thin houses for dupes,
Pages of pale trash,
A world that has gone sour
With spruce.
from ‘Afforestation’
‘A world that has gone sour with spruce’ pretty much sums it up. Mind you, Thomas’s solution was to return the land to men and their sapling-stripping, monocultural sheep, an idea that would give most modern-day environmentalists the vapours. The poem was written in the 1960s – and the destruction and regimented planting had become especially frenzied in the years after the Second World War. Oliver Rackham, our pre-eminent woodland writer, dubbed the years 1950–75 ‘The Locust Years’ – although, to be more accurate, what these particular locusts devoured they also replaced: thousands of hectares of diverse ancient woodland gave way to monotonous lines of spruce; teeming, self-regenerating, wildlife-rich woods became closed, sterile circuits of industrialized timber production.
In those years, even people who loved their local woods may have felt that their destruction was somehow necessary. Perhaps a leftover spirit of sacrifice from the war, along with a new obsession with the statistics of economic growth, convinced enough people that scientifically managed plantations were the right, futuristic solution to Britain’s perceived timber shortage. More likely, most people didn’t care enough and just sort of assumed that someone else knew better. It’s true that immediately after the Second World War there was less woodland in Britain than at any time since the last Ice Age, but there had been many similar panics about a national shortage of timber over the centuries. Unfortunately, this was the first moment that the panic coincided with the tools (and the imported seeds and trees) to transform our landscape within a generation. No one stopped to consider whether we actually needed to be self-sufficient in timber (it was centuries since we last had been), they just demanded more trees. Lots and lots of them. And, whereas in the past, the oak tree had been the patriotic tree of choice for the would-be forester, this time it was the spruce.
If you want a glimpse of the national mood during these disastrous years, then a good place to start is Trees, Woods and Man by H.L. Edlin, first published in 1956 as part of Collins’s iconic ‘New Naturalist’ series. Edlin loved his trees, and lamented the dying out of the traditional woodland crafts (and even the disappearance of our native woodland), but what he really wanted to see was the efficient ‘re-establishment of forests by modern methods’. One of his most frequently used woodland words is ‘crop’, because in his eyes trees were really no different from wheat, beans or potatoes. Trees were timber. And a wood was nothing more than a production line of trees. Anything else that grew or lived in the wood was getting in the way of the harvest.
‘The general practice of the British forester is to clear fell his woodland and to start his new crop from scratch,’ he notes approvingly, but ‘How closely does the forester plant his young crop, and what type of trees does he use? On the average he sets the trees in rows, five feet apart each way, using about 1,750 to each acre (or about 1,500 after allowing for roads, rides, and like gaps).’
A sense of urgency pervades the pages; there is no time to wait for nature to run its course, or for our slow-moving, clearly rather hopeless native woodlands to get their act together. There is pressing, grown-up business at hand: ‘Vast woods, ripe for slow regeneration in this way [i.e. self-seeding], have had to be slaughtered within a few months,’ he tells us, and as for Britain’s fragile and irreplaceable reserves of peat: ‘The Forestry Commission, following the lead of a few pioneering private landowners [oh yes], has steadily been developing ways and means of draining peat bogs, and finding trees, such as the spruce, that tolerate them.’ In his vision, learned in his years as a rubber planter in Malaya, every scrap of what was deemed to be non-productive land had to be put to good use. It’s not a crazy idea – no doubt Edlin and others had witnessed enough shortages, hardship and starvation to make them impatient of any obstacles to economic growth or bleatings about aesthetics – but it was symptomatic of the forces that led to the almost total annihilation of Britain’s native woodland. There has been a bitter and hard-fought backlash, and a change in policy at the Forestry Commission, but we remain stuck with a veneration of productivity and growth, along with a corresponding confusion about anything that cannot be measured as useful. We may have left the Locust Years but, if anything, the state of mind that gave rise to them is even more entrenched. Why else would anyone even have to explain what a wood is for?
Many (English) nature writers and landscape historians, surveying the destruction, seem keen to blame the Germans for all this. At some point in the eighteenth century the Prussians got it into their heads that the forests could be regulated, the trees paraded into neat lines and the productivity of woods maximized on strictly scientific, Enlightenment principles. It was all a question of measurement. Oak trees and most other broadleaves (messy, erratic, slow, inclined to host wildlife and far too tolerant – if not downright neighbourly – towards other species of tree) were destroyed and replaced by the conifer plantations that we now think of as a quintessentially German landscape. Within a couple of generations, the famous German oak forests had gone. Edlin (with his suspiciously Teutonic name) was just following the mood of the times. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the beauty of trees or the glory of the woods (he wrote with elegiac intensity about them, even as they disappeared from view), but he would hardly have expected such intangible ideas to take precedence over the nation’s economic needs. In the 1965–67 ‘stocktaking’ at the start of Trees, Woods and Man (a census of woodlands carried out by the Forestry Commission) he proudly displays a table showing the state of Britain’s woodlands, alongside the same ‘stocktaking’ from 1947. It shows that in the period between 1947 and 1967 (the years when the locusts really got going) the amount of woodland in Britain had actually increased by twenty per cent, but that the increase was entirely down to the mass planting of conifers.
It was the woodlands that the Forestry Commission deemed ‘unproductive’ – broadleaf coppices and native woods – that were neglected or destroyed and in just twenty years had fallen (from an already shockingly low base) by another thirty per cent. For centuries, the coppices, the broadleaf woods that were managed on a cycle to produce most of our fuel and much of our timber, had been our most ‘productive’ of all; now they were dismissed as a waste of space: as too diverse, slow and complicated. The frenzy of destruction continued deep into the 1970s and continues – openly, insidiously – to this day. The idea that woodland – all of nature – is something to be accounted for, with stocktakings and harvests, and what’s more that it is incapable of looking after itself and is something that needs to be managed, has become deep-rooted and instinctive. There have always been other voices. John Fowles raged against the ‘disastrously arrogant male dominated religions, which supposed man to be in God’s image and duly appointed him, like some hopelessly venal and ultimately crazed gamekeeper, the steward of all creation’. But most of the time nature lovers and naturalists were dismissed as an irritating irrelevance and an encumbrance to progress and profit. The pendulum may be swinging, but it would be naive to assume that it is heading in the right direction.
The path up from the crossroads among the conifers leads towards Croft Ambrey, the remnants of an Iron Age fort. This land – these woods – has been worked by people for over 2,500 years and, as naturalists always seem quick to tell us, there is not a scrap of unblemished woodland left on these islands: it has all at some point been chopped down, managed, replanted or in some way pawed over by someone. I refuse to believe that – it’s a grim, desiccated thought, rather like knowing that every inch of Britain (the world!) can be conjured up on a screen, courtesy of Google Earth. Who would want that? So one thing I have in mind is to try to find a little parcel of woodland where it might at least be possible to imagine a world before people got so indefatigably busy with their axes, fires and crops. Or at least one where only the most light-footed people have ever trod, stepping with care over the fallen trees.
That place is not here. Many of the conifers, I now notice, have been marked with red crosses, a sign that their days in the forest are numbered. It’s a pleasing thought, but also unexpectedly and absurdly troubling, triggering a whisper of unease about the rounding up of ‘non-natives’ and the cleansing of unwelcome and invasive aliens. People do get very agitated about introduced species: rhododendrons, Corsican pines, parakeets, grey squirrels, Japanese knotweed, Chinese mitten crabs, horse chestnuts, sweet chestnuts, Spanish worms, Spanish bluebells, Dutch elm bark beetles, mink, muntjacs and rabbits. Foreigners every one. Brought here by the Romans, borne back triumphantly by Victorian plant collectors, escaping from farms and gardens to rampage through our land, overwhelming or just simply eating the insipid and degenerate locals. Some of them are undeniably successful, these imported plants, fungi and animals.
The native woodland that the National Trust is hoping to cherish on this hillside will include any species that once managed to scramble over the land bridge that still connected Britain to mainland Europe about seven thousand years ago, just before the ice melted and the waters rose, cutting us off from France and creating an island. There is still some debate about which species of tree qualify, but there are probably twenty-six of them. The last over the causeway may well have been the box tree, which has always struck me as a rather unlikely native, more suited to a sun-dazzled Mediterranean mountainside than the backdrop for a tense picnic in Jane Austen’s Emma. One tree that didn’t make it was the sycamore (although given the enthusiasm with which it has spread ever since it was introduced you’d have to think this was an oversight – perhaps it woke up late one morning somewhere near Dieppe to find the drawbridge raised and all its so-called friends already colonizing the White Cliffs of Dover). It has made up for lost time since – a fact that seems to enrage some people. I think we should take our bearings from Barbara Briggs, author of the 1934 children’s book Our Friendly Trees:
Sycamores are such common trees all over England that it is difficult to believe that they are really foreigners and were not brought here from Europe till the fifteenth century. They seem to like this country very much, for they have settled down as if they had been here always, in town and suburban gardens, parks and fields, and even on the salty sea-coast where no other large-leaved trees can live… We are very often inclined to look down on common trees and flowers, and to think that others are more beautiful just because they are rare. But if you watch a sycamore all the year round, the unfolding leaves, the blooming flowers, the ripening fruits, and the shadow patterns of its foliage on the sunlit grass, you will realize that it is a very handsome tree, besides being a homely and friendly one.
There are, predictably, a few sycamore trees at the edge of the conifer plantations, although there is no word from the Forestry Commission about what they have in store for this stubbornly prolific tree: ‘First they come for the conifers.’ In fact, there are also plenty of self-seeded conifers here, on the dark edge of their own plantation, jostling for the sunlight. This surprises me, even though it shouldn’t, but I hadn’t stopped to think that conifers would spread all by themselves, without being planted into neat rows by a friendly forester. There is, in reality, no turning back. What we’ve introduced will persevere and prosper if it can and – across the planet, and in all sorts of unexpected ways – we are reaping what we have sowed. The fertility of trees is surprising, though. Ever since the early twentieth century, the oak tree, so generously fecund with its acorns, has stopped being able to propagate inside woodland. The acorns catch and root and grow on the edges of woods, or in the open – and in wood pasture, indeed, unless they are bothered by sheep – but they will not take hold within a wood of any density. Oliver Rackham has a tentative explanation, blaming the accidental introduction of an American fungus, but it’s troubling to think that our most iconic tree is growing old childless. And perhaps Rackham shied away from a more disturbing possibility, one that he was too scrupulously scientific to voice, that our woods and trees are somehow knocked off balance and wounded more deeply than we know.
There’s a big old oak tree near the top of Croft Ambrey, about twenty paces from the rough path. It’s just about the last tree you see as you leave the woods and reach the cleared ground near the defensive earthworks at the summit. It’s possible that the people who lived in this place from about 2,500 years ago may have kept a few trees scattered around their hill fort, whether as living objects of veneration or perhaps because they ringed the walls with planted hawthorn, ready to be cut down as an extra layer of thorny defence. Trees grow more expansively and die younger when they’re not crowded in a wood, so it’s hard to tell how old this particular oak tree might be (and I’d have to cut it down and count its rings to have any chance of getting close to guessing), but it could be over 400 years old. Its great-grandfather may well have been a sapling in the last days of the Iron Age people who lived in this fort and then gave it up to the invading Romans. Trees’ lives are lived to a different rhythm and timescale to ours, which is one reason we love them. They help us look up and out.
I say that the oak tree is about twenty paces from the path, but that’s just its trunk. One immense branch starts low at the base, bends close to the earth, then forges up and over where I’m standing. It could be a medium-sized tree in its own right – and the strength that must be needed to keep it horizontal is incalculable. A blackbird sits singing at its tip, far from the centre; I wonder if it has any idea that it is sitting in a single tree, and not a copse. This is probably not the kind of thing blackbirds ‘think’ about. An oak tree this size is its own planet, giving succour to over 300 other species – everything from bacteria to buzzards. Nettles, brambles and goose grass (or ‘sticky willy’ as I once used to call it, before people looked at me strangely), even a small hawthorn, all flourish in its shade. The trunk is split some way from the ground, but still bullishly alive. As I gaze at its rough surface I am shaken by how huge this tree has become. Not just its thick grooved trunk, but look up and there are dozens of branches that twist and swirl skywards, and even bigger branches, which I hadn’t seen from the path, flung far out up the hill. Its roots are braced on the slope, planted deep like medieval bulwarks. I could worship this tree. We should all worship this tree. And just as I am thinking that, I hear the words very clearly in my head (I know it sounds ridiculous, but I do) ‘noli me tangere’. Don’t touch! Why did I think that? Was it from the tree? Do trees talk? Well, yes, it’s likely that they do (if not in Latin, let’s hope), but more of that later.
Many people were upset when the Conservative Party adopted the oak tree as its new party logo in 2006, and then painted it red, white and blue. Or even blue and green (this was before they dispensed with all the ‘green crap’ and apparently gave up trying to affect any of the life-threatening dangers that are poised to engulf every living thing on the planet). It wasn’t just because it was the Conservatives doing this: it doesn’t seem right that any political party, of all things, should be claiming a tree (the national tree) as their own. But of course we can see what they were trying to do. John Ruskin wrote that ‘the man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species’ – and I think that’s right. Why would any of us, standing in wood country, want to change a thing? Maybe remove the conifers (planted by radicals of all parties, no doubt), perhaps pick a posy of wild flowers or chew on a blackberry, but that’s about it. The Conservatives, in claiming the oak as their own, are hoping to show that they are standing at one with the unchanging certainties of the past – a past that connects seamlessly with a bright, burnished and utterly secure future – and the woods, and the countryside, and indeed the planet itself, have nothing to fear from any slight changes they may be about to make.
In reality, the Conservatives are just part of a continuum of ecologically destructive governments, who generally have had other things to think about than the health of our forests. And okay, yes, there is something ‘conservative’ about the oak tree. When young King Arthur (‘the Wart’, as he is known) in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone flies up into the forest (he has been transformed into an owl, obviously), he finds the oak tree has this to say to him: ‘I am a conservative, I am; and out of my apples they make ink, whose words may live as long as me, even as me, the oak.’ Oak trees are big and loveable and slow-moving and daunting – and they live for ever and we want to hug and worship them. People may think of oak trees as ‘conservative’, but that’s only because, in a supreme act of anthropomorphism, it is hard to imagine an oak tree doing anything skittish, or getting involved in a get-rich-quick scheme, or selling off the National Health Service to its friends in the private health sector. They are ‘conservative’ with a small ‘c’ – they don’t like change. And if you’re confused by T.H. White’s reference to oak ‘apples’, they are those hard, light-brown, marble-sized balls you see on oak trees, not the seed but the home of the gall wasp larva: yet another species that makes its home on the oak. The black fluid distilled from the gall was used for centuries as ink for writers’ quills.
Oak trees also have the most delicate, sinuous green leaves in spring, so slight and vulnerable when set against the massive weight of their elephant-grey wood. It seems like a good day, as the earth bustles into early summer, to wonder which tree has the most beautiful spring leaves. There are hornbeams here, far from their Home Counties heartland. The sunlight drifting down through their knitted branches gives the leaves a lovely fresh green sheen. The lime tree’s leaves are even greener – and so soft, it’s like they’re made of the faintest crepe paper. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once, waving his wife and friends off on a country walk, was forced by a bad burn on his foot to spend the day in a ‘lime-tree bower’. No doubt in considerable pain, presumably self-medicating with enormous draughts from a flask of opiates, it was only because he couldn’t move that he had to soak himself in the loveliness close at hand and so was able to ‘keep the heart awake to Love and Beauty!’:
Or in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d
Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine!
Coleridge, from
‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’
What he then goes on to say is that beauty is everywhere, and that he didn’t need to go roaming the cliff tops with his friends to find it. He might also have reflected that it was his constant philosophizing, late-night revelations and incessant yakking that drove his long-suffering wife to throw scalding milk on his restlessly pacing feet, thereby forcing him to stay behind brooding under the lime tree. Although, if she hadn’t lashed out in a rage, we would never have been blessed with one of the English language’s most beautiful poems.
The hazel, one of my favourite trees, is rather dowdy at this time of year. It’s better to see them earlier, when the yellow-dusted catkins emerge on a late-winter’s day, to the utter relief of anyone who has been yearning for a sign that winter surely cannot last for ever. There’s a big ash tree at one end of Croft Ambrey and its leaves are struggling through rather later than the other trees’ foliage, but now they’re here they’ve come in sprays and spumes, a frothing surge thrust up from the small, uptipped black buds (Coleridge’s spirit is lurking…). The ash can’t compare to the big sticky buds of the chestnut, nor the pink and placidly erotic sycamore, but it is undeniably generous with its fishbone leaves and profusion of small purple flowers.
It is, of course, impossible to choose a favourite springtime leaf. There are a couple of maple trees here, the native field variety, and their newborn leaves are hanging limp and clean like so much sparkling laundry. It is a fresh, invigorating sight, but it’s still probably better to catch the maples during their autumn display, even if they are not exactly Canadian in their splendour. No doubt there are some beech trees lurking, and the birch is sweet and dainty earlier in the year, but I’m distracted by the sight of a dozen hawthorn trees in full bloom. The hawthorn looks so dead through the winter, its grey bark sunk into dreary gloom, but when the leaves do finally emerge (so much later than expected) they are flat and glossy and pulsing with optimism. And then the flowers come out – and keep coming. So many of them, drenching every branch and twig, the whole tree so bushily alive. Is the hawthorn just a little too busy? Yes, yes, we get it: leaves, flowers, perfume in the air, insects homing in – well done. But isn’t it all just a little needy? I cross the hawthorn from my ‘Best Spring Leaf’ list and decide that the task is absurd. And who would even want to choose their favourite tree?
The views from the top of Croft Ambrey are extraordinary. They say you can see six counties from here (on a clear day is the predictable qualifier – not an especially likely occurrence this close to Wales). There’s a quarry on the north side, half a hill scoured and gouged grey, bringing stone for houses, gardens and roads; beyond it the green fields and hedgerows head for the Shropshire Hills. In the other direction – towards the Malvern Hills or, with half a twist, the Wye Valley and Brecon Beacons – there are bare hills with square patches of woodland, all of it, as far as I can see, conifer plantations. I really don’t want to find that I am accompanied on my every walk by this conifer obsession, but I am not ready or able to leave it alone. The New York poet Eva Salzman, who found herself living in Kent in the 1970s (from Tribeca to Tunbridge Wells!), had this to say:
I follow an ordnance map and find
frightening rows of straight and vacant pines.
The earth as barren as the rugs
people in my nearby town put down. Medicine
sting of pine. Listen there, hear nothing. No bird sings,
I’m told that insects are the only living things
in that Forest Commission flat. And slugs.
from ‘Ending up in Kent’
The poets, in other words, have been complaining for a while, but it has been a long time since enough people cared what a poet thought about anything important. Did we ever? More than two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth was grumbling about the planting of pines in the Lake District and flung his hat in a rage at a larch tree. He would be distraught to see the place now. We are not oak trees and we don’t notice the full sweep and scope of the changes we have unleashed. We can only comprehend the immediate detail: the loss of a wood here, a river dammed and poisoned there, a water meadow drained, England’s last wolf cornered and killed. If we could live as an oak for eight hundred years, and watch the landscape as the busy mass of humanity scurried and scraped at its surface, the villages emptying, coalfields rising and falling, the last pockets of wilderness tidied away, we would feel the agony of our loss. The conifers are just a distraction.
Although… as I walk by a different route down from the summit of Croft Ambrey, I come to a place where the Forestry Commission has already started clearing its conifers. It’s a huge area of violent devastation. Almost all the trees are gone and a churn of macerated larch covers the ground for hundreds of metres in every direction. The fury of destruction has flung branches and trunks among the still-living conifers further down the hill. Here, all the trees are marked with green or orange paint, awaiting their catalogued fate. Dead wood is everywhere. Bark. Branches. Chips and shreds. Roots ripped from the ground. Did the conifers at least fulfil their original destiny and get taken to be made into pine tables? It’s hard to imagine that there was anything left to take, given the vast quantity of biomass that remains, stripped and sprayed across the hillside. There are signs telling us to stick to the path, but I scramble over the massed debris to take a look at one single pine that has been left, a tall tree with no branches (it had once struggled up to the light in fierce competition) that stands amidst the desolation like a raised middle finger. Up yours and fuck you, it seems to be saying. I never asked for this.
The new plantings don’t seem to be doing very well. There are small, square, fenced areas where the new broadleaf saplings are being prepared for their life as ‘wood pasture’ – an area of woodland with roughly twenty per cent tree cover, given over to animal grazing. Many of the trees will be pollarded – cut on a seven- to ten-year cycle at a spot on the trunk just out of the reach of hungry cattle and deer – and once the new trees have grown this should be a beautiful place. There are young hornbeam, holly, maple, some thorn trees and, I’m sure, oak. But right now many of the new saplings seem to be struggling (‘struggling’ as in ‘dead’ in most cases). I wonder if the soil has been irredeemably sucked dry or turned to acid by the conifers, and I hope it’s unlikely. The Forestry Commission will just have to try again next year. One broadleaf tree has got a head start. It must have been growing in the conifer plantation for the last thirty years, hidden in the forest, a thin, spindly, apologetic kind of thing – possibly a wild service tree – but now it has been set free to grow and spread. Under a fork of its bottom branches is a tiny, self-seeded fir tree, missed by the men with the machines. I feel pleased about that, although it’s not very tidy. But perhaps our obsession with tidiness is something we need to address. We have been managing our forests in the same way we have been trying to manage our economies and our lives. Keeping everything in rows. Clinging to the grid. Harvesting the frail, the superfluous and the irregular. Chopping it all down and starting again. As the Forestry Commission concedes defeat and embraces the wild, perhaps in the wider world the men with clipboards will learn that not everything can be reduced to simple economic rows. Perhaps they will stop measuring success by how much they have pruned and saved, and how many people they have transplanted or trimmed, and instead start thinking about creating an environment where everyone can flourish. Or perhaps they won’t…
A pair of buzzards drifts and circles in the cool spring air above the lacerated pines. In the distance I see there are also three youngish oak trees, sheared at the top and leaning against one another. They are set solid in a deranged explosion of bluebells and that, of course, is why we want to be rid of the conifers: we want our bluebells back, not to mention the ferns, the cowslips, the anemones, primroses and wild garlic. Someone has said that individually the bluebell is not an especially interesting flower, but that’s not true. It has a soft and rather brave charm, although – and of course – en masse they glow and shine with a radiant blue light. Is this the return of ‘Old England’, with only the native trees and plants untouched in the slaughter? A beating back of the Locust Years? We have to hope so, although there are still plenty of conifers left, even here, and it’s fanciful to imagine we can ever return truly to what we once had. But the idea of this imagined future wood pasture lifts the heart. I can even gaze at the conifer plantation down the hill without irritation. It looks almost Alpine here, I realize, and an Alpine landscape is one of the joys of this world. But just not here. If I didn’t know that these conifers were alien and planted as a short-term crop, would I care so much? Show most people these woods and I’m sure they’d prefer the bluebell-laden broadleaves; but they wouldn’t necessarily be feeling the visceral cultural antipathy to the conifers that I’ve managed to generate.
We are all infused with the views of our times, and a hundred years ago even the most English of writers would have found much to love in the pine forest:
A wind sways the pines,
And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so.
George Meredith, ‘Dirge in Woods’
The pine woods here are planted more thinly than most, the trees taller. It would be wrong to say that the birdsong ceases, but it is now replaced by the noises of the sea, the soothing sound of the wind in the top branches. Perhaps the conifers are nearing their time for harvest, but they have been thinned and this means that there are at least brambles and ferns on the forest floor. If these trees were planted on what was once an ancient wood, then when they go there’s a chance that the woodland flowers and fungi may return more easily. But to bring back an ancient wood’s true diversity takes centuries (so far as we know, but who has had the time to check?), which is why only woodland that predates the year 1600 has been classified as ‘ancient’. Frankly, that’s not ancient at all (ask an oak), but it’s a start. And it means that the loss of even the smallest scrap of ancient woodland should be counted as a national tragedy. An international tragedy, given that without our trees we won’t be able to breathe. Or eat. Trees clean our land and our air, they scrub our rivers and our soil, they keep the oceans alive, they soak up our effluence, toxins, greenhouse gases and poisons. Without trees we will all die. Britain has less tree cover than almost any European country – we are contending with Ireland and The Netherlands at the bottom of a dismal league. We need to hoard and cherish every wood we still have – and we need to plant more. Many many more. Woods are not just for walking in. They are our lungs, our refuge, our playgrounds, our solace. They are the generous providers of fuel, timber, food, energy and life. And for us, they are a ‘kingdom free from time and sky’, says Louis MacNeice in ‘Woods’. They let us dream of other ways of living.
I don’t see why our whole country can’t be covered in woods. And all the buildings, warehouses and homes, the factories, roads and railways, they should all be topped by mist-laden, life-giving trees as far as the eye could see. There would be huge oak forests surrounding our towns and beech trees standing thick and tall on the high streets. There would be orchards in the wastelands and vast fountains of ivy would foam from the walls of every public building. We need the trees more than we know, and we need them everywhere, from the most remote valleys to the heart of the teeming cities.