The Trees of Life

No, I haven't gone all biblical on you! I read last week (Sunday Times 1 May) about a Woodland Trust plan to plant 64 million trees to restore woodlands, starting in the areas of Suffolk and Essex most affected by ash dieback, breaking up huge "prairies" and providing green pathways for species such as bats, butterflies and pine martens, as well as creating forests.

Planting of new woodland last year was less than half the government target of 12,355 acres exacerbated by death of species such as ash, sweet chestnut, juniper and oaks from pests and diseases.

Trees chosen include maple, beech and alder in Suffolk, aspen, cherry, beech and apple in Hertfordshire and sycamore, maple and beech in Yorkshire. Now sycamore is a weed for me - and not just me - the site woodlands.co.uk, a blog for a business which creates woodland - says sycamore is fast growing and regarded by some as a ‘weed’. They also say it is not a native tree but was introduced from central and south east Europe. (http://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/tree-identification/sycamore/#). However, I think this thing about native species is a bit artificial - how far back do you go?  After all chickens were brought here in the iron age and the Romans introduced rabbits. Also the species we think of as part of our natural landscape - like oak - became dominant for commercial reasons. A University of East Anglia professor of landscape history (hmm, another subject I didn't know you could be a professor in) says the long dominance of oak, elm and ash in our country was all down to economics. The three species accounted for 85-100% of the trees growing four counties - Norfolk, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire - before disease hit. Ash was prized for fencing and firewood, elm was good for planks and water pipes and oak for building.

So what we look at and regard as a classic and natural British landscape is, of course, man made and artificial. But beautifully artificial. As Bill Bryson has written 'nothing, and I mean nothing' can compare with the beauty of the English countryside. As a result of planting trees and hedgerows, many species are repopulating or returning, including birds and owls. But the type of tree matters.

Trees are home to many forms of life, especially insects. The most hospitable is oak, which homes 284 species of insects. After that we have willow (266), birch (229) and hawthorn (219). In comparison, as is clear when walking through different types of forest, conifers are almost uninhabitable for insects: spruce hosts 37 and fir 16. Surprisingly they are still more insect friendly than one of my favourites, the horse chestnut, just coming into glorious bloom, but host to only 4 species of insect - and a 16th century immigrant from Turkey, to boot.

Mind, while there is a clear issue for wildlife habitats, it's easy to think that the country is being progressively deforested, which is not true. Today, only 10% of England's area is covered by trees, compared with the EU average of 37%. But in 1870 it was 5%. Even at the time of the Domesday Book it was only 15%. It was the farmers of the pre-Roman era who scraped the landscape bare of trees, not Tudor shipbuilders or post war barley barons. To find a time when the tree cover in England was 37%, one might have to go back to the Bronze Age!

Coniferous trees proliferated after the 2nd world war, the area in England trebling to nearly a million acres between 1947 and 1980. But since then broad-leaved tree planting has more than reversed the trend. Conifer acreage has been shrinking and broadleaf has more than plugged the gap: up from 1.45m acres in 1998 to 2.23m by 2015. Interestingly, the low price of imported timber made conifer planting less attractive; government grants for broadleaf also made an impact. Over Britain as a whole, broadleaf is now more prevalent than conifer by 3.3m acres to 3.23m, with the gap widening.

The coalition government had a policy to increase tree cover in England to 12% by 2060. As noted above, they haven't been going at the target rate, but things seem to be going in the right direction. The most numerous and fastest spreading species in England is now not spruce, but oak.

So, while there is clearly much to do to preserve and improve our beautiful, if artificial, British environment, as our 'slowly changing seasons' (a Roy Harper lyric, of course) move from spring towards summer, let's enjoy and respect what we have:

"One of those days in England that you just could not forget
From the mists of secret morning to the golden red sunset.
And though the time fast slips away, it's long enough to laugh and play
Around the fireside making hay, dreaming of tomorrow, oh you know there's no today".
Roy Harper, One of Those Days In England parts 2-10 from 'Bullinamingvase' 1977.

"The Blackcap sings and the forest rings
The nettles tall around me
With shafts of sun and moving things
And poems fast and slowly.....
Two silver greenflies to flicker the back-dropping lush
Of the emerald springtime
To lust for a moment in love of another
As dust on a dragonfly's wing".
Roy Harper, Commune, from Valentine, 1974.

As you can tell, both of these songs are as much about communing in nature as communing with nature, but that would be a consistent theme with Roy!

Facts on tree cover and the wild life trees can sustain from a fascinating Richard Girling article, 'History, homes and comfort for the soul from little acorns grows', Sunday Times, 3 May 2015.