Trees, Woods and Forests

Trees, Woods
and Forests
A Social and Cultural History

Charles Watkins

REAKTION BOOKS
 Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2014

Copyright © Charles Watkins 2014

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 373 4
 m c ontents

Introduction 7
one Ancient Practices 17
two Forests and Spectacle 36
three Tree Movements 65
four Tree Aesthetics 91
five Pollards 119
six Sherwood Forest 140
seven Estate Forestry 175
eight Scientific Forestry 204
nine Recreation and Conservation 224
ten Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland 247
Afterword 269

references 277
select Bibliography 298
acknowledgements 301
photo Acknowledgements 303
index 305
 But when I walk past our village woodlands which I’ve saved from
the axe or hear the rustle of my own saplings, planted with my own
hands, I feel I too have some control over the climate and that if
man is happy a thousand years from now I’ll have done a bit
towards it myself.
Dr Astrov in Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya,
Act i (1897), trans. Ronald Hingley

The ash is quite bare. Oddly enough the last leaves seem to linger
on the top rather than lower down, as one might have expected.
It’s really shocking, I am becoming a nature-lover and observer –
fatal! – The intellect fades in proportion.
Lytton Strachey to Roger Senhouse, 12 November 1928

What kinds of times are they, when

A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
Bertolt Brecht, ‘To Those Born Later’, c. 1938
 m Introduction

O
ur understanding of the history of trees and woodlands has
been transformed in recent years. Established ideas, such as the
spread of continuous dense forests across the whole of Europe
after the Ice Age, have been questioned, if not overturned, by archaeo-
logical and historical research. While there is continued clearance of
tropical forests, concern over woodland loss in Europe, where the area
of land covered by trees has increased substantially in the last century,
is less well founded. Recent research shows that the interactions between
humans and trees and woods have varied dramatically through time and
from place to place. Over history the clearance of woodland has often
been celebrated as a sign of increasing population; an indication of
improved agricultural production; a surrogate for civilization. But
woodland is not a simple category from which a settled landscape has
been wrought. Rather it is a complex category which has varied dramat-
ically in the density, age, species and form of its trees and shrubs. The
utility of woodland and the cultural values ascribed to it are also diverse,
whether it is tilled or grazed by domestic stock: it may be a provider of
status or symbolic power, a site of traditional management or scientific
experimentation.
A key issue is that the same trees and woods are perceived very
differently by different people at the same time, and by groups of people
through time. John Ruskin argued that a love of trees could be a moral
test failed by those who disliked them, but most people like trees in
some circumstances and dislike them in others. And the reasons for
like or dislike can sometimes be almost unfathomable due to personal
recollections and associations with trees. I vividly remember being shown
in 1978, from a library window, an attractive nineteenth-century land-
scape park in the English Midlands scattered into the distance with a

7
 Trees, Woods and Forests

diverse range of plantations and groves. While I was appreciating the

well-tended young plantations of pine and the old oaks, the owner
pointed out with relish that the plantation to the left was under Schedule
‘D’ for income tax purposes and the clumps of oaks to the right were
Schedule ‘B’, while the large wood in the middle distance was a mix-
ture of both. The view was revealed as a landscape of tax avoidance. The
principal reason the woods were so carefully tended was that the move-
ment of woods between schedules allowed heavy expenditure incurred
during replanting to be offset against income from other sources. The
beauty and productivity of the woodland was a consequence of the then
tax regime, which had been introduced in 1915 to encourage woodland
management. This meaning was invisible to anyone uninitiated into the
intricacies of tax accounting.
The aim of this book is to examine how different understandings
and values ascribed to trees, woods and forests help to provide rich
layers of association and meaning to them. The pattern of trees in the
landscape is the result of centuries of unremitting hard work by our
ancestors as they struggled to survive in harsh conditions. The work of
management and control of trees has involved careful shepherding of
flocks of sheep and goats, manipulation of fire and skilled harvesting
of leaves, fruits, seeds and branches. Woodland can be benign and pro-
vide shelter, warmth, sustenance, fuel and fodder. But it may also be dark,
disorientating and threatening and associated with debauchery and
death. The landscape of woods and forests is imprinted with ancient
patterns of power and desire.
This book explores our understanding and knowledge of trees,
woods and forests by examining a series of episodes and moments in
woodland history. It draws on a wide array of sources and approach-
es. The history of trees and woods is intrinsically interdisciplinary;
research is carried out by archaeologists, botanists, ecologists, foresters,
geographers and historians. Much of the most interesting and fruit-
ful research is being undertaken at the edge of disciplines and uses
approaches from cultural history, historical ecology, local history,
natural history, historical geography and field ecology. Very different
forms of evidence are combined to develop an understanding of the
history and development of a particular piece of vegetation. This
evidence may include surveys of present-day plants and animals; his-
torical maps and documents; field archaeology; dendrochronology;
oral history; land management practices; literary descriptions; genetic

8
 Introduction

analysis; pollen and soil analysis; aerial photographs; and drawings

and paintings.
The shape and form of a tree is itself one of the best sources of
evidence of its history. It can tell you whether a tree has been lopped or
coppiced in the past and whether it has been affected by diseases,
grazing or browsing. Trees are usually defined as having some sort of
perennial, woody growth which often, but not always, has a main stem
or trunk with woody branches. They are enormously varied: some species,
such as the Californian coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), can grow
over 100 metres high and form dense stands of ancient trees. By contrast,
the alpine woods of the Hayachine mountain in northern Honshu
consist of 1- to 2-metre-high species such as Pinus pumila and Tsuga
diversifolia hugging the ground in dense low mats of interlocking vege-
tation where it is difficult to distinguish individual trees (illus. 66). Trees
are usually rooted and static, but some trees growing along rivers and
in river beds are moved by floods. Trees can extend their range rapidly
through windblown seeds, or by fruits and nuts carried by animals and
rivers; they may also spread several metres a year through the stealthy
creeping growth of root suckers. Many trees are ancient beings hundreds
of years old, yet the oldest trees are not always the largest: within a wood,
small, stunted trees which grow very slowly can be the same age as
neighbouring large trees of the same species which reach to the canopy
(illus. 65).
The ideas associated with the terms ‘woods’ and ‘forests’ vary through
time and from country to country. Recent research in historical ecology
is increasingly showing that the boundaries between woodland, wood
pasture, pasture with trees and arable land are difficult to define with
precision. In general terms, distinct boundaries between dense wood-
land and more open woodland have become more pronounced in
many places over the last 300 years. These changes are related to the more
intensive management of land and the greater control over grazing,
and are very closely tied to changes in the pattern of land ownership and
control. But there remain many areas of semi-natural vegetation where
it is difficult to map distinct boundaries between woodland and non-
woodland.
These definitional ambiguities emphasize the great care needed in
interpreting the history of woods and forests. The changing uses of the
terms can obscure; the changing meanings themselves can, however, be
used to uncover changing attitudes and practices. In England, for

9
 Trees, Woods and Forests

example, the medieval Royal Forests were areas where the monarchy
retained special hunting rights. All included land which was deemed suit-
able for hunting, but some areas, such as Exmoor, had far fewer trees
than others such as the Forest of Dean. Most forests were made up of
tracts of land which could contain villages, heaths, arable land, pasture
and woodland. There was no direct connection between the idea of
forest and the concept of woodland: medieval forests were adminis-
trative units more akin to a modern national park than extensive areas
of planted trees. With the decline in Crown interest, especially from the
eighteenth century onwards, the term ‘forest’ became increasingly asso-
ciated with those wooded areas, such as the New Forest and the Forest
of Dean, which survived as Royal Forests. It was not, however, until the
establishment of professional forestry in the nineteenth century, and the
intermixture of traditional estate woodland management with ideas
of scientific forest management introduced from the Continent, that
the terms ‘forestry’ and ‘forester’ began to be the normal terms used to
describe woodland management and managers. It was the state Forestry
Commission, established in 1919, which introduced the word ‘forest’
to describe its administrative units and then went on to use the term
‘National Forest Park’ for recreational areas. Their use of ‘forest’ was
ambiguous: it linked the coniferous afforestation of massive areas of both
upland and lowland with ideas of ancient deciduous woods associated
with the remnant Royal Forests.
Trees and woods often outlive humans and provide a semblance of
order, continuity and security. The sense of regret brought about by the
sudden loss of familiar trees can be acute. In the late 1960s and early
’70s there was growing concern in lowland England about the loss of
broadleaved woodland and hedgerow trees through agricultural expan-
sion and the enlargement of fields. This was exacerbated in the early
1970s by the devastating effect of Dutch elm disease, which stripped
most of England bare of one of the most important trees of hedgerow
and small woodland.¹ The agricultural landscapes of vast tracts of the
country were rapidly denuded and skeins of intertwined dead English
elms (Ulmus procera, which had been introduced by the Romans) and
wych elms (U. glabra) remained for several years as memorials of the
implications of the global spread of tree diseases.
This concern over woodland loss and decline was more than matched
by concern over the effects of large-scale coniferous afforestation in
the uplands of Britain. This showed itself in the Lake District in the late

10
 Introduction

1930s, where there were intense debates over the darkening spread of
introduced conifers that was so clearly visible across the fells. There
was less of an outcry over similar though largely invisible afforestation
schemes over extensive areas of flat, lowland heathlands such as Sherwood
Forest and the East Anglian Breckland. The change in the appearance
of landscape was mitigated by changes to the planting schemes of the
Forestry Commission in the 1950s and ’60s, but the rapid increase in
public and private coniferous afforestation in the 1970s and early ’80s
heightened the level of concern. Some of the keenest critics of afforesta-
tion were organizations, such as the Ramblers’ Association, who saw the
new plantations as restricting public access to the open heaths and moors.
The argument was fiercest in Scotland and Wales, and the planting of
Sitka spruce over areas of international significance for bird conserva-
tion, such as the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, brought
matters to a head in the 1980s and led to afforestation restrictions.²
By the 1980s public concern, initially in Central Europe and eastern
North America, became acute concerning the potential effects of ‘acid
rain’ on trees and woods. Scientists identified a forest malaise which they
termed Waldsterben, a very worrying general forest decline brought
about by air pollution. Many popular articles were written and illus-
trated by images of dying and dead trees. But within less than ten years
careful research showed that there was no such general decline. Although
more chimera than fact, and now a largely forgotten moment in forest
history, the acid rain ‘crisis’ was important in sustaining the level of pub-
lic concern over the fragility of trees and woodlands. In England, this
was further reinforced by the Great Storm of 15–16 October 1987, the
worst within living memory, which had a particularly devastating effect
on trees in southeast England. These threats to trees and woods loomed
large in the public imagination in Britain, and were part of a worldwide
concern over loss of tropical rainforests through logging and conversion
to grazing land.³
Another key debate over woodland management concerned the
rapid rise in importance given to the nature conservation and cultural
value of semi-natural habitats. The insights provided by historical ecol-
ogy showed that many woods were of ancient origin and that traditional
forms of management such as coppicing, which had largely stopped in the
interwar years, in many instances had beneficial effects on nature conser-
vation. This nuanced approach to woodland management had important
implications for policy, especially on the pressure to stop the replanting

11
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of old woodland sites with conifers. The category ‘ancient woodland’ was
formulated to engage the public and help preserve and then conserve
areas that had been woodland for hundreds of years. There is now a gen-
eral consensus that ancient woodlands should be protected, although
vigilance is still required to safeguard them from new roads, railways
and houses.4
If there was any doubt of the very high regard with which trees,
woods and forests are held by many people and the strong resonance
they have with ideas of local and national identity, this was ousted by the
vociferous campaign in February 2011 to stop plans by the govern-
ment to sell woodland owned and managed by the Forestry Commission.
The campaign raised considerable concerns about the provision of
public access to woodland and the benefits that accrue to society from
different types of woodland management. A group called Save England’s
Forests rapidly gained the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Annie Lennox, Dame Judi Dench and other celebrities. The group wrote
a letter to the Sunday Telegraph (22 January 2011), made extensive use
of Facebook and Twitter and achieved its aim with remarkable ease;
within weeks the government reversed its policy of selling off public
woodlands.
The high profile and success of this campaign and the evidence
collected by the consequent Independent Panel on Forestry emphasizes
deep public support for trees and woodland and the wide range of
benefits they provide, including timber production, landscape and cul-
ture, wildlife and game conservation, public access and shelter. Woodlands
are increasingly valued for their ability to reconnect children and adults
with nature; they are seen as a type of therapeutic landscape. Knowledge
of the precise and specific role of trees and woodland soils in provid-
ing habitats for mosses, lichens, fungi, insects, birds and mammals is
improving rapidly but at the same time local traditional knowledge is
being lost.5 In the last ten years or so an additional value, that of carbon
storage, has been ascribed to woodland, providing yet another reason
for woodland establishment and management.
The relationship between humans and trees is rich, intricate and
multilayered. This book examines the different ways in which people have
used, understood and appreciated trees, woods and forests through a
close examination of episodes and moments in woodland history. The
emphasis is on Britain but examples are drawn from across the world. The
approach is broadly chronological but chapters are structured around

12
 Introduction

key themes and periods which shed light on changing understandings

of trees and woods. Chapter One considers the importance of ancient
tree and woodland management practices such as coppicing and the evi-
dence for tree and woodland management from archaeology and ancient
literature. It emphasizes how essential trees were for the survival of our
prehistoric ancestors and the specialized knowledge and expertise that
they had. Trees have been managed for thousands of years and the
labour and effort of our ancestors were essential in creating the soils and
landscapes which we cultivate. Chapter Two focusses on forests and
spectacle and the way in which the expression of power and the desire
for understanding the origin of the world are related to trees. The sym-
bolic importance of forests for hunting and its association with military
prowess and horsemanship were vital for Alexander the Great and Roman
emperors such as Hadrian. Trees and woods are closely associated with
classical, Christian and Norse creation myths. The Norman kings of
England used forests to express their power and produce crucial income.
Humans have moved trees from place to place for centuries and
have rapidly revolutionized the distribution of individual species. The
speed of movement has increased dramatically over the last 400 years.
Chapter Three examines the fascination and enthusiasm of European
collectors from the seventeenth century onwards and how new species
were collected, named, catalogued, tested and acclimatized. The great
enthusiasm for novel trees led to the establishment of important tree
collections, which from the early nineteenth century became termed
‘arboreta’. The chapter concludes with a case study of the Japanese
larch, which after its introduction into Britain rapidly became a com-
mon plantation tree, but is now threatened by an introduced disease.
Trees are not only crucial for timber, fuel, food and fodder; people
have long valued them for their beauty. Many different types of trees
are appreciated. Some value the tall, clean lines of large standard trees
such as beeches, oaks or pines grown in plantations or limes and oaks
as avenues along roads or across parks. Others enjoy ancient, crooked
oaks, ashes and thorns growing in hedgerows or in remnant areas of
wood pasture and commons. Chapter Four examines how trees and
woods have been represented in art and how attitudes to trees were
transformed by the rise of the cult of the Picturesque in the eighteenth
century. Chapter Five concentrates on the ancient practice of pollard-
ing and its importance for leaf fodder for farm animals. The last vestiges
of the practice in Greece are considered, as are changing attitudes to

13
 Trees, Woods and Forests

pollarding in Britain, which were strongly influenced by questions of

aesthetics and power.
The same trees and woods are perceived very differently by different
people at the same time, and by groups of people through time. Chapter
Six examines these different meanings and values by exploring changing
interpretations at Sherwood, one of the world’s most famous forests,
which rose to international fame at the start of the nineteenth century just
as its legal identity was lost. The changing ways in which the ancient oaks
of Sherwood have been celebrated and enjoyed are identified. Chapter
Seven focusses on British forestry in the nineteenth century, when most
landed estates had a wide variety of trees and woods varying from
hedgerow trees and small spinneys within agricultural land to larger
woods managed for timber and trees and woods in parkland. The
value of different types and patterns of woodland for game shooting
and fox hunting are analysed, as are the ways in which trees were
used in landscaping and to naturalize, disguise or emphasize property
ownership.
The invention of the idea of sustainable woodland management and
forestry is described in chapter Eight. This opens with a consideration
of late medieval ideas of sustainable woodland management in north-
ern France and the development of scientific forestry in Germany.
The spread of these ideas into India and America in the later nineteenth
century and to Britain after the First World War is examined, as are some
of the landscape implications of scientific forestry and consequent
large-scale afforestation of land formerly used for grazing animals.
Chapter Nine examines the repercussions of the ‘discovery’ of Californian
redwoods for the development of forest conservation and the concept
of national parks and public reserves. It then considers how the idea of
National Forest Parks was developed in Britain and how it was used to
help normalize large-scale newly established plantations of conifers.
The final chapter considers the spread of unplanned, naturally
regenerated woodland as a contrast to afforestation. Very large areas of
woodland have become established in the Italian Apennines over the
last century through the abandonment of former agricultural land and
pastures and the consequent natural regeneration of trees and shrubs.
Chapter Ten considers the reasons for this process and the effects on cul-
tural landscapes and nature conservation. The abandonment of the
complex and subtle mix of activities and landscapes that includes the
grazing of summer pastures, agricultural terraces, tree management and

14
 Introduction

chestnut culture has led to massive natural regeneration of trees and

woods and the loss of the former cultural landscape. This new ‘rewilded’
landscape poses significant questions for the conservation of nature
and heritage. While some people celebrate letting land go out of culti-
vation and the provision of apparently wild and untamed landscapes that
encourage the spread of wild boar, wolves and eagles, others decry the
loss of local meaning and subtlety and the coarsening of the landscape.
The close examination of particular episodes, moments and themes
that forms the basis of this book should help to elucidate and deepen
an appreciation and understanding of trees, woods and forests. Trees can
live to a great age, and some woods appear timeless and ancient, yet they
are also prone to sudden death through fire and storm. Trees can live
for many hundreds of years if they are repeatedly browsed and grazed
by animals. Human activity has led to the clearance and destruction of
enormous areas of woodland and has also brought about the rapid
spread across continents of potent diseases such as chestnut blight,
elm disease and ash dieback. Humans have also created vast areas of
forest plantations and have managed the form and shape of individual
trees for centuries. Trees and woods are celebrated for their fixedness
in the landscape and used as landmarks and sites of memory. Trees
are planted and grow thousands of miles from the places where they
originated, and tree seeds rapidly spread and grow over abandoned
fields and villages. In this way trees, woods and forests represent change
and mark episodes in history.

15
1 Charles Holroyd, Eve and the Serpent, 1899, etching.
 m
one
Ancient Practices

T
he complex relationships between humans and trees go back
many thousands of years. There was a time when trees were of
vital importance for almost all human activities: making clothes;
providing food, fuel and fodder; constructing houses; making tools,
weapons and wheels; providing shelter and shade. One of the most
exciting archaeological finds of recent years that demonstrated the
dependence of early humans on trees and shrubs was the extraordinary
discovery of a frozen man at the Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Alps
on the borders of Austria and Italy in September 1991. The body has
been dated to 3300 bc and the thorough examination of the body,
the man’s clothing and belongings and the site raises many questions
as to his social status. He has been interpreted as an outlaw, a hunter or
warrior, a priest, an ore prospector and, perhaps most likely, a shepherd
making use of the high summer pastures in the Ötz valley. While his
way of life remains contentious, the preservation of his equipment and
clothing allows a precise and accurate archaeological interpretation of
the many varied uses to which different tree products were put.¹
Wood was a key component of most of the surviving clothes and
artefacts owned by the ice man and he made use of six main species of
tree. The lime (Tilia spp.) was used for the greatest variety of purposes.
The inner bark of the lime, called bast, can be separated into fibres that
can then be twisted to make string and rope. This bast was used as a
sewing material for his shoes and for various containers. It was also
used to make the string which formed the basis of his backpack and the
sheath for a dagger. A very specialized use of lime was discovered in a
pouch ‘which held two blades and a borer made of flint, an awl made
from a sheep or goat bone, pieces of true tinder fungus (Fomes fomen-
tarius) and a previously unknown tool for sharpening flints’ which

17
 Trees, Woods and Forests

consisted of ‘a completely debarked branch of lime in which a peg of a

deer antler was inserted’. This tool was just over 11 centimetres long with
a diameter of 2.6 centimetres, and was used for making or sharpening
flint tools.²
Yew was used for the ice man’s two main weapons, his bow and his
axe. The use of yew for the longbow is hardly surprising as this was
for many centuries the favoured wood for this purpose: all prehistoric
bows are of yew and as recently as the sixteenth century large quantities
of yew were imported from the Tyrol for the English Army. The ice
man’s bow was in the process of being made and has many whittling
marks, showing that it was not ready for use. More unusual was the use
of yew for the handle of his axe, since most surviving axe handles of
the same period are made of ash, oak, beech or pine. The ice man’s axe
handle was made from a ‘longish piece of trunk from which a strong
branch stuck out almost at right angles’. The trunk of yew was trimmed
to make the haft of the axe and the branch was made into the shaft that
held the copper blade. This method of axe making has a long tradition
stretching from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. The only use that the ice
man had for ash was as the handle of a dagger. This is surprising, as ash
wood had many purposes in prehistoric times, since it is pliable and
relatively easy to work into tool handles.³
Hazel stems are very strong and pliable and were used by the ice
man to construct frameworks for his backpack and quiver. The frame
of his haversack was ‘constructed from a thick branch of hazel (Corylus
avellana) bent into a U-shape’ with ‘two coarsely-worked laths of larch
(Larix decidua)’. The hazel spar had been stripped of its bark and side
branches. It was notched, and these notches probably helped to hold
the larch laths in place. Later a third larch lath was found nearby. The
goatskin quiver, which was given structure by hazel stems, held four-
teen arrows made from straight, thin yet dense and hard stems of the
wayfaring tree Viburnum lantana. Most of the arrows were unfinished,
like the bow, and a broken arrow had been repaired, with the front
end replaced with a stem of dogwood (Cornus). The ice man carried
two containers made of birch bark, which is fairly easy to detach from
young trees and remains flexible and strong. These characteristics made
it ‘an ideal material for the manufacture of containers and cases’ while
the sap of the birch was used to make the glue which helped fix the axe
blade in place. One of the containers was used to carry embers; leaves of
the Norway maple (Acer platanoides) were used as insulating material

18
 Ancient Practices

2 Reconstruction
of a birch-bark
vessel found
with ‘Ötzi’,
the Tyrolean
ice man (3300 bc).

between the hot embers and the wall of the birch bark container. The
embers consisted of a mixture of charcoal including spruce or larch, pine,
green alder (Alnus viridis), elm and willow.4
The types of tree identified in the charcoal fragments remind us of
the importance of wood as a source of fuel for warmth and cooking.
But the most important consequence of the discovery of the ice man is
a fascinating demonstration of the subtle interactions between humans
and trees over 5,000 years ago. It shows the great knowledge that humans
had of the values and uses of different tree species and the enormous
care that was taken to select the most appropriate species based on a
wood’s characteristics of strength, pliability and ease of working. The
characteristic tree species in the area today, as it was 5,000 years ago, is
spruce, although the variety of different species used by the ice man show
that the wood was gathered from the transitional zone between the
lower broadleaved woodlands, including species such as hazel and birch,
and the higher spruce woods. Interestingly pollen from the hop horn-
beam (Ostrya carpinifolia) was the dominant arboreal pollen found in
the ice man’s colon, and today this species remains one of the principal
broadleaved trees in the lower Tyrolean valleys.5

19
 Trees, Woods and Forests

3 Ancient pollard
(dated at c. 2400 bc)
found at Aston/
Shardlow Gravel Pit,
Derbyshire, in 2002
by Chris Salisbury
and Norman Lewis.

y Sweet Track and Flag Fen

The extent to which very large quantities of wood were used by our
Neolithic ancestors has recently been demonstrated by two major
archaeological research projects in lowland England. The Somerset
Levels is an area of low-lying land between the Mendip Hills to the
north and the Quantock Hills to the south. Since the last Ice Age the
area has been characterized by winter floods, and persistent waterlogging
has allowed the development of extensive peat bogs and the accumu-
lation of deep layers of peat several metres thick. Peat cutting for fuel
became common in the medieval period, and many drainage ditches
known locally as rynes were cut to help drain areas for agriculture. In
1834 a farmer who was cutting a ryne made a discovery that, although
largely ignored at the time, was later seen to be of great significance for
our understanding of the history of tree and woodland management.
The farmer uncovered deep in the peat a line of alder (Alnus glutinosa)
tree trunks that had been split and laid down parallel and next to each

20
 Ancient Practices

other. When a later owner of the estate heard about this in 1864 he was
so interested that he encouraged local archaeologists to consider the
evidence. It was interpreted as part of an ‘ancient plank road’ or wooden
trackway which was named the Abbot’s Way, as it could have been
constructed by one of the abbots of Glastonbury Abbey in the later
Middle Ages to form a dry route over a wide stretch of boggy ground.6
In the 1930s and ’40s further archaeological work uncovered various
other trackways and with the development of radiocarbon dating it
was realized that many of the wooden artefacts found in the peat orig-
inated from c. 3500 bc to c. ad 400 rather than the Middle Ages. One
trackway, constructed of young rods of hazel, was dated to the third
millenium bc, which gave ‘the earliest evidence in the world for cop-
piced woodland’, although this was not noted at the time.7 By the 1960s
digging for horticultural peat had become profitable, and this resulted
in the discovery of more wooden archaeological structures. The Abbot’s
Way was rediscovered and traced for around 1,000 metres (3,280 feet).
In 1970 Raymond Sweet found ‘a piece of ash plank, clearly split from
a large tree’ and further digging found ‘more of the same wood together
with pegs still driven into the lower peats, and axed debris’. This struc-
ture, known as the Sweet Track, was soon identified as Neolithic and
formed a remarkable cache of information about ancient woodland
management.8
The aim of this Neolithic ‘ingenious structure’ was ‘to provide a
raised path across a wet reed swamp’. Long, straight trunks of quite thin
ash, alder, hazel or elm were laid flat on the surface of the marsh. ‘Pairs
or groups of oblique pegs were then pushed or driven down into the soft
unstable surface to either side’ of this flat pole ‘so that they crossed over
it’. On ‘the V formations thus created’ planks were carefully balanced
to make a strong walkway, and additional strength was provided by
notches cut on the underside of the planks to fit them firmly to the struc-
ture (illus. 4). The types of wood used in the structure give an indication
of the type of woodland growing in the Somerset Levels in the Neolithic
period: ‘oak, elm, lime and ash as the common large trees, hazel and holly
for undergrowth, and alder, willow and poplar on the wetter fringes’.
But the different pieces of wood found also give an indication of way the
trees grew. For example, the lime trees that had been cut to produce long
and straight planks were themselves tall, straight trees with few side
branches, which suggested that they had grown fairly close together
in dense woodland. Some of the large oak planks indicated that the oak

21
 Trees, Woods and Forests

trees used were up to 5 metres (16 feet 5 inches) long and 1 metre (31⁄4
feet) in diameter. Archaeologists were very impressed with the quality
of woodworking skills indicated by the finds. Oak was the most frequent
species used for planks and ‘the trunks were converted into planks by
splitting with wedges, either of stone or seasoned oak.’ Most of ‘the splits
were radial, exploiting the tendency of oak to split along its rays’ but
smaller oak trunks were cut ‘at right angles to the rays, more or less
around the rings’.9
The large amount of preserved wood allowed archaeologists to
carry out dendrochronological studies that produced a vivid picture
of the types of Neolithic woodland. Large numbers of hazel rods were
deliberately coppiced on a seven-year cycle. Moreover the age of the oaks
used to make planks in the construction of the track ranged from 400
down to just over 100 years. This, together with the variety of species
found, shows that by the late fourth millennium woodland was diverse
and heavily influenced by human activities.¹0
Another major site of woodland archaeology, found at Flag Fen on
the other side of England, just outside Peterborough, was excavated

4 A reconstruction
of part of the ‘Sweet
Track’, a Neolithic
plank walkway in
the Somerset Levels.
Tree-ring evidence
dates it to c. 3800
bc, and identifies
the woods used as
oak, hazel, ash and
alder.

22
 Ancient Practices

by Francis Pryor and a team of archaeologists from 1971 onwards.

Peterborough had been designated a New Town and building devel-
opment spread determinedly eastwards into the peaty fenland. Rescue
archaeology revealed an extensive area of Bronze Age field systems with
fields surrounded by ditches and a number of droveways. The ‘Bronze
Age fields were organized for the management of large numbers of
livestock’ and the droveways ‘enabled animals to be moved between
wetter and drier seasonally available grazing’. The fields were probably
established in the later third and second millennium bc. Near Newark
Road a complicated pattern of fields and other small enclosures and
yards set about an important droveway indicated by substantial lines
of post was uncovered. The very extensive quantity of wooden posts and
planks, which have been variously interpreted as parts of a causeway and
platform, allowed tree ring analysis to be carried out. This showed that
most of the trees used for the various structures were felled just after
1300 bc and then, after a lull in activity, in a second batch between 1200
and 900 bc. The oldest posts found were of alder (Alnus glutinosa) and
it is thought that these were felled locally. The other main species used
was oak, which was also used for posts as well as planks, and a few
wooden artefacts were found, including part of an axle and a wheel. The
most common find was wooden poles, almost all of which had some
evidence of Bronze Age woodworking, including the cutting of the
posts to length, the removal of side branches, the sharpening of poles
to make a pointed end and an occasional notch.¹¹
The archaeologists at Flag Fen carried out a large number of experi-
ments to establish the type of woodworking used in the Bronze Age.
Splitting or cleaving was the principal means of making construction-
al timber. This is not to say that saws did not exist by this time; small
copper saws had been developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia and the
Minoans appear to have been the first to have saws, while Theophrastus
(370–285 bc) argued that sawteeth should be set in alternate ways to
allow the removal of sawdust, especially when green wood was being
cut. This was reiterated by Pliny the Elder, who noted that the teeth of
saws ‘are bent each way in turn, so as to get rid of the sawdust’, which
would otherwise clog up the saw and make it ineffective. A fine Iron Age
saw was found at the excavations at Glastonbury Lake Village in the
early twentieth century. This saw ‘is described as having its teeth “turned
from side to side”; in other words, the teeth are like a modern saw,
making this implement a transitional form between the simple serrated

23
 Trees, Woods and Forests

blade and the modern saw where the teeth are set so that they are
effective on both the pull and the push.’ It is curved with a finely cut knob
at the end of the handle, which made pulling and pushing it easier.¹²
But cleaving was the most common way of making posts and other
structural timbers at Flag Fen. The principle is to split each log length-
ways in half, and then in half again, until the required thickness of
timber is achieved. Experimentation showed that ‘a log approximately
300 mm in diameter could be split in various ways depending on what
was needed: half or quarter splits could make useful posts or beams,
down to thirty-second splits, which will produce a stack of 32 feather-
edge planks each about 150 mm wide with a thick edge of about 40 mm.’
The archaeologist Maisie Taylor notes that by this method ‘virtually no
wood is wasted’ with a tree 300 millimetres in diameter, but with larger
trees, there is considerable waste as the halves and quarters are too large
for normal use and require additional time-consuming work ‘to bring
them down to useful dimensions’. Following the Great Storm of 1987,
experiments were made on the splitting of a large fallen oak from
Minsmere, Suffolk. The importance of splitting the oak while it was still
green and had not hardened through seasoning was soon identified, and
the ‘accuracy of the splitting’ was affected by the careful positioning of
different-sized wedges and the quality of the wood. The archaeologists
were rather taken aback by the ‘lifelike, almost heart-rending, noise’ of
‘a big tree’ as it groaned while splitting and by the pungent ‘tannic smell
of the oak’ after it was split ‘sometimes pricking the eyes and back of the
throat’. Their experimentation had almost taken them back directly into
the sensory world of the Bronze Age.¹³
Large oak trees had a special significance at funerary and religious
sites. At Foulmere Fen in Cambridgeshire a wooden structure inside a
Neolithic barrow was found to have been built of tangentially cut planks
‘virtually all made from one huge tree’, carefully placed so that ‘the out-
side surfaces of the mortuary structure are also the outside of a tree, or
trees.’ Perhaps the most extraordinary archaeological oak from East
Anglia, however, is the central oak from the Bronze Age timber circle
on the shoreline at Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk. The timbers of the
circle itself abut each other and are set with the bark to the outside of the
circle. From a distance, therefore, ‘the monument would have resem-
bled a huge log or tree trunk’. The central tree was a substantial inverted
oak tree more than a metre in diameter whose bark, unlike the surround-
ing posts, had been removed deliberately. The function of this tree remains

24
 Ancient Practices

5 Seahenge, the remains of a Bronze Age monument found below sea level at
Holme-next-the-Sea, Norfolk. Tree-ring and radiocarbon evidence suggest
a date of c. 2050 bc.

a mystery although it is thought that the roots of the upside-down tree

may have ‘cradled a body, perhaps left there during rites of excarnation’.
Whatever its precise function, the inverted oak, stripped of its bark and
surrounded by a massive ‘trunk’ of barked poles, demonstrates the
potent interaction between prehistoric humans and trees.¹4

y Classical knowledge
The younger Pliny (c. ad 61–c. 112), Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus,
was a successful Roman senator and imperial administrator. Most wealthy
Romans of his status owned several estates and in addition to his villa
at Laurentum not far from Rome, he held two major estates at Tifernum
on the Tiber (Città de Castello), about 150 miles northwest of Rome,
and at Comum (Como) in northern Italy. His description of his Tifernum
estate in a letter to his friend Domitius Apollinaris gives a fascinating
insight into Roman woodland management. The estate is on the slopes
of ‘the Apennines, the most salubrious of mountains’ and ‘lies far back
from the sea’ and well away from the fever-ridden ‘oppressive and nox-
ious coast’.¹5 He asked Domitius to ‘Picture to yourself an enormous
amphitheatre, such as only nature can provide . . . on the mountain tops
are woods of great age, where the trees are tall. These provide hunting

25
 Trees, Woods and Forests

and in good measure and of great variety. On the slopes below are the
coppice-woods; between the woods there are rich fields.’ Lower down
again the slopes ‘are covered with vineyards in an unbroken pattern.
Where the vineyards end, at the bottom of the slopes, plantations are
growing up. Then come meadows . . .’, and finally the heavy soils of
the river plain. The younger Pliny demonstrates an acute awareness of
the value of different types of land and woodland. This is emphasized
in another letter, to Calvisius Rufus, asking for advice as to whether he
should buy an estate adjoining and partly intermixed with his Tifernum
estate where ‘the land is fertile and rich and consists of arable fields,
vines, and woods producing timber which provides a return that, though
modest, can be depended on.’ This regular, dependable income has
been interpreted by the leading scholar of classical timber Russell Meiggs
as a reference to coppicing.¹6
While we learn about the attitude of a Roman landowner to his
woodland from the letters of the younger Pliny, it is his uncle Pliny the
Elder (ad 23–79) and his encyclopaedic Natural History that provide
us with insights into classical knowledge, experience and beliefs about
trees. Pliny was born on the family estate at Como, which he left to his
nephew, and had written his natural history by 77, a couple of years
before his well-documented death from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79.
The book was dedicated to his friend the Emperor Trajan’s son Titus.
Pliny organized his Natural History into 37 books: trees are found in
books 12–16, between his descriptions of animals and agriculture. Books
12 and 13 discuss ‘foreign trees that cannot be trained to grow elsewhere
than in their place of origin and that refuse to be naturalized in strange
countries’; book 14 focusses on growing vines and book 15 on fruit trees
and olives; there is only a single book (16) on forest and timber trees
grown in the Roman Empire.¹7
Pliny introduces trees by stating that ‘trees and forests were supposed
to be the supreme gift bestowed’ by nature on mankind; they ‘provided
him with food; their foliage carpeted his cave and their bark served for
raiment’. Trees were once ‘the temples of the deities, and in conformity
with primitive ritual simple country places even now dedicate a tree of
exceptional height to a god’. He thought that people did not ‘pay greater
worship’ to ‘images shining with gold and silver than they did to forests
and to the very silences that they contain’. He celebrates trees for their
production of fruits, nuts and acorns, and especially because ‘from
trees are obtained olive oil to refresh the limbs and draughts of wine to

26
 Ancient Practices

restore the strength.’¹8 The first tree that Pliny discusses is the plane,
which fascinates him because it had been introduced to Italy and spread
through the Roman Empire ‘merely for the sake of shade’. He is thrilled
by the celebrated plane tree growing in Lycia, southern Turkey, which
‘stands by the roadside like a dwelling-house, with a hollow cavity inside
it 81 feet across, forming with its summit a shady grove’, while inside
the tree embraced ‘mossy pumice-stones in a circular rim of rock’. His
contemporary Licinius Mucianus, who ‘was three times consul’ and
governed Lycia, ‘held a banquet with eighteen members of his retinue
inside the tree’, which ‘provided couches of leafage’ on such a ‘boun-
teous scale’ that ‘he had then gone to bed in the same tree, shielded from
every breath of wind, and receiving more delight from the agreeable
sound of the rain dropping through the foliage’ than he would from the
‘gleaming marble’ or ‘gilded panelling’ of a palace.¹9
Pliny loved a good story, and trees associated with the founding
or history of Rome or with the spread of the Empire he found par-
ticularly attractive. He records the fig tree ‘growing in the actual forum
and meeting-place of Rome’, which is ‘worshipped as sacred’, since it
memorializes the fig tree ‘under which the nurse of Romulus and Remus
first sheltered these founders of the empire on the Lupercal Hill’. His
antiquarian interests are drawn out when he recounts how the tree was
named ‘Ruminalis, because it was beneath it that the wolf was discov-
ered giving her rumis (that was the old word for breast) to the infants’.²0
Although much of Pliny’s work is based on his wide reading, some of
his knowledge is derived from his own experience. He spent part of his
life as a soldier in Germany and was enormously impressed by the ‘vast
expanse of the Hercynian oak forest, untouched by the ages and coeval
with the world, which surpasses all marvels by its almost immortal
destiny’. He was particularly struck by tales of the sea eroding the oak
woods of the Netherlands around the Zuyder Zee: the oaks ‘when under-
mined by the waves or overthrown by blasts of wind carry away with
them vast islands of soil in the embrace of their roots’. These trees ‘thus
balanced, float along upright’ so that the Roman fleets ‘have often been
terrified by the wide rigging of their huge branches when they seemed
to be purposively driven by the waves against the bows of the ships at
anchor for the night’. The Romans were then ‘unavoidably compelled
to engage in a naval battle with trees’.²¹
Russell Meiggs’s survey of the classical literature on timber and
trees in the ancient world shows that there was an enormous amount

27
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of interest in the cultural geography and history of trees and their

products. But he was surprised to discover relatively little on what
would later be termed forest science or silviculture, the planting of trees
for growing timber or the cultivation and selling of trees. Indeed, he felt
that ‘One gets the impression from literature that woods were appre-
ciated more for pasture and leaf-fodder than their timber.’²² The dominant
importance of knowledge about growing trees as part of normal farm-
ing and agriculture practices comes through the classical literature again
and again. One of the most authoritative Roman texts on farming and
estate management is De agricultura by Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149
bc), who had gained experience on the Sabian family estate as a young
man. He very usefully lists the profitability of different types of farm-
land and woodland, with vines and irrigated gardens being the most
profitable and woodland providing acorns and beech mast for pigs and
cattle the least. Interestingly he names beds of willow coppice as more
profitable than olive groves, and these were both more profitable than
meadows and arable land for grain. Willows provided ties for vines, as
they still do in many parts of Italy, and were useful for making all types
of baskets and items of furniture. Coppice woods (silva caedua), which
were used for firewood and many sorts of useful poles, and orchards lie
between arable land and grazed woodland in terms of profitability.
Cato shows that the growing of trees was thoroughly integrated
with the growing of vines and crops and he argued that trees should be
managed carefully to maximize their potential for producing fruits,
nuts, leaves and timber. It was expected that farms would grow their own
trees, and he provides advice on the best way to cultivate elms, figs, pines
and cypresses from seed. Farm buildings, including the farmhouse
and outbuildings, would be built from timber grown on the farm. The
qualities of different types of timber were well known: when construct-
ing an olive press ‘for the anchor-posts and guide-posts oak or pine are
specified, for the great disc elm and hazel, because of their strength. Oak
is used for dowels, cornel, one of the strongest woods, for nails, and
willow for wedges. For the press-beam, black hornbeam should be
used.’²³ The leaves of some trees are particularly valued as fodder for farm
stock. Cato emphasized that elm and poplar provided excellent leaves
for sheep and cattle. He thought that elm leaves were the best fodder,
followed by poplar, and recommended that ‘If you have poplar leaves
mix them with the elm to make the latter last longer; and failing elms,
feed oak and fig leaves.’ He encouraged farmers to plant ‘elms and poplars

28
 Ancient Practices

round the borders of the farm and along the roads to give you leaves for
the sheep and cattle and timber when you need it’.
Marcus Terentius Varro, who had estates in Apulia and at Reate
(Rieti in Lazio), writing in 37 bc, also thought that elms were one of
the best trees to grow on a farm if the soil was suitable. He valued the
elm especially as a tree over which to grow vines, while its leaves were
excellent for sheep and cattle and its timber good for fencing rails and
for firewood. Other authors had different ideas about the best tree on
which to grow vines.²4 Lucius Junius Columella, after serving in the
army, managed his Italian estates in Latium and Etruria. He, like Cato,
thought that vines were the most profitable crop and that poplars, fol-
lowed by elm and ash, were the best trees on which to grow them.
These vine supports were carefully pruned, and the leaves, including ash
leaves, were collected to be eaten by sheep and goats. Vines could also
be supported by wooden stakes, which were usually cut from coppices.
Columella argued that the best species for this purpose were oak, which
took seven years to reach the correct size, and chestnut, which grew
quicker and could be cut after five years. He thought that chestnut liked
a ‘dark, loose soil, does not mind a gravelly soil, provided that it is moist,
or crumbling tufa; it is at its best on a shady and northward-facing slope’.
Precise details are provided about planting and harvesting the chestnuts
and the yield that could be expected, with every jugerum (0.25 hectare)
yielding 12,000 stakes.²5
Many classical descriptions of trees make sense to a modern reader
and still hold true, but some essential distinctions that were believed for
centuries now appear strange. One of the first people known to classify
trees by considering their appearance and growth was Theophrastus, who
was born on Lesbos and died at Athens. He was one of Aristotle’s pupils
and followed him as leader of the Lyceum. It is thought that Theophrastus’
interest in the classification of plants was encouraged by the reports of
geographers and botanists who had accompanied Alexander the Great’s
campaigns to the east. Theophrastus himself was not a great traveller, but
drew evidence from friends who had visited areas such as Macedonia,
Arcadia and Asia Minor. One of his basic assumptions was that, like
animals, all trees were either female or male and that the former were
fruit-bearing. He hit a problem when male and female trees of the same
species both bore fruit, and argued that in this case the female trees had
‘better and more abundant fruit’. The sex of the tree was also thought
to affect the value of the timber. With lime trees, for instance, ‘the wood

29
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of the male tree is hard, yellow, more fragrant and denser; the wood of
the female is whiter’. Moreover the ‘bark of the male is thicker and when
it is stripped off it is hard and so does not bend, whereas the bark of the
female is thinner and flexible’. This idea persisted through the classical
period and neither Greek nor Roman authors recognized that ‘most
species of tree have male and female flowers on the same tree.’²6
Trees were not only of value for farming and building; they were
crucial for the construction of the navies on which the Greeks and
Romans depended. Theophrastus gives one of the best descriptions of
the types of timber used for different parts of the ships. He states that
‘Fir (elate), mountain pine (peuke), and cedar (kedros) are the standard
ship timbers.’ The triremes and warships were built of ‘fir because it is
light’, which made them faster and more efficient. Merchant ships, in
contrast, were built of the heavier pine because it was less prone to rot.
Theophrastus notes, however, that some states had to make do with
the timber they had growing in their area. For example, in Syria and
Phoenicia they used cedar because they had little pine or fir, while in
Cyprus they used ‘the coastal pine (pitys)’ that grew on the island and
seemed to be ‘of better quality than mountain pine (peuke)’. The keel
of triremes was made of oak because this was strong enough to with-
stand being hauled onto the shoreline, and they made ‘the cutwater and
catheads, which require special strength, of ash, mulberry, or elm’. The
most favoured tree for the production of oars was the silver fir (Abies
alba) and the best type were young, flexible trees that had been grown
in fairly dense stands so that there were few side branches. Theophrastus
pointed out that ‘the fir has many layers, like the onion, for there is
always a layer below the one that is visible.’ He argued that it was impor-
tant ‘when they shave the wood to make oars they try to remove the
layers one by one evenly’. If this was done successfully the oar would
be strong, but ‘if they do not strip off the layers evenly the oar is weak.’²7
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey provide vivid insights into ancient
appreciation and practical use of different trees.²8 The oak is the most
commonly mentioned and figures in many similes, but there are also
references to poplars, pines, firs and ash. In battle scenes the fall of
warriors is likened to the felling of trees, the penetration of human flesh
by bronze spears equated with the cutting of living trees with axes. In
the Iliad the leader of the Cretans, Idomeneus, ‘cast his spear on the
throat below the chin’ of Asius ‘and drove the bronze clean through’.
Asius ‘fell as an oak falls, or a poplar, or a tall pine that among the

30
 Ancient Practices

mountains shipwrights fell with whetted axes to be a ship’s timber’.²9

When Simoeisius was struck by Aias ‘on the right of his chest beside the
nipple’ with a ‘spear of bronze’, he ‘fell to the ground in the dust like a
poplar tree that has grown up in the bottom land of a great marsh,
smooth, but from its top grow branches: this a chariot-maker has felled
with the gleaming iron so that he may bend a wheel rim for a beautiful
chariot, and it lies drying by a river’s banks’. Here the acute and pre-
cise picture of the poplar is followed by a poetic description of the way
the tree is felled, seasoned and converted into chariot wheels.³0 The
spearman Imbrius, who had married one of the daughters of Priam, was
‘struck beneath the ear with a thrust of his long spear’ by Ajax, and ‘he
fell like an ash tree that on the summit of a mountain that is seen from
afar on every side is cut down by the bronze, and brings its tender
leafage to the ground; so he fell.’³¹
Spears were usually made of ash with a bronze point. Hector struck
Aias’ ‘ashen spear with his great sword close by the socket at the base of
the point, and sheared it clean away’ so that Aias was left brandishing
‘vainly a pointless spear, and far from him the head of bronze fell to
the ground with a clang’. Achilles’ spear was the ‘Pelian spear of ash,
that Cheiron had given to his dear father from the peak of Pelion (near
present-day Lamia), to be for the slaying of warriors’.³² The noise of
battle is equated with wind and fire rushing through the forest. When
the Trojans and Achaeans raised ‘a terrible shout as they leapt on each
other’ Homer compares this to ‘the roar of blazing fire in the glades of
a mountain when it leaps to burn the forest’ and ‘the shriek’ of the wind
‘among the high crests of the oaks – the wind that roars the loudest in
its rage’.³³ The shouts and calls of the two ‘masters of the war cry’ Hector
and Patroclus, and the sounds of the Trojans and Achaeans slaughtering
each other, are compared to the noise of the ‘East Wind and the South’
as they ‘strive with one another in shaking a deep wood in the glades of
a mountain – a wood of beech and ash and smooth barked cornel’ which
‘dash one against the other their long boughs with a wondrous din, and
there is a crack of broken branches’.³4 But Homer was also aware that trees
that survive frequent strong winds have usually developed strong roots.
When Polypoetes and Leonteus defended a gate against King Asius, they
‘stood firm like oaks of lofty crest on the mountains that ever stand up
to the wind and rain day by day, firm fixed with roots great and long’.³5
The day to day life of woodcutters is glimpsed through analogy. In
one battle Agamemnon and the Danaans broke through the opposing

31
 Trees, Woods and Forests

line ‘at the hour when a woodman makes ready for his meal in the glades
of a mountain, when his arms have grown tired with felling tall trees,
and weariness comes on his heart, and desire of sweet food seizes his
thought’.³6 But the great care, skill and attention needed when felling
trees with an axe is recognized by Nestor when he tells his son Antilochus,
in a pep talk before a chariot match, that a charioteer, like a woodman,
needs intelligence over brawn: ‘By cunning, you know, is a woodman
far better than by might.’³7 The use of ancient Greek woodland for
keeping pigs and hunting wild boar is also evident. In the Odyssey
Circe’s palace was built in ‘the forest glades’ where there were ‘moun-
tain wolves and lions’. She drugged the companions of Odysseus and
‘penned them in sties’. They had ‘the heads, and voice, and bristles, and
shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before’.
As they wept in their pen ‘before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and
the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are
wont to feed upon.’³8 In the Iliad two Trojans fought ‘like a pair of wild
boars that among the mountains await the tumultuous throng of men
and dogs that comes against them’. They charge at each other and ‘crush
the trees about them, cutting them at the root, and there arises the
sound of the clash of tusks till someone strikes them and takes away
their life’.³9
Although most of the dendrological similes in Homer concern
bloody battle scenes, there are exceptions which bring out subtle ways
of relishing the beauty of trees. In the Odyssey the women who work in
the house of Alcinous ‘weave at looms or twist the yarn, while, like the
leaves of a tall poplar, flit the glancing shuttles through their finger-
tips’.40 The Achaens feasted on freshly slaughtered and cooked cattle
and offered gifts ‘to the immortals on the holy altars, beneath a fair plane
tree from which flowed the bright water’, although here the beauty is
ironical, since ‘a serpent, blood-red on its back, terrible’ then ‘glided from
beneath the altar and darted to the plane tree’ where it devoured the
‘nestlings of a sparrow’ that cowered beneath the leaves ‘on the topmost
bough’. Here the beauty of the tree accentuates the horror of the arrival
of the terrible serpent sent by Zeus.4¹
Even the greatest warriors could succumb to the beauty of plane
trees: when the Persian Emperor Xerxes was travelling between Phrygia
and Sardis on the road which crossed ‘the river Maeander’ in 480 bc
he found a plane tree under which he camped overnight and ‘which he
adorned with gold because of its beauty, and he assigned one of his

32
 Ancient Practices

immortals to guard it’.4² By the first century ad the plane had become
one of the most popular and accepted shade trees in the Roman Empire.
It was used to shade those engaged in education, athletics and training
for war. Pausanias describes how at Sparta in the second century ad there
was an area called ‘the Plane-tree Grove, so called from the plane-trees
which grow in an unbroken line around it’, which was where ‘young
Spartans passing from adolescence to manhood’ did their rough fight-
ing: ‘they strike, and kick, and bite, and gouge out each other’s eyes. Thus
they fight man against man.’ Before the fight started ‘the lads pit tame
boars against each other, and the side whose boar wins generally conquers
in Plane-tree Grove.’ He also describes how, at the ‘old gymnasium’ at
Elis, ‘high plane trees grow between the tracks’, shading the area where
the athletes did ‘the training through which they must pass’ before the
Olympic Games.4³ And the plane, which became one of the most popu-
lar trees introduced from Greece to Italy, was one of the younger Pliny’s
favourite trees, although, rather than celebrating an individual tree like
Xerxes, he cultivated and marshalled hundreds of them in the extensive
formal gardens at his Tuscan villa. One of his favourite places, which he
used when he had ‘none but intimate friends with me’, was a ‘summer-
house enclosing a small area shaded by four plane-trees, in the midst of
which rises a marble fountain which gently plays upon the roots of
the plane-trees’. He also had a hippodrome, which was horseshoe-shaped
and used for walking as well as riding. The straight rides were shaded
and ‘set round with plane-trees covered with ivy, so that, while their tops
flourish with their own green, towards the roots their verdure is bor-
rowed from the ivy that twines round the trunk and branches, spreads
from tree to tree, and connects them together’. At the curved ends of
the hippodrome, cypresses cast a ‘deeper and gloomier shade’ than the
plane trees; additional dwarf planes were to be found in an adjoining
garden, with fruit trees, box trees and laurels.44 Pliny the Younger’s
descriptions of his gardens depict the Roman use of trees at its most
luxurious yet productive.
But the Roman enthusiasm for trees and certain timbers could be
destructive, as is shown by the fate of one of the most fashionable timbers
in the Roman Empire, the mysteriously attractive wood of the ‘citrus
tree’ Tetraclinius articulata. This evergreen coniferous tree was famed for
its timber, in contrast to the trees with the same common name in the
genus Citrus, which provide lemons and oranges. Some Roman men
became completely infatuated with tables made from citrus wood and

33
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Pliny remarked that ‘ladies use [men’s] table-mania’ as a useful ‘retort’

when charged with ‘extravagance in pearls’. The mania for these tables
was as strong if not stronger than the tulipomania which beset the
Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Cicero, who was not a particu-
larly wealthy man, purchased one for 500,000 sesterces and one owned
by Gallus Asinius ‘cost a million’; these, according to Pliny the Elder,
were sums of money equivalent to the price of a reasonable estate,
‘supposing’, he added acidly, ‘someone preferred to devote so large a sum
to the purchase of landed property.’ The main attraction of the citrus
wood tables were the ‘wavy marks forming a vein or else little spirals. The
former marking produces a longish pattern and is consequently called
tiger-wood, while the latter gives a twisted pattern and consequently slabs
of that sort are called panther-tables.’ Other sorts of wood, depending
on the markings, looked like peacocks’ tails or parsley. The ‘highest value
of all resides in the colour’, and highly polished citrus wood tables had
the enormous advantage of not being ‘damaged by spilt wine, as having
being created for the purpose of wine-tables’.45
The demand for citrus wood tables was intense and people collected
them: Seneca is said to have amassed 500 with ivory legs. This huge
demand caused the destruction of areas of woodland where the trees
grew in North Africa. The best citrus wood was cut from the roots of the
tree and the patterning was a type of burr wood, which, as Pliny noted,
was caused by ‘a disease of the trees’ found growing as an ‘excrescence
of the root’ or ‘as knobs that grow above ground, on branches as well
as on the trunk’. Strabo noted that Mauretania was ‘surpassing in the
size and in the number of its trees’ and was the country ‘which supplies
the Romans with the tables that are made from one single piece of
wood, very large and most variegated’. Other types of wood such as
maple were used as a substitute and Strabo noted that some trees in
the Ligurian forests around Genoa had ‘very great quantities’ of ‘timber
that is suitable for shipbuilding, with trees so large that the diameter
of their thickness is sometimes found to be eight feet. And many of
these trees, even in the variegation of their grain, are not inferior to the
thyine wood [citrus] for the purposes of table making.’ Pliny records
that the ‘most celebrated citrus-wood’ came from a ‘mountain called
Ancorarius’ in Mauretania but that ‘the supply is now exhausted.’ The
full effect of this exploitation was depicted carefully by Lucan, who
noted that the ‘timber of Mauretania’ had been ‘the people’s only wealth’
but that they were ‘content with the leafy shade of the citrus-tree’,

34
 Ancient Practices

being ‘ignorant how to make use of this wealth’. But ‘our axes have
invaded the unknown forest and we have sought tables as well as
dainties from the end of the earth.’ And thus Roman greed for luscious,
highly patterned trees resulted in the destruction of the citrus wood
forests, a portent of the removal of huge areas of woodland and its
conversion to meadows, pastures, fields and deserts over the centuries
that followed.46

35
 m
two
Forests and Spectacle

K
ings, bishops, aristocrats and state authorities have all had a
particular interest in controlling their forests. Forests were
defined to impose order over large areas of land and as a way
of policing borders. The spectacle of hunting and its association with
military prowess and horsemanship were key to the establishment of
power by Norman kings in England, as they had been for Alexander the
Great in Macedonia and Roman emperors such as Hadrian. In Europe
forest laws were established in the early Middle Ages to control large
areas of land that included villages and even towns. Literary depictions
of forests drew on associated and conflicting ideas of chaos, freedom,
contemplative spaces and danger, and the strength of these ideas had
a direct effect on the way that forests were administered, controlled and
managed for centuries. Great kings were keen to memorialize their prow-
ess at hunting and control of their forests. Nebuchadnezzar, the powerful
young king of Babylon (r. 605–562 bc), celebrated his victories against
the Phoenicians and attack on Jerusalem with an inscription at Wadi
Brisa in present-day Lebanon. The text ‘is accompanied by a relief, now
very badly worn, of the king killing a lion’, and a second relief shows
‘the king cutting down a tree’. Nebuchadnezzar’s death was celebrated by
the prophet Isaiah: ‘the whole world has rest and is at peace . . . The pines
themselves and the cedars of Lebanon exult over you. Since you have
been laid low, they say, no man comes to fell us’ (14:7–8).¹
In 1977 three royal tombs were discovered at the modern village
of Vergina in northeastern Greece.² Among the many astonishing
finds was a large tomb interpreted as being that of Philip ii, father of
Alexander the Great, who had been murdered at the age of 46 by his
ex-boyfriend in 336 bc. Above Philip’s tomb was the funeral pyre which
contained remnants of the hounds and horses which hunted with him.

36
 Forests and Spectacle

The attribution remains contested, although if not Philip it is likely to

be that of Arrhidaeus (later Philip iii), Alexander the Great’s brother.
The doorway of the tomb is between two Doric columns and above
these is an Ionic frieze showing a hunting scene. James Davidson has
described it as ‘a vigorous hunt in a sacred landscape with naked youths
and dogs attacking deer, a boar and a bear, with spears, a net and an axe’.
The scene is remarkable in many ways, but for many the most
exciting element is the central group around the lion. Here a bearded man
on a rearing horse strikes downwards to kill the lion while another
rider in the centre of the frieze is in the act of throwing a javelin with the
same aim. The bearded man ‘is supposed to be Philip making use of the
king’s prerogative of killing the king of beasts, while his son, the youth-
ful Alexander, rushes to assist him’. The young men ‘are the so-called
Royal Boys who alone were allowed to accompany the king on hunts
like these’. With all this to catch the eye, it is easy to miss the landscape
in which the hunt is taking place. Although the original frieze is faded,
the ground is fairly clear of vegetation, though rocky in places, and
appears to be grazed by sheep or goats; such open areas were essential
for hunting on horseback. There are several old trees which resemble
pollards, trees that have been regularly cropped of their branches; one
in the centre next to Alexander’s horse Bucephalus, if the attribution is
correct, appears to be dead. This ancient landscape is reminiscent of
many equivalent modern landscapes of old trees in pasture and heath.

6 Doorway to the tomb of Philip ii, c. 336 bc, Vergina, Greece.

37
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Alexander’s love of hunting was described by the Roman senator

Quintus Curtius Rufus in his biographical account of Alexander fight-
ing deep in Asia. There were ‘no greater indications of the wealth of
the barbarians in those regions than their herds of noble wild beasts,
confined in great woods and parks’. They chose for this purpose ‘exten-
sive forests made attractive by perennial springs’ and they ‘surround
the woods with walls and have towers as stands for hunters’. When
Alexander arrived, ‘the forest was known to have been undisturbed for
four successive generations’ and ‘entering it with his whole army’ he
‘ordered an attack on the wild beasts from every side’. A ‘lion of extraor-
dinary size rushed to attack the king himself ’ and Lysimachus, who
happened to be next to Alexander, prepared to attack it with a hunting
spear. But Alexander ‘pushed him aside and ordered him to retire’, ‘met
the wild beast’ and killed it with a single thrust of his weapon.³
Hunting was seen by the Romans ‘as a spectacle to entertain the
people’ and was popular with the Emperor Trajan, whose ‘only relax-
ation’, according to Pliny, was ‘to range through the forests and drive
the wild beasts from their lairs’ while Pliny himself ‘sat by the hunting-
nets, with writing materials instead of hunting spears’. Trajan’s successor
Hadrian was particularly fond of hunting. It is probable that he hunted
wild boar on his visit in ad 122 to the northernmost reach of his empire
where Hadrian’s Wall was built: an altar in the northern Pennines records
that a Roman officer ‘had taken a boar of exceptional fineness which
many of his predecessors had been unable to bag’. In 124 he travelled
through present-day northwest Turkey and hunted in the wooded in-
terior, founding a town named Hadrianutherae (‘Hadrian’s Hunts’,
now Balıkesir) after a successful hunt resulting in the death of a female
bear. Coins were minted which showed the Emperor Hadrian on horse-
back with the head of the bear on the other side. The inscription on
the tomb of one of Hadrian’s favourite hunting horses, Borysthenes,
described how he ‘used to fly over plains and marshes and hills and
thickets, at Pannonian boars – nor did any boar, with tusks foaming
white, dare to harm him’.4
An Egyptian hunting trip Hadrian took with Antinous in September
130 is described in a poem by Pankrates which survives in Greek on a
fragment of papyrus. Hadrian ‘wished to test the aim of the handsome
Antinous’ and deliberately wounded a lion which ‘grew even fiercer
and tore at the ground with his paws in his rage . . . he lunged at them
both in rage.’ Eventually the lion mauled Antinous’ horse and Hadrian

38
 Forests and Spectacle

7 Boy with Horse, ad 117–18, marble relief. This bas-relief was excavated by Gavin
Hamilton in part of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. It possibly represents Castor taming
his horse.

killed the lion, saving Antinous’ life.5 Hadrian was ‘a passionate, almost
obsessive hunter’ who composed epigrams extolling the virtues of fav-
ourite hunting dogs and horses. There was a relief of a young man with
a horse at Hadrian’s Tivoli villa and there are eight marble relief tondi
celebrating his hunting exploits and his huntsmen, including a boar
and a lion hunt. The ‘figure in the background of the boar hunt tondo,
riding behind Hadrian, bears a strong resemblance to Antinous’.6
The central place of hunting and trees within human culture can be
traced back even further. In 2010 it was claimed that an archaeo-
logical team had discovered the remains of a stone enclosure, possibly
dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries bc, near Nemi in the
Alban Hills south of Rome. This enclosure ‘amidst the ruins of an
immense sanctuary dedicated to Diana, the goddess of hunting, along
with the remains of terracing, fountains, cisterns and a nymphaeum,
once surrounded a large sacred tree, such as the one that the pre-Roman
Latins believed symbolized the power of their priest-king.’ Christopher
Smith, director of the British School at Rome, commented that ‘this is
an intriguing discovery and adds evidence to the fact that this was an
extraordinarily important sanctuary; we know that trees were grown in

39
 Trees, Woods and Forests

containers at temple sites and that the Latins gathered here to worship
right up until the founding of the Roman republic in 509 bc.’7 This
could provide a location for the famous scene with which Sir James
Frazer opens his monumental work on the anthropology of religion, The
Golden Bough (1890).
Frazer ruminates over the landscape around Lake Nemi where
‘Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these
woodlands wild. In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of
a strange recurring tragedy.’ Under the steep cliffs below Nemi, on
the shore of the lake, ‘stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana
Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood’ and in this wood ‘there grew a
certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into
the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl.’ Frazer pictures how
this figure would ‘darken the fair landscape’ for the ‘gentle and pious
pilgrims’ at Diana’s shrine. A belated wayfarer would see a sombre
scene: ‘the background of forest showing black and jagged against a
lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the
rustle of withered leaves under foot . . .’. This was the priest of the
sanctuary, who always carried a drawn sword and might expect to
murder or be murdered at any time, for the rule of the sanctuary was
that the ‘man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him
and hold the priesthood in his stead’. Within Diana’s sanctuary at Nemi
grew a tree from which no branch might be broken (illus. 67). The
only exception was that ‘a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he
could, one of its boughs.’ If he succeeded in this task he had the right
to fight the ‘priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his
stead with the title of King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis)’. Frazer argues
that the ‘public opinion of the Ancients’ was that ‘the fateful branch
was that Golden Bough’ which ‘Aeneas plucked before he essayed the
perilous journey to the world of the dead.’ Moreover the golden bough
was actually mistletoe, which was seen as the ‘the life of the oak’ since
it remained ‘green while the oak itself is leafless’.8
When Aeneas searches for the perfection of the spirit, represented
by the golden bough, forests signify dangerous, shadowy and dark
places where ‘lust and unbridled passion’ rule.9 Aeneas and his follow-
ers are commanded by the Sibyl to make a pyre for Misenus’ tomb and
go to the ‘forest primeval, the deep lairs of beasts; down drop the
pitchy pines, and ilex rings to the stroke of the axe; ashen logs and
splintering oak are cleft with wedges, and from the mountains they roll

40
8 William Ottley, Study of Trees and Rocks in the Chigi Park at Ariccia, 1790s, pen
and brown ink drawing, with brown-grey wash.

9 The Golden Bough, c. 1847, etching by Thomas Abel Prior after Joseph Mallord
William Turner.
 Trees, Woods and Forests

in huge rowans’. Alone, Aeneas ‘ponders with his own sad heart, gazing
on the boundless forest’ and goes on to find the golden bough and the
way to the Underworld: ‘As in the winter’s cold, amid the woods, the
mistletoe, sown of an alien tree, is want to bloom with strange leafage,
and with yellow fruit embrace the shapely stems: such was the vision of
the leafy gold on the shadowy ilex.’ Aeneas immediately ‘plucks it and
greedily breaks off the clinging bough, and carries it’ to the Sibyl.¹0
The Aeneid was an enormously influential text in the medieval
period and its symbolic forest landscapes are associated with hunting,
fighting, exile and death. When the Trojans landed in Libya, for exam-
ple, above the harbour loomed ‘heavenward huge cliffs and twin peaks’
and ‘a background of shimmering woods with an overhanging grove,
black with gloomy shade’. The first thing Aeneas does is to climb a
peak to look for other ships, but instead he sees ‘three stags’ with herds
of deer and he immediately seizes ‘his bow and swift arrows’ and ‘lays
low the leaders themselves, their heads held high with branching antlers,
then routs the herd and all the common sort, driving them with his darts
amid the leafy woods’.¹¹ In Book ix, when the warriors Euryalus and
Nisus are chased, they flee ‘to the wood and trust to the night’ but they

10 Dido and Aeneas, 1787, etching and engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi (figures)
and William Woollett (landscape), after Thomas Jones (landscape) and John
Hamilton Mortimer (figures).

42
 Forests and Spectacle

find the ‘forest spread wide with shaggy thickets and dark ilex; dense
briers filled it on every side’, and although ‘here and there glimmered
the path through the hidden glades’, Euryalus ‘is hampered by the
shadowy branches’. Nisus gets through the wood, but calls out ‘Unhappy
Euryalus, where have I left thee? Or where shall I follow, again un-
threading all the tangled path of the treacherous wood?’; after much
bloodshed both warriors are killed in the forest (illus. 11).¹²
The forest in the Aeneid ‘appears as a landscape of potentiality,
associated with destiny, prophecy and the unexpected’ and this can
be contrasted with the harmony of idyllic pastoral groves depicted in
Virgil’s Eclogues.¹³ The First Eclogue opens with Tityrus, who may rep-
resent Virgil, ‘at ease beneath the shade’ of ‘the spreading beech’s covert’,
telling the shepherd Meliboeus, who has been driving his goats ‘amid
the thick hazels’, of his visit to Rome, which has ‘reared her head as high
among all other cities as cypresses oft do among the bending osiers’.¹4
In a later Eclogue Meliboeus listens from the shade of a ‘whispering ilex’
and near a ‘hallowed oak’, where ‘swarm humming bees’ to a poetry
competition where Corydon tells of ‘junipers and shaggy chestnuts;
strewn about under the trees lie their own diverse fruits; now all nature
smiles’; while Thyrsis considers ‘Fairest is the ash in the woods, the pine
in the gardens, the poplar by the rivers, the fir on the mountain-tops.’¹5
One of the most significant trees from a religious perspective is
the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, the
home of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis (illus. 12). The Garden
of Eden is popularly called Paradise, a word which ‘is probably of
Persian origin and signified originally a royal park or pleasure ground’.
The Catholic Encyclopaedia notes that the word paradise ‘does not occur
in the Latin of the Classic period nor in the Greek writers prior to the
time of Xenophon’ and in the Old Testament ‘it is found only in the
later Hebrew writings in the form (Pardês).’ An example of the origin
of the term is provided when Nehemiah, a high official in the Persian
court of King Artaxerxes i, returned to Jerusalem in 445 bc to repair
the city:

Moreover I said unto the king: ‘If it please the king, let letters
be given me to the governors beyond the River, that they may
let me pass through till I come unto Judah; and a letter unto
Asaph the keeper of the king’s park, that he may give me timber
to make beams for the gates of the castle which appertaineth to

43
11 Death of Euryalus, 1800, etching and engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi after
Francisco Vieira Portuense.
 Forests and Spectacle

the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I
shall enter into.’

Here the word happerdês is used to describe Asaph’s role as the custodian
of the royal park of the Persian ruler (Nehemiah 2:7–8).
According to Genesis, man is ‘set to take care of the Garden of Eden’
and has ‘permission to eat of its fruit, except that of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil’. Adam and Eve ‘live in childlike inno-
cence until Eve is tempted by the serpent, and they both partake of the
forbidden fruit’. They then know sin, ‘incur the displeasure of Yahweh’
and are thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Consequently ‘their lot is
to be one of pain and hardship’, and humans have to win ‘sustenance
from a soil which . . . has been cursed with barrenness’.¹6 Trees are also
of crucial significance in the Norse myths, including the creation of
humankind. The rich Icelandic landowner, lawyer and poet Snorri
Sturluson (1179–1241) compiled the important collection of oral
myths and poems known as the Prose Edda. In the myth concerning the
origin of humankind Snorri tells how

Bor’s sons were walking by the sea-shore and came upon two
logs. They picked them up and shaped them into human beings.
The first gave them breath and life, the second understanding
and motion, the third form, speech, hearing and sight. They

12 John Martin, Fall of Man, 1831, mezzotint with etching.

45
 Trees, Woods and Forests

13 School of
Annibale Carracci,
Garden of Eden
with Eve and the
Serpent, late 16th
century, ink
drawing.

gave them clothes and names. The man was called Ask [ash tree],
the woman Embla [perhaps ‘elm’ or ‘vine’]. From them descend
the races of men who have been given a dwelling-place below
Midgard.¹7

When the logs became human ‘The sun shone from the south on the
stones of earth; then the ground was grown with green shoots.’¹8
After this, Snorri tells of ‘the Yggdrasill, tree of fate, upon which
the welfare of the universe seems to depend. Beneath it lay the well
of fate (Urðarbrunnr) from which the fates, conceived in female form,
proceeded to lay down the course of men’s lives.’¹9 This tree is usually
identified as an ash tree. But ‘even the great world-tree is subject to attack’:

The ash Yggdrasill endures hardship

More than men can know,
The hart bites its crown, its sides decay,
The serpent Nidhogg tears its roots.

46
 Forests and Spectacle

The Norns tried to preserve the ash Yggdrasill ‘by pouring over its
branches water and mud from the Well of Fate. This magic liquid helps
to stop the rot. In the end the tree is to fall, as are the gods themselves.
They are as mortal as man.’²0
Trees were associated with several Norse myths and in the Hávamál
‘it is told how Òðinn hung for nine nights on a windswept tree’:

I know that I hung

on the windswept tree
for nine full nights,
wounded with a spear
and given to Òðinn
myself to myself;
on that tree
of which none know
from what roots it rises.

14 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve; standing on either side of the Tree of Knowledge
with the Serpent, 1504, engraving.
15 Hans Varnier the Elder, The Tree of Knowledge with the Serpent, 1530s–40s,
woodcut.

47
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Many have equated this tree with a pagan reflection of Christ on the
Cross and the ‘similarities between the scene described here and that
on Calvary are undeniable’. Indeed ‘the two scenes resembled each
other so closely that they came to be confused in popular tradition.’ But
most elements in the Norse myth can be explained as part of the pagan
tradition.²¹ According to the eleventh-century scholar Adam of Bremen,
a ‘notorious festival at Uppsala was held every nine years, and contin-
ued for nine days. Nine head of every living thing was sacrificed, and
the bodies were hung on trees surrounding the temple.’ These hanged
victims could well be ‘dedicated to Òðinn, whose image stood with
those of Thór and Fricco in the temple of Uppsala’, and scholars con-
sider that ‘the tree from which Òðinn swung was no ordinary tree. It
can hardly be other than the World Tree, the holy Yggdrasill’, named
after Òðinn’s horse, from ‘Yggr’ (the terrifier) and ‘drassil’ (a poetic word
for horse).²²
One troublesome detail is that the Yggdrasill is sometimes described
as ‘evergreen’, and some argue that the tree of life could be a yew rather
than an ash. There is ‘little doubt that the evergreen yew was held
sacred, whether or not the Yggdrasill and holiest tree at Uppsalir were
yews. The best bows were made from yew.’ Moreover, the archer god
Ull, also known as the hunting god, who was ‘so skilled on skis that
none could compete with him’, lived in Ýdalir (Yew-dales), ‘where yews
flourished’. Adam of Bremen described the temple at Uppsala in c. 1070
when it was still in use: it was ‘as if centuries of heathen belief and
practice had silted up in this Swedish backwater’. In the grove next to
the temple itself

One tree was holier than all the others; it was evergreen
like the ash Yggdrasill. In some ways it resembled the great
column, Irminsul which, as Saxons believed, upheld the
universe. We may also think of Glasir, the grove with golden
foliage standing before the doors of Valhöll, and of the tree
growing from unknown roots on which Òðinn swung in his
death agony.²³

Biblical and classical conceptions of hunting and forests strongly

influenced the writers of the Middle Ages, who linked ideas of the
wilderness and the desert and classical ideas of the chaotic forest
with the uncultivated landscape of the medieval forest. Associations

48
16 The world-tree
Yggdrasill from
the Icelandic Edda
oblongata manuscript
of 1680.
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of solitude and divine inspiration ‘were appropriated as part of the

forest’s symbolism in the romances’, which became one of the most
popular forms of literary entertainment at the courts of the north
European aristocracy. Deserts and forests were both characterized by
their uncultivated quality. Biblical deserts often consisted of rocky
landscapes with caves, some vegetation and springs. For example in St
Athanasius’ Life of St Anthony, written in ad c. 360, the Egyptian deserts
included a cave with seedlings, trees and wild beasts.²4 This ‘exchange
of landscapes’ preceded the Norman Conquest of England: Aelfric (c.
955–1005), the abbot of Eynsham, referred to John the Baptist going
to the wilderness ‘to escape the vices which men practise’, where ‘He
drank neither wine, nor beer, nor ale, nor any of the drinks which men
drink. But he ate fruit and that which he could find in the forest.’
Solitary ascetics restricted their existence by staying in caves or the
hollow interiors of ancient trees. The ‘associations of the forest with
the Biblical desert or wilderness render comprehensible such stories as
that of Evrard de Breuteuil, viscount of Chartres, who abandoned all
to lead an eremitic life as a charcoal-burner in 1073, modelling himself
after Saint Thibaud’.²5
In Anglo-Saxon and Norman times felons were ‘put outside the
law’ and were said to bear ‘the wolf ’s head’ and to be ‘treated as wolves
by those within the law’. An early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman
poem tells of a guiltless person accused of a felony whose only remedy
was to go to ‘the beautiful shade’ of the wood of Belregard; ‘There is
no deceit there, nor any bad law . . . where the jay flies and the nightin-
gale always sings without ceasing.’²6 Woods and forests played a complex
and central role in medieval romance landscapes. In influential romance
texts such as those by the twelfth-century writer Chrétien de Troyes, who
first wrote of that exemplar of chivalry Sir Lancelot, the departure of
the knight on solitary quests and adventures through the unknown
forest is a strong theme.
At the court of King Arthur, for example, the knight Yvain flees the
tournament at Chester when he is spurned by Lady Laudine. ‘He would
rather be banished alone in some wild land, where no one would know
where to seek for him, and where no man or woman would know of
his whereabouts.’ He rose ‘from his place among the knights’ and ‘such
a storm broke loose in his brain that he loses his senses; he tears his flesh
and, stripping off his clothes, he flees across the meadows and fields.’ He
meets ‘close by a park a lad who had in his hand a bow and five barbed

50
 Forests and Spectacle

17 Geertgen tot
Sint Jans, John
the Baptist in
the Wilderness,
c. 1490–95, panel.

arrows, which were very sharp and broad’ but ‘he had no recollection
of anything that he had done. He lies in wait for the beasts in the woods,
killing them, and then eating the venison raw. Thus he dwelt in the
forest like a madman or a savage.’²7 Forests were to a large extent ‘the
special territory of romanciers’, who in the later medieval period ‘looked
back to a time immediately preceding their own, largely mythical in
England, in which this forest landscape was almost boundless, and
thus might be moulded to the requirements of the romance form’.²8 The
forest was a place of exile where one’s will, courage and expertise could
be tested to the full. It was also a place where those outside the law could
go to hide from society.

51
 Trees, Woods and Forests

y Practical spectacle: medieval Royal Forests

We know that the forests of England were not boundless in the medieval
period; on the contrary, they were defined by their very boundedness
through the application of special laws. Areas of land, including dense
woodland, but also open areas of heath, moor and pasture, were pro-
tected for hunting by Frankish kingdoms by as early as the seventh
century, and ‘England maintained close contact with these kingdoms
and rapidly assimilated their cultural tradition.’ Some English estates,
such as Bickleigh in a pre-Conquest charter of ad 904, ‘were singled out
as of special importance for hunting’. The landscape historian Della
Hooke’s close examination of Anglo-Saxon charters has allowed her to
identify the Old English word haga as describing ‘wood-banks topped
by hedges or fences’ and that ‘haga features noted in woodland, there-
fore, appear to have been enclosures into which deer could be encouraged
as a readily available source of venison and protected from marauding
animals such as wolves.’²9
But it was the arrival of the Normans with their new legal systems
and vast enthusiasm for hunting that grounded the complex bundle of
ideas associated with forests and hunting into a hardnosed reality in
England and Wales. When William, duke of Normandy (1027/8–1087),
conquered England in 1066, hunting, which had been popular with the
Anglo-Saxons, was reaffirmed as a vitally important royal sport by the
creation of large areas of royal forest, including the New Forest, where
William’s son Richard was killed in a hunting accident. William was
‘physically imposing’ and ‘was exceptionally strong; William of
Malmesbury, for example, recounts that, while spurring on a horse,
he could draw a bow which other men could not even bend.’ Hunting
as well as demonstrating the power and authority of the monarch was
essential training and practice for warfare. In 1069 a Danish army
landed in the North and was ‘joined by Edgar Ætheling and a large force
of English rebels, and the combined army captured York on 20
September’. It is thought that William heard of the loss of York while
hunting in the Forest of Dean.³0
William ii (c. 1060–1100), known as William Rufus, who succeeded
William i in 1087, was a ‘rumbustious, devil-may-care soldier, without
natural dignity or social graces, with no cultivated tastes’, but his ‘chival-
rous virtues and achievements were all too obvious’ and he ‘maintained
good order and satisfactory justice in England and restored good peace

52
 Forests and Spectacle

to Normandy’. He was also exceptionally keen on hunting and his

‘enlargement of the royal hunting preserves’ and ‘tightening of the
severity of the laws to protect them were generally resented’. His last
hunting trip was in the New Forest on Thursday, 2 August 1100. The
evidence suggests that ‘Contrary to his usual custom he did not go out
until the afternoon, when the royal party, which included his brother
Henry, broke up into small groups, each to take up position at a butt.’
Here they dismounted and waited ‘to shoot at deer driven across their
front by beaters’. Disastrously, it was not a deer that was shot, but the
king, who was ‘killed instantly by an arrow in the heart’. The exact site
is disputed but it is likely to be near where the ‘Rufus Stone’ was set up
in 1745. It was most likely a hunting accident: William’s elder brother
Richard had been killed in the same way, as had one of his nephews. But
several anti-Norman writers argued that the archer who fired the arrow

18 The Death of William Rufus, 1777, etching and engraving by Francis Chesham
after John James Barralet.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

‘was simply God’s instrument to avenge the making of the New Forest
and to punish a blasphemer’.³¹ Hunting was a very dangerous sport, as
were the celebrations after a day’s hunting. In November 1135 William
Rufus’s younger brother and successor Henry i (1068/9–1135) travelled
to his hunting lodge at Lyons-la-Forêt in Normandy ‘to indulge in his
favourite pastime of hunting’ but ‘fell mortally ill’ after ‘feasting on
lampreys – a delicacy that his physician had forbidden him’.³²
The three kings of England from 1066 to 1135 appeared almost to
live and die for hunting, and by the reign of Henry i the royal forests were
controlled by ‘an administrative system fully developed and function-
ing in a routine manner’. There is ‘evidence that each of the three kings
manipulated the forest administration as a matter of conscious policy
when it could be to his advantage’. Moreover, in the subsequent civil
war both sides used ‘grants of exemption from the forest’ in attempts
to gain support. After the war Henry ii (1133–1189), who became king
in 1154, ‘extended the royal forests beyond the area they had attended
under his grandfather’ and they covered their greatest area during his
long reign.³³ Henry ii was as keen on hunting as his Norman ancestors
and also engaged in ‘intellectual debates with a circle of clerks or visit-
ing monks’, but at ‘moments of tumult at court he fled in silence to his
beloved forests, seeking a solitary peace in the wild’. He improved the
governance of the forests and ‘the assize of the forest (1184) brought the
regulation of forest offences, previously based largely on the king’s
whim, into the realm of customary law.’³4
But the increase in the area of forests was the cause of resentment
and disputes with landowners, which came to a head in the reign of
King John and brought about the Forest Charter of 1217. This resolved
several contentious issues and the rising tide of new forests was stopped
and pushed back: new forests established by Richard i and John were
disafforested and the boundaries of those created by Henry ii were
checked. Woods not owned by the king were disafforested. More speci-
fically free men could now graze their domestic animals ‘within the
forest at will’ and could drive their pigs ‘through royal demesne woods’
to enable them to eat the acorns. The power of the ecclesiastical and lay
lords to hunt was reaffirmed and ‘every archbishop, bishop, earl or baron
travelling through the forest may take one or two beasts by view of the
foresters or he may blow his horn to give notice if they are not present.’
Moreover, ‘no man shall lose life or member for taking venison’ and men
outlawed for forest offences ‘from the time of Henry ii to the first

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 Forests and Spectacle

coronation of Henry iii’ were pardoned. Although the Forest Charter

reduced the power of the king, the struggle between royal power and
that of landowners and local people who lived and worked in the areas
under forest jurisdiction continued for many centuries.³5
A medieval Royal Forest was a tract of land subject to the Forest
Law, which was designed to protect the interests of the king, especially
relating to hunting, timber trees and other rights. The standard legal
definition was written by John Manwood, a barrister and forest official,
in his A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forest, first published
in 1598: ‘A Forrest is certen Territorie of wooddy grounds & fruitfull
pastures, priuiledged for wild beasts and foules of Forrest, Chase and
Warren, to rest and abide in, in the safe protection of the King, for
his princely delight and pleasure.’ The key point here is that no-one
was allowed to hunt the wild animals protected by the forest law unless
he had express permission from the king. The four beasts of the forest
protected by the law were red, roe and fallow deer and wild boar. Areas
of relatively wild land were maintained so that populations of these
animals could be retained and within the forest, no matter who owned or
held the land, ‘only the king or those with his warrant were permitted
to hunt these four beasts and there were restrictions on the use of the
land and the woodland cover.’³6
Royal Forests were often very extensive, and in England as a whole
it is estimated that about a quarter of the whole country was under
forest law in the early twelfth century. There were also many forests in
Wales. But how was a forest organized and managed, and what did it
mean to people living and working in the forest? We can examine this
by considering one of the less well-known forests, the Royal Forest of
Feckenham in Worcestershire. An important point is that the bound-
aries of forests could be changed. In 1086, for instance, large tracts of
Worcestershire were within the Royal Forest, which stretched from
Herefordshire in the west across to Warwickshire. But by the thirteenth
century ‘two substantial areas had been disafforested’ after the establish-
ment of the Forest Charter in 1217: the Malvern Hills and surrounding
land had become a chase or private forest in 1217, and large areas to
the north and south of Worcester around Ombersley and Horewell
had been disafforested by 1227.³7
We know the boundaries of this and other forests because every so
often a ‘perambulation’ around the boundaries was made to survey and
fix them so as to ensure that everyone knew how far the Forest Law

55
 Trees, Woods and Forests

extended. The only surviving perambulation of Feckenham Forest took

place on 30 May 1300 in the 28th year of the reign of Edward i, and
this is particularly interesting as it describes how ‘the smaller bounds’
noted above were ‘grudgingly accepted by the king’ in a deal which ‘was
linked to the grant by parliament of a much-needed tax’ of ‘a fifteenth
of all movables’.³8 In other words, the king had accepted a reduction in
the forest area in exchange for a useful increase in taxation. The remain-
ing area of the forest covered almost 200 square miles and included
the royal manor of Feckenham and large parts of central and eastern
Worcestershire, running up to the gates of the city of Worcester itself.
The main animals hunted from the thirteenth century onwards were
the two larger species of deer: the red deer, which was native to Britain,
and the fallow, which it is thought was introduced by the Normans,
possibly via Italy.³9 The larger red deer were chased across open country
and were ideal for the scale and terrain of Royal Forests, made up of large
areas of open ground with patches of woodland (illus. 68). The smaller
fallow deer were more normally kept as herds within deer parks owned
and managed by the gentry. Fallow deer could be hunted with hounds,
and the gentry could watch the hunt, but another method was for beat-
ers to drive a group of deer towards a trap of waiting archers.40 The wild
boar had become ‘relatively rare and localized in England, and they had
probably disappeared from Feckenham Forest’ by the twelfth century.
In many ways the wild boar, largely immune to control by humans, was
a better indicator of wildness than deer, but the distinction between the
increasingly rare true wild boar and the domesticated pigs that thronged
the woods becomes progressively difficult to pin down.4¹ Henry iii’s
request for twelve wild boars from the Forest of Dean in 1260 is per-
haps the last reference to the species in England. However, there is a
reference to a wild boar in the Plea Rolls of the Worcestershire Eyre
of 1270 in which it was stated that ‘a boar (aper) from the said forest
followed some sows into the vill of Rous Lench’ on 28 October 1266
and that two men from the village ‘took the said boar and divided it
between them’.4²
The ‘vert’ of the forest, including trees, shrubs and grassland form-
ing the wood pastures that were the habitat for the deer, was protected
by law and those who lived in the forest had limited access to these
resources. But they did have the right to cut wood and timber trees, and
to graze their domestic flocks and herds. These rights, called estovers,
were limited and strictly administered. Local people who held land

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 Forests and Spectacle

could take wood for their own fuel, fencing or building repairs but
not for sale to others. They could also use forest pastures for their own
farm livestock, but the size of flocks and herds often caused disputes
between local farmers and forest officials. Grazing was restricted when
the female deer were fawning and pastures were closed off during
what was known as fence month, centred on Midsummer Day, to
allow the successful establishment of the new generation of deer. One
of the most important restrictions was that people were not allowed
to make new areas of arable and pasture land by clearing woodland,
a process known as assarting, without permission. The growing popu-
lation in the thirteenth century meant that there was great demand
for new agricultural land and the king could manage this demand
profitably by charging fines and rents on those who made new
assarts.4³
How were the royal forests administered and controlled? The main
forest court was known as the eyre, and it was usually held in a local
town or city. The officials of the forest eyre were justices who moved

19 George Stubbs, Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe
and Hound, 1800, oil on canvas.

57
 Trees, Woods and Forests

20 A Boar Hunt, 17th century, circle/school of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640),

pen and brown ink and brown wash.

21 South Indian painting of wild-boar hunting, c. 1775, gouache on paper.

from eyre to eyre dealing with different forests as they progressed

around the country. An individual eyre could last several days and many
local people were summoned to attend, including all lay and ecclesias-
tical holders of land in the forest: ‘barons, knights and free tenants,
together with four men and the reeve from every vill in the forest’. This
was a cumbersome process and hundreds of people could be summoned.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the gaps between eyres increased
and at Feckenham, the eyre was replaced by more flexible ‘inquisitions’
concerning the state of the forest, eight of which were held between 1362
and 1377. The three main types of business heard at eyres and inqui-
sitions concerned reports and sentencing of those poaching deer;

58
 Forests and Spectacle

investigations of the extent of clearance of the forest by assarting; and

reports of damage to trees.44
There was a complicated bureaucratic structure to document and
report upon the various offences. Each Royal Forest had a keeper – at
Feckenham the keeper was appointed, although in some forests the
post was hereditary – and under this keeper were five hereditary foresters
and a hereditary parker. These were wealthy and powerful figures who
often appointed under-foresters to carry out administrative work for
them, and the post could be very profitable. The foresters ‘had many
ways of exploiting their position’ and some took ‘bribes to permit
breaches of the forest law such as the sale of wood and assarting’ and
exploited ‘to their own advantage the very forest resources they were
supposed to protect’. Another group of forest posts filled by members
of the local gentry were those of verderer, regarder and agister. Verderers
were elected court officers who worked with foresters to deal with poach-
ing offences; regarders checked on the boundaries of the forest and
inspected the condition of the forest; while agisters were particularly
concerned with controlling the number of pigs in the forest.45
Where woods in the forest were owned by the king, local officials
were appointed at the time of periodic sales of wood to supervise and
keep records of the amount of timber felled and sold. Most woods in
the forest were owned by private landowners who had to appoint an offi-
cial woodward, whose role was to ensure that landowners did not exploit
the wood and take more timber or wood than was customary. These
woodwards were ‘notable for being in the invidious position of being
responsible to two masters’ and when ‘out in the forest on a daily basis’
were ‘subject to many temptations’. Moreover, if a woodward did not
fulfil his role for the king the woodland could be ‘confiscated and had
to be redeemed by payment of a fine’. In 1280 it was reported that the
two woodwards of William de Bello Campo at Alcester had damaged
the woodland for which they were responsible by making excessive sales
and gifts: ‘those woodwards gave 1 cart of firewood for every 2 taken
out.’ The same year the parson of Grafton Flyford, with his brother and
others, entered a wood at Hadzor ‘at night time’ and ‘felled and carried
away six oak saplings’.46
But sometimes individuals could disentangle themselves from
the surveillance that so frequently trapped local residents. In the Plea
Rolls of Worcestershire Forest Eyre of 1262, Peter de Lench Randulf
went before the justices and argued that Robert Estrech the forester

59
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of Feckenham had ‘impeded him in such a way that he cannot assart

and improve to his own benefit a little grove (gravetta) next to his garden
within his close in Rous Lench, which no forester ought to enter, as they
say.’ The verderers and regarders of the forest investigated and found
that Peter’s small grove was within his enclosed land in the village, which
‘no forester or other ought nor is accustomed to enter except Peter.’ The
court ordered that no one in the future should obstruct Peter, ‘who
may assart the little grove and approve it for his own use whenever he
wishes’.47
Most offenders were fined, or imprisoned and kept in prison until
they had paid a fine. The records show that all types of people were
likely to be poachers and although most brought before the eyre were
men, there were several women. In 1264, when Margery de Cantalupo
was staying at Studley Priory at midsummer in what was known as
the time of grease, when male deer were considered at their fattest and
best for hunting, her steward and others ‘were accustomed to enter
the forest with intent to offend against the king’s venison. And they
carried the venison they took to Margery, who knowingly received
them.’ Later in the same year Ralph, son of Constance of Coughton,
‘took a buck in the said forest without a warrant, and carried it to
Constance’s house at Coughton, she knowingly receiving it’.48
The area to the north of Alcester and east of Studley was clearly
prime poaching country. One of the most persistent offenders was
Ralph Bagot, parson of the church of Morton Bagot, a still tiny village
to the north of Alcester in Warwickshire. He was described as a ‘com-
mon wrongdoer’ and imprisoned and fined heavily in 1272, although
he was soon released on bail under surety of his wealthy friends. This
did little to stop his enthusiasm for hunting: he was accused of enter-
ing the forest on 9 September the next year ‘with bows and arrows and
dogs, to offend against the king’s venison’. They, ‘with others of their
society, were common offenders’ who ‘were condemned time and time
again’.49 He was later identified as a member of a gang who had taken
two bucks and carried them away on a cart on 30 December 1277, and
was again imprisoned. But he did not stay there long as he was found
guilty with several others, including Almaric le Despenser, lord of
Oldberrow, of entering the forest on 18 October 1279 with a stalking
horse, which they hid under and from which ‘they shot two bucks and
carried the venison wherever they wished.’ All these records for the
hunting parson were listed at a court meeting in 1280 and there is

60
 Forests and Spectacle

little reason to doubt that he continued to take the king’s deer long after
that date.50
The cumbersome forest eyre was replaced by inquisitions in the
fourteenth century, but the lists of offenders continue. An inquisition
of 29 April 1377 identifies various offenders, including William La
Hunte of Astwood, who ‘killed a buck in the place called “Arley” with
a bow and arrow’, while Thomas Jakettes with John Mauduyt killed a
buck ‘in the wood of the bishop of Worcester’ and ‘carried the flesh away
with them’. Some people, such as Adam Salesbrugg of Hanbury, were
multiple offenders. In April 1370 he ‘took and had a doe on the night
after Easter with various engines’ and in 1371 he ‘took and had a doe
with his nets in the said forest’. Moreover on 11 November 1374 he took
a pricket [a male deer in its second year] at night with his engines’ and
‘on various occasions, at night, entered the king’s park of Feckenham
with his nets and other engines to offend against the king’s venison’. The
view was that ‘the said Adam is and for a long time was a common
wrongdoer against the king’s venison.’5¹
The administrative structure of the Royal Forests protected the
interests of kings, who could derive useful income from the sale of
rights to clear land for agriculture. But the importance of hunting for
the maintenance of the power and authority of the king should not

22 Morton Bagot Church, Warwickshire, built in the late 13th century under
Ralph Bagot, 2014.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

be underestimated. Moreover the right to hunt in their private parks was

an enormously important privilege and sign of status for the gentry.
Medieval English kings ‘built the great majority of their residences in
rural settings, close to woods and wastes which formed the core of
the royal forests’ and whose main attraction was hunting.5² Richard fitz
Nigel, an important treasury official who later became bishop of
London, noted in his Dialogus de Scaccario of 1176–7 that ‘It is in the
forests too that “King’s chambers” are, and their chief delights. For they
come there, laying aside their cares now and then, to hunt, as a rest and
recreation.’5³
In 1302 several of Edward i’s staff went hunting in the castle park
at Huntington in west Herefordshire on the Welsh border and wrote
about the incident to the king. It seems to have been a ‘carefully thought-
out attempt’ to use hunting as ‘a theatrical vehicle for propaganda’.
The king’s agents were finalizing the ‘formal take-over’ of Humphrey
de Bohun’s estates and needed to ‘obtain fealty of the tenants for their
royal master’. This was an attempt ‘to use a game reserve to reinforce the
king’s new control over a power-centre of one of his great tenants-in-
chief, a place made more significant by its position on the edge of the
Welsh March’ where Edward i had been trying to impose his author-
ity for ten years. A report written for the king by one of the royal
hunters stated: ‘because there is a fine (beau) park, we hunted barren does
(deymes baraignes) therein the better to publish and solemnize your
lordship (seigneurie) and seisin before the tenants and people of the
country.’ Here, it is clear, hunting was not merely a pleasure, but seen
as a significant expression of the dominant power of Edward i in the
face of crowds of people from the area.54 The importance of royal power
over hunting in Royal Forests was to some extent mirrored by the value
that gentry placed on their ability to make parks for deer and to hunt
in them. Such parks ‘occupied a unique position in the social land-
scape as a meeting point for a variety of groups and a range of conflicting
ideas’. As hunting was ‘an activity closely associated with the assertion
of social leadership and high standing’, the enclosed parks ‘aroused
particular sensitivities in their contemporaries’ because they enabled their
owners ‘to define who was to be involved with and, just as importantly,
who was to be excluded’ from the chase.55
Hunting could continue throughout the year, although different
seasons favoured different styles of hunting and game. In the summer the
male deer was particularly favoured as they were ‘at their fattest and at

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their best for hunting, usually reckoned to be between Midsummer

(24 June) and Holyrood Day (14 September)’ – in the time of grease
(tempore pingwedino) – and this was the period when royal hunting was
most likely.56 Female deer could be hunted in the closed season for stags
and bucks, from around mid-September until early February, and other
game species at different times of the year. King John and his queen, for
example, ‘spent much of March and April 1207 moving between vari-
ous lodges and forests in central and south-western England, closely
followed by the king’s chief forest justice and master of hounds, Hugh
de Neville, and his pack’. Over 150 years later, in January and February
1367, Edward iii’s winter itinerary was partially determined by visits to
places that provided hunting.57
As we have seen at Feckenham, the ‘great enthusiasm for venery
spread far beyond a narrow court circle’ and ‘many of the nobility and
gentry were keen hunters too, despite formal royal restrictions over hunt-
ing in many forest areas.’ The poaching parson of Morton Bagot was
participating in an activity highly favoured by the great churchmen
such as Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham (1153–1195), an ‘avid’ hunter
who made complicated arrangements with tenants to provide specific
hunting services. Medieval account books show a telling diversity of
hunting accoutrements such as bows, tents, hunting horns, dogs and
hawks, and such items were frequently given as gifts. In 1304–5 ‘Henry
de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, purchased a green tent and robe for his hunt-
ing trips.’ Towards the end of the century Roger Mortimer, earl of March,
purchased ‘green hunting gowns for himself, his brother Thomas and
a group of the king’s chamber knights’ and also bought ‘a new bow, bow
strings, and gilding for his freshly sharpened hunting knife’.58
This specialized equipment and clothing is persuasive evidence of
the zest for hunting, which can indeed be seen as a form of spectacu-
lar conspicuous consumption. Enthusiasm was stoked by the need for
monarchs, lords and knights to gain the skills of riding and using bows
and arrows which for so long were central to warfare and were reinforced
by ancient classical, biblical and contemporary ideas of chivalry which
were constantly reworked in literature, ballad and song. The spectacle
of hunting, its association with military prowess and horsemanship and
the control of hunting grounds were key elements in the maintenance
of princely, royal and aristocratic power and prestige. The historian Chris
Wickham has argued that in the early medieval period the ‘symbolism
of hunting ever more clearly came to match that of royal charisma’ and

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that the dispersal of forests and hunting rights to churches and aristocrats
matched ‘the dispersal of that charisma and of royal power in general
to the aristocracy’.59 In England and Wales under the Normans it was
so important to medieval monarchs and landowners that they created
a whole body of law to allow it to function and to provide a special
landscape of forests and parks in which it might flourish.

64
 m
three
Tree Movements

H
enry Compton, who has been described as ‘something of
a rootless cavalier’, after a brief military career was bishop of
London from 1675 until his death in 1713. He is most famous
today for his role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He openly
opposed James ii’s policy of employing Roman Catholic officers in the
army and later signed the letter inviting William of Orange to England
and also helped Princess Anne, later Queen Anne, to escape from London.
The bishop of London’s summer residence from the eleventh century
until 1973 was Fulham Palace, which included a fine garden and park-
land. Earlier bishops, such as Edmund Grindal (1558–70), who is thought
to have planted the Quercus ilex which still survives (illus. 23), had
already started to collect and plant trees and shrubs here. But Compton,
who had ‘a great Genius for Botanism’, had the enthusiasm and oppor-
tunity to start collecting trees on a very extensive scale and ‘apply’d
himself to the Improvement of his Garden at Fulham, with new variety
of Domestick and Exotick Plants’. In addition he was happy to share
his knowledge and enthusiasm and showed ‘great Civilities to, and
had an Esteem for, all those who were anything curious in this sort of
Study’. John Ray in his Historia Plantarum of 1686 listed fifteen rare trees
and shrubs, many from America, in Compton’s Fulham Palace garden,
including the angelica tree and the tulip tree (illus. 23). Stephen Switzer
considered him to be ‘one of the first that encouraged the Importation,
Raising and Increase of Exotics, in which he was the most curious Man
of that Time’. Many years later, the Scottish botanist and garden designer
John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) described him as ‘the great intro-
ducer of foreign trees’ in the seventeenth century and stated that he ‘may
truly be said to have been the father of all that has been done since in
this branch of rural improvement’.¹

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

23 Quercus ilex (holm oak) at Fulham Palace, 2014.

But how did Compton manage to gather and grow so many new
trees? The answer, at least partially, is that in his role as bishop of London,
Compton was also head of the Church in the American colonies. He was
conscientious in appointing and looking after clergy in the colonies and
was able to appoint some who had a keen interest in botany. Switzer
thought that ‘by the recommendation of Chaplains into foreign Parts’
he had ‘greater opportunities of improving’. The most famous of these
collectors was John Banister (1650–1692) from Twigworth in Glouces-
tershire, who developed his interest in botany at Oxford, making use
of the collections of the Oxford Physic Garden. He moved to Virginia
in 1678 and almost immediately started to send specimens, drawings
and lists of species to Henry Compton and other enthusiasts including
John Ray and the gardener George London, who worked for Compton
and was also a member of the Temple Coffee House Botany Club. By
1690 Banister had gained almost 1,800 acres of land in Charles City
County, Virginia. He was a founder of the College of William and Mary
in Williamsburg. But he was accidentally shot by a fellow explorer while
plant collecting along the Roanoke River in May 1692. The new American
species received at Fulham Palace included Liquidambar styraciflua,

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 Tree Movements

Magnolia virginiana and Acer negundo. Compton himself died in his

eighties and there ‘were few days in the year, before the latter part of his
life, but he was actually in his Garden’ ordering the planting and care
of his trees and plants.²
From the seventeenth century onwards the spread of tree species
across the world gathered pace and many hundreds of tree species were
introduced to Europe, especially from America and Asia. Trees became
important commodities and new species had to be named, catalogued,
tested and acclimatized. The great enthusiasm for novel trees led to
the establishment of important tree collections, which from the early
nineteenth century became termed ‘arboreta’. Many of these, such as
that of Earl Somers at Eastnor Castle, were developed by keen land-
owners; others were established by botanical societies and by city
councils, as at Derby, at least partly to educate the public.

y Exotic enthusiasm
From the 1600s onwards the movement of tree species around the
world and hence the variety of trees available to be planted in gardens,
parks and plantations increased rapidly and dramatically. Four key
stimuli to horticultural and silvicultural innovation in the period
1500 to 1900 have been identified. The first of these were scientific
and technological advances such as the dissemination of botanical
knowledge through publication of classical and modern works on plants
and trees, experimentation, the work of botanical gardens, improvements
in greenhouses and the development of the Wardian case, a sealed plant
container which improved the survival rate of seedlings on lengthy
voyages. Second, there were changes in attitude and taste and in par-
ticular the importance of fashions for particular tree species and styles
of planting. Third was the development of an economic infrastructure:
the successful establishment of important nurseries in suburban London
such as Gordon at Mile End and Kennedy and Lee at Hammersmith and
the establishment of tree nurseries on private estates, which assisted
the rapid diffusion of newly introduced species. Finally there was the
enormous increase in the number of introduced species. By 1550 it is
estimated that there were 36 hardy and woody exotic species cultivated
in England: ‘by 1600, 103 species; by 1700, 239 species; by 1800, 733
species; and by 1900, 1911 species’.³ Underpinning all these factors was
the enormous growth in world trade and the associated development

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

24 John Claudius Loudon, ‘Abies Douglasii. Douglas’s Spruce Fir’,

from Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum; or, the Trees and Shrubs
of Britain . . . (1838).
25 John Claudius Loudon, ‘Platanus occidentalis. The Western,
or American, Plane’, from Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum.

of trading posts and colonies. European species were moved to Africa,

America and Australia to make settlers and traders feel at home in their
new surroundings, but far larger numbers of species were imported
into Europe to be tested for their susceptibility to frost and their
marketability as potential ornamental or timber trees.
British writers and horticulturalists were thrilled with the oppor-
tunities for profit and pleasure provided by these new trees. Mark
Catesby, another collector to send plants to Henry Compton, extolled
in his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763) the advantages of American
trees that could be ‘usefully employed to inrich and adorn our woods
by their valuable timber and delightful shade; or to embellish and
perfume our gardens with the elegance of their appearance and the
fragrancy of their odours; in both which respects they greatly excel our

68
 Tree Movements

home productions of the like kind’.4 John Claudius Loudon went so

far as to argue that ‘no residence in the modern style can have a claim
to be considered as laid out in good taste in which all the trees and
shrubs are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous
ones.’ He summarized the dates of introduction of foreign trees to the
British Islands and the principal collections of trees in the second
chapter of volume i of Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum of 1838.5
This monumental work consisted of four volumes of dense text and four
of drawings to illustrate and help identify all the different tree species
currently known to be growing successfully in Britain. It both fixed the
state of knowledge of individual trees and their movements across the
globe at a particular time and was itself instrumental in encouraging
further enthusiasm for collecting and planting new trees.
The widespread availability of popular translations of classical
authorities in the eighteenth century also helped to encourage the
planting and nurturing of trees. Virgil’s Georgics, which had become very
popular through John Dryden’s translation of 1697, ‘provided both a

26 John Claudius
Loudon, ‘Larix
Americana rubra.
Red-coned
American larch’,
from Arboretum
et Fruticetum
Britannicum.

69
 Trees, Woods and Forests

27 John Evelyn
Holding a Copy of
‘Sylva’ (1687), 1818,
engraving by
Thomas Bragg after
Sir Godfrey Kneller.

model for silviculture and an encouragement to the sort of botanical

experimentation already taking place’.6 The influence of John Evelyn’s
Sylva should not be underestimated, and although some later authors,
such as Loudon, considered that he was ‘more anxious to promote the
planting of valuable indigenous trees, than to introduce foreign ones’,
successive editions of Sylva in 1664, 1670, 1679 and 1706 extolled the
introduction of new trees. He ‘had a voracious interest in new species,
chiefly trees. Throughout his library any reference to the introduction
of new species is marked or annotated.’7
Many enthusiastic botanists, such as Samuel Reynardson (who
lived at Cedar House, Hillingdon, from 1678 until his death in 1721)
and Dr Robert Uvedale (1642–1722) of Enfield, had large collections
of exotic trees. Reynardson kept his trees mainly ‘confined to pots and
tubs, preserving them in green-houses in winter, never attempting to
naturalize them to our climate’. They were not laid out in gardens and
grounds in the form of planted arboreta.8 The growing knowledge of
introduced trees is shown by comparing Stephen Switzer’s essays in The
Practical Husbandman (1733) to his Ichonographia Rustica of 1718. In 1718
he recommended European trees such as oak, ash, beech, chestnut,

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 Tree Movements

hornbeam, Scotch pine, silver spruce, elm, lime and poplar. By 1733
Switzer was insisting that

any one that would strive to bring the raising and planting
of Forest Trees to their utmost Perfection . . . ought not to be
content with treating barely on those plants that grow at Home,
but ought by all means to endeavour at such Introduction of
foreign Trees and Plants from Climates of equal Temperature,
or (if possible) from Climates which are cooler than ours.9

The very rapid growth in the number of introduced species led to

the practical need to identify, classify and label trees so that nurserymen,
gardeners and owners could be relatively secure about which trees they
bought and sold, discussed and displayed. New trees arrived in Britain
first from Europe and Asia Minor, then in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries from eastern North America, and finally a great surge from
western North America, China, India and lastly Japan. Initially the
classification and display of trees took place in a complex paper land-
scape of trade catalogues, botanical treatises and manuscript notebooks,
descriptions taking the form of dried leaves and seeds, competing
botanical nomenclatures and drawings of flowers, seeds, leaves and
eventually whole trees. The innovative and influential binomial system
of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was central to
these classificatory debates. Philip Miller (1691–1771), curator of Chelsea
Physic Garden from 1722 until 1770 and author of The Gardeners
Dictionary, which went through eight editions between 1732 and 1768,
was for a long time reluctant to use the Linnaean system because he
thought it would confuse gardeners, but he eventually used it in the
influential eighth edition of his work, the last to be published in his
lifetime.¹0
Loudon thought that in the seventeenth century the ‘taste for foreign
plants was confined to a few, and these not the richest persons in the
community; but generally medical men, clergymen, persons holding
small situations under government, or tradesmen’. In the following cen-
tury, however, ‘the taste for planting foreign trees extended itself among
the wealthy landed proprietors’ influenced by the Dowager Princess
of Wales at Kew and by several aristocrats.¹¹ One of the most prominent
landowners with a fascination for growing and displaying introduced
trees in the eighteenth century was the Earl of Islay (later third Duke

71
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of Argyll) at Whitton on Hounslow Heath in Middlesex. The duke was

best known ‘as the personification of unionist Scotland in the first half
century after union’ but was also a keen classical scholar. He ‘had one
of the largest private libraries in western Europe’ and was seen by some
as one of the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment.¹² One of Linnaeus’s
pupils, Pehr Kalm, noted that the duke was particularly interested in
‘Dendrologie’ and visited Whitton in May 1747: ‘there was a collec-
tion of all kinds of trees, which grow in different parts of the world, and
can stand the climate of England out in the open air, summer and
winter.’ He pointed out that the duke had ‘planted very many of these
trees with his own hand’, that ‘there was here a very large number of
Cedars of Lebanon’ and that ‘Of North American Pines, Firs, Cypresses,
Thuyas’ there was ‘an abundance which throve very well’.¹³
Other key eighteenth-century arboreal enthusiasts include the ninth
Lord Petre at his estate at Thorndon in Essex and as an advisor to the
Duke of Norfolk at Worksop Manor, Nottinghamshire; the second
Duke of Richmond at Goodwood, Sussex; Lord Bathurst at Cirencester
Park, Gloucestershire; and the ninth Earl of Lincoln at Oatlands,
Surrey. The last was described by the Duke of Richmond in a letter of
1747 as ‘quite mad after planting’.¹4 An early form of plant labelling is
described by Dr Richard Pococke, who visited Lord Lincoln’s Oatlands

28 Whitton Park, Middlesex, c. 1773, engraving from Robert Goadby, A New

Display of the Beauties of England: or, a Description of the most Elegant or
Magnificent . . . Seats . . . in . . . the Kingdom (1773).

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 Tree Movements

on 29 April 1757. Visitors went down ‘a winding walk’ through shrub-

beries to a nursery ‘laid out like an elegant parterre’. Near this was
‘lately made another enclosure for all sorts of exotic plants that will
thrive abroad, with boards plac’d over them on which their names are
cut’.¹5 Some of the plantings were on a very extensive scale. A letter of
1 September 1741 from the English botanist and gardener Peter
Collinson (1694–1768) to the American botanist and explorer John
Bartram (1699–1777) notes: ‘The trees and shrubs raised from thy
first seeds, are grown to great maturity. Last year Lord petre planted
out about ten thousand Americans, which being at the same time mixed
with about twenty thousand Europeans, and some Asians, make a very
beautiful appearance.’ Moreover ‘great art and skill’ was ‘shown in con-
sulting every one’s particular growth, and the well blending the variety
of greens’.¹6 The nurseries at Thorndon were ‘the most extensive private
nurseries in the country’ and after Lord Petre’s death in 1742 at the early
age of 29 the contents of his nurseries were sold to fellow tree enthu-
siasts: the Duke of Richmond, Lord Lincoln and Sir Hugh Smithson,
later first duke of Northumberland.¹7 From the late seventeenth century
onwards well-known collections of trees on private estates were cele-
brated and much visited, but with the massive increase in tree species
in the nineteenth century it became necessary for rapidly expanding
collections to be formalized and displayed scientifically and artistically
in planned, labelled and mapped arboreta.

y Arboreta
The first clearly documented use of the term ‘arboretum’ to describe
a collection of growing trees dates from 1796, in the original plan for a
botanical garden at Glasnevin by the Dublin Society, which later became
the Royal Botanic Gardens. The arboretum was established by Walter
Wade, a medical practitioner who had published a flora of Dublin in
1794, and the head gardener, James Underwood. The garden was des-
igned to be both didactic and practical. One area was classed the ‘cattle
garden’; it included distinct sections demonstrating different types of
herbage that were ‘injurious’ or ‘wholesome’ for sheep, goats, ‘horn
cattle’, horses and swine. The ‘Hortus Linnaeus’ was strictly educational
and was divided into three sections: the herbarium, the fruticetum and
the arboretum. The arboretum was established on the higher ground and
took the form of a lengthy strip of trees along the southwestern edge

73
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of the botanical gardens. It was protected by a further ‘plantation skreen’

of trees on the outer edge of the gardens. The first catalogue lists more
than 200 species of deciduous trees in addition to around 30 species of
conifers.¹8
The regulations for planting and ordering the trees were strict. Each
had to be ‘arranged according to its Class, Order, Genus and Species’.
Moreover every tree ‘is to have a painted mark affixed to it’, which indi-
cated the number in the printed catalogue, ‘the class and order’ and
the ‘generic and specific name, all in black on a white ground, and the
English name in red’. Great care was taken to identify species accurately
and clearly in Latin and English. The arboretum was laid out to facilitate
the viewing of individual trees. There was a ‘broad gravel walk through
the centre’ of the arboretum and the grass was to be ‘kept as fine as a
bowling-green’. The specimen trees were ‘to be planted from twenty to
thirty feet apart, and where there is a very delicate or choice species,
two may be planted, lest one should fail’. The uncertain nature of the
requirements of newly introduced trees and the careful treatment they
received is shown in the planting pattern chosen. The ‘intermediate
spaces’ between the specimen trees were planted up with ‘Fir, Larch,
Laurel, Elm etc.’ for shelter, but these plants were ‘to be cut away when
they come to interfere with the Linnean plants, or are useless as nurses’.
Clear evidence of Wade’s experience of practical plantation management
and the danger when thinning trees of removing the best trees by acci-
dent is given by his stipulation that the ‘nurses be as distinct in appearance
as possible from the species they are planted to protect, as Deciduous
for Evergreens, and vice versa.’ So here, in the first place to be given that
name, we can see that arboreta were from the start a combination of plan-
tation, which usually consisted of a few varieties of trees, and botanical
garden. Arboreta were Enlightenment projects that struggled to produce
some sort of order and structure from the hundreds of new trees that
circulated around the world and accumulated in collections. They were
pedagogical sites that were usually linked with printed sources, such as
guidebooks and catalogues, which informed visitors of the potential of
the new species for enjoyment and commercial enterprise.¹9
Arboreta became especially popular from the 1830s as an ideal
way to grow trees in larger private and public gardens, estate parks and
botanical gardens. John Claudius Loudon is the person most strongly
linked with the concept, but other gardeners and landscape gardeners
were promoting the idea during the first decades of the century. George

74
29 Thomas Sherrard, ‘A Survey of the Botanic Garden at Glasnevin in the County
of Dublin’, 1800, from Transactions of the Dublin Society (1801).
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Sinclair, head gardener at the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey, under

the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
enthusiastically recommended their widespread introduction. For
Sinclair, the ‘interest arising from the adoption of foreign trees into dom-
estic scenery’ was ‘not confined to their picturesque effects’. Introduced
trees reminded people ‘of the climes whence they come’ and the ‘scenes
with which they were associated’. In exploring ‘a well-selected arboretum’,
he felt that the ‘eternal snows of the Himalaya, the savannahs of the
Missouri, the untrodden forests of Patagonia, the vallies of Lebanon,
pass in review before us: we seem to wander in other climes, to converse
with other nations’.²0
Arboreta were likened to ‘living museums’ and were places where
trials of new plants and experiments to discover the best growing con-
ditions were undertaken. Arboretum staff sometimes aimed to replicate
in microcosm the originating sites, and arboreta might be divided by
taxonomy, climate, zone or geography. However, unlike laboratories,
museums or glasshouse collections, arboreta were vulnerable to climatic
and seasonal conditions and, in the context of rapidly industrializing
Victorian society, the dire effects of air pollution. George Nicholson,
curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, produced during the
1880s a guide to the different kinds of trees and shrubs that could be
planted in various conditions, including chalky, clay, sandy and peaty
soils, marshy and boggy conditions and waterside. Tree collections in
urban areas presented their own special problems and in his selection
of trees and shrubs that could be ‘best calculated to withstand the smoke
and chemical impurities of atmosphere’ within manufacturing towns,
Nicholson tried to distinguish between those best adapted to withstand
the industrial conditions of northern, Midland and southern towns.
Across the vast expanses of the usa and Canada the variations were even
more marked. Charles Sargent divided the North American continent
from Arctic periphery to Mexican border into nine fundamentally dif-
ferent ‘tree regions’, defined according to the ‘prevailing character of
aborescent vegetation’.²¹
As the nineteenth century progressed, the movement of tree species
around the world increased, with large numbers of new ‘discoveries’
made by European and American collectors. In the early twentieth
century William Jackson Bean, curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew, when writing his comprehensive treatise on hardy British trees and
shrubs, noted the ‘enormous number of new species’ that had become

76
 Tree Movements

available for cultivation since Loudon’s day through the activities of

collectors such as William Lobb (1809–1864) in Chile and California
and Robert Fortune (1812–1880) in Japan and China. Chinese varieties
proved particularly challenging given that many remained unclassified
or unnamed, while the designation of ‘hardy’ was difficult to apply as it
depended upon gardening taste, economic value and experience. Neither
were systems of nomenclature necessarily secure. By the early 1900s, par-
ticularly in Europe and the usa, attempts to subdivide species, genera
and natural orders had become so prevalent that Bean feared it would
‘involve such confusion and readjustment of nomenclature as to render
its acceptance by cultivators’ in Britain highly unlikely.²² Disagreements
concerning nomenclature were particularly evident where names cele-
brated political figures, nations or empires that were not universally
popular, and there were ‘numerous and perplexing’ differences between
‘European and American authorities’ concerning the names of Coniferae.²³
These changes of names and classifications, in addition to the increase
in the number of known species, made the role of arboreta in identify-
ing, classifying and growing trees more important as well as more difficult.
Arboreta took many forms. Some, such as those at Eastnor Castle in
Herefordshire, Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire and Westonbirt in Glouces-
tershire, were the products of the wealth, enthusiasm and hard work of
successive generations of enthusiastic landowners and their gardeners
and staff. Sometimes these followed precise and careful plans, but often
they grew in an informal way, creeping over a large landed estate in the
form of clumps of cedars, groves of American or Japanese trees and
avenues of exotic pines. The rapid spread of new trees and shrubs into
English arboreta is demonstrated at Eastnor Castle (illus. 30), where until
the 1850s planting had been dominated by North and South American
varieties, especially from California and New Mexico. These new intro-
ductions were tested by harsh winters and could fail. For example a hard
winter in 1860–61 resulted in the destruction of 150 Pinus insignis and
130 Cupressus macrocarpa, which had reached heights of between 8 and
40 feet before they were killed by the frosts. It was soon found that some
of the more tender trees that did not survive in the frost hollows at
Eastnor could survive at higher elevations. After this very bad winter,
the more tender species began to be replaced by specimens from Japan
collected by John Gould Veitch and Robert Fortune, which seemed
to cope with the harsh winters and the bad spring frosts to which, the
gardener William Coleman noted, Eastnor was particularly prone. By the

77
 Trees, Woods and Forests

30 Eastnor Castle
Arboretum,
Herefordshire,
2014.

later nineteenth century the arboretum became well known for holding
one of the best private collections of conifers in Britain. A visitor noted
in 1888 that the park scenery was ‘of the greatest beauty and grandeur’
and that ‘the wealth of conifers planted both as individuals and in groups
was almost unique in this country.’ The owner of the estate, Earl Somers,
was particularly keen on cedars and had fine examples of the Japanese
cedar Cryptomeria japonica, ‘beautiful thriving specimens of Cedar of
Lebanon’ and a ‘fine Mount Atlas Cedar’ 50 feet in height which, ‘like
many others here to be met with’, had been raised from seeds gathered
by Earl Somers on Mount Atlas around 1859.²4
Another type of arboretum was established by horticultural and
botanical societies which followed in the tradition of that founded
in Dublin in 1796. Local and national botanical, scientific and horti-
cultural societies such as those at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cork, Hull,
Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham promoted botanical study
by forming arboreta that were available to members and the public on

78
 Tree Movements

various conditions. However, while these arboreta were intended for

scientific societies, arguments often arose concerning the relative merits
of aesthetics and botany. These were driven by the need to retain subscrip-
tion income. The first English arboretum was established in the gardens
of the Horticultural Society at Turnham Green in London from 1826. This
was influential as it was visited by thousands of members, subscribers and
their guests each year and also served as the most important centre for
training gardeners and labourers. The arboretum was laid out by William
Atkinson, who had assisted Sir Walter Scott in the landscaping of his
gardens at Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders. Although established by
a national scientific association with the important nurseryman George
Loddiges sitting on the planning committee, the design of the Horticultural
Society gardens was inspired more by aesthetics than taxonomy.²5
The Horticultural Society was dependent upon the subscriptions
of members and donations from patrons and therefore had to accommo-
date their wishes. Trees were arranged as ‘clumps irregularly disposed upon
turf ’ with further ornamental plants on the grass, while through the
centre ran a canal supplied by a well in which aquatic plants were grown.
The arrangement was admitted to be ‘not systematic’, although species of
each genus were arranged ‘as much as possible in the immediate vicinity

31 William Atkinson, Plan of the Arboretum in the Garden of the Horticultural

Society at Chiswick, March 1826 (1826).

79
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of each other’ to afford ‘comparative examination’. The whole of the

eastern sides consisted of separate groups of oak and elm plantations
in front of a long strip that also included oaks and elms, while paths
surrounded but did not traverse the arboretum.²6 The emphasis upon
aesthetics rather than botanical principles was criticized by John Claudius
Loudon, who noted that although the arboretum was the first of its
kind in England, it was ‘to be regretted’ that the ‘trees and shrubs were
chiefly crowded together’ in large, rectilinear clumps, which had ‘sub-
sequently never been sufficiently thinned out’, rather than around a
circumference of the buildings. As a result of this, ‘the different kinds
have not had an equal chance of displaying themselves, or of attaining
that magnitude and character which they ought to have to answer the
ends of an arboretum.’²7
For Loudon the Horticultural Society garden was ‘most defective in
its general arrangement’ and offered a ‘want of grandeur and unity of
effect as a whole, and of connection and convenience in the parts’.²8 He
initially felt that the layout was ‘so bad’ that it could not be improved and
should be ‘totally obliterated’. But the trees were ‘thriving’ by 1833 and
many of them had ‘now achieved a considerable size’, though this suc-
cess caused a problem common to all tree collections, namely that the
trees became too big for their situation. He noted that ‘in most of the
clumps they are crowding each other, so that the characteristic forms
of individual species will soon be lost.’ He thought that if instead they
had been planted widely spaced the public could have gained useful
knowledge of the ‘forms, colours, and effect in the landscape’ of dif-
ferent species. His critique was devastating: there was ‘no thinking
gardener’ who could not foresee that soon ‘this arboretum will become
nearly useless for every purpose of the garden artist.’²9
Loudon was able to put his own ideas into practice when he designed
the Derby Arboretum, which opened in 1840 and was one of the first
especially designed Victorian public parks. This arboretum was backed
by the Strutts, the wealthiest Nonconformist manufacturing family in
the region, and can be seen as a political counterpart to the aristocratic
arboreta established nearby at Chatsworth and Elvaston. Unlike these,
it was open freely to members of the public for two days a week. In en-
couraging the foundation of other public parks and arboreta, the Derby
Arboretum helped to set the pattern for Victorian public urban parks,
although it remained only a semi-public institution. The political,
rational and recreational objectives of the Arboretum were emphasized

80
 Tree Movements

32 Nottingham Arboretum in a postcard of c. 1900. It was opened in 1852.

by Joseph Strutt in his speech at the opening ceremony in September

1840. It was a utilitarian venture, designed to be instructional, to improve
the environment and to give pleasure to the citizens of Derby and else-
where. Loudon specified that the tree species should be widely spaced
and that once trees had become too big for their place, they should be
removed. They were to be clearly labelled and many of the trees were
placed on long, low mounds of earth to help create an illusion of size
by obscuring walkers from each other on adjacent paths and helping to
disguise boundaries. However, given that the mounds were not high
enough to do this, their main function seems to have been to help
demonstrate specimen forms and root systems.
The local perception of the value of Derby Arboretum was made
clear by the Unitarian minister Noah Jones, who preached Joseph
Strutt’s funeral oration in 1844. The Arboretum, he said, was a ‘noble
gift’ which would enhance the ‘rational social pleasures of mankind’,
especially the ‘toilworn artisan’, encouraging him to work with greater
diligence.³0 Health commissioners in 1845 considered that the park had
‘already produced a perceptible effect in improving the appearance and
demeanour of the working classes, and it has, doubtless, conferred an equal
benefit upon their health’. It was argued that ‘the most cursory’ under-
standing of the life of the working classes would convince anyone of ‘the
immense advantages, moral and physical, that must accrue to the

81
 Trees, Woods and Forests

inhabitants of closely-built towns by the establishment of public parks

. . . and gardens like that presented to the town of Derby’.³¹ A Derby
Mercury editorial of 1851 thought that it was ‘scarcely possible to over-
estimate the benefit which so large a space of ground for air and exercise
is capable of conferring upon a dense population’.³²
Foreign visitors were also very impressed by this first public
arboretum. Charles Mason Hovey, who owned a nursery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and edited the Magazine of Horticulture, visited it in the
autumn of 1844 and thought it the best he had seen in England, Scotland
and France. He noted that there were no weeds, the flower garden was
flourishing and the tree labels were in full order. He considered that
Loudon’s and Strutt’s example should be followed, as ‘we know of
no object so well deserving the attention of men of wealth than the
formation of public gardens free to all in crowded towns or cities.’³³ The
influential American landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing
thought it a ‘noble bequest’ that was ‘in beautiful order’ and ‘evidently
much enjoyed’ not only by locals but by strangers from the country
around. He met ‘numbers of young people strolling about and enjoy-
ing the promenade’, with nurses and children gaining strength from
the fresh air, while amateur botanists would carefully read the labels of
the various trees and shrubs and make notes in memorandum books.
Thus, in Downing’s view, ‘the most perfect novice in trees’ could, by
walking around the Arboretum, obtain in a short time ‘a very consid-
erable knowledge of arboriculture while problems of identification and
classification could be solved by observation of living specimens’.
Shortly after his return to America in 1850, he set to work on a design
for extensive public grounds in Washington which incorporated many
of the ideas he had seen in Europe and included a garden of American
trees and a living ‘museum’ of evergreens. He also urged the creation
of a large park in New York. Downing considered that Derby Arboretum
was ‘one of the most useful and instructive public gardens in the world’.³4
The movement of trees, expertise, botanical theories and knowledge
between British, European and North American tree collections and
arboreta was complicated and reciprocal. America provided a major
source of exotic specimens planted on both sides of the Atlantic, and
American botanists utilized their knowledge of American natural history
to inform British botany and travelled between the two nations, main-
taining contacts with scientific communities. American garden cemeteries
such as Mount Auburn became well known in Britain while American

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 Tree Movements

landscape gardeners such as Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted

travelled to Europe and made special studies of British institutions,
horticulture and parks. British models for parks and arboreta were
adopted that exploited the spaces and natural resources of the growing
American empire. Rapid American economic growth, growing polit-
ical and imperial power and urbanized population demands for leisure
and education encouraged the formation of multiple national and
urban parks. One result was the creation of more arboreta than any other
country by the early twentieth century, many of which were associ-
ated with scientific and educational institutions, such as the Arnold
Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts. In Britain, by comparison, the
idea of the arboretum became faded and old-fashioned and in 1961
Evelyn Waugh was able to identify it as pretentious:

He faced, across half an acre of lawn, what the previous owners

had called their ‘arboretum’. Ludovic thought of it merely as
‘the trees’. Some were deciduous and had now been stripped
bare by the east wind that blew from the sea, leaving the

33 Thomas Chambers, Mount Auburn Arboretum, Massachusetts, mid-19th

century, oil on canvas.

83
 Trees, Woods and Forests

holm oaks, yews, and conifers in carefully contrived patterns,

glaucous, golden and of a green so deep as to be almost black at
that sunless noon . . .³5

y The Japanese larch in Britain

As areas of the world were opened up to trade in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the range of new species of tree that could be tested
for growth in Britain rapidly expanded. British landowners and foresters
began to expect and demand novel trees that could be established on
their estates and supplement the trees that they already grew. We can
examine the cultural appropriation of a new species through the case
of the Japanese larch. In the late nineteenth century the fashion for
Japanese plants and gardens spread throughout Europe and the United
States, part of a larger cultural moment that included the vogue for
design, arts and crafts known as ‘Japonisme’.³6 Japan was increasingly
identified in Britain as a global partner, with a comparable imperial
history and interest in horticulture. Japanese gardens were displayed in
many international exhibitions and there was extensive coverage in the
popular press, including the numerous illustrated garden magazines.
This led to a flourishing export market in mature plants, bulbs and stone
ornaments. In Japan large export nurseries were established, such as L.
Boehmer’s and the Yokohama Nursery Company. British-based nurseries
stocked an increasing range of Japanese plants and ornaments, as did
the leading Arts and Crafts design store Liberty’s of London, which
advertised Japanese stone lanterns.³7
Before 1858, when Japan opened three treaty ports to the West, it
had been largely secluded from the world from the early seventeenth
century, except through links with the Netherlands and China via the
artificial island of Dejima at Nagasaki. Most plant introductions and
knowledge in Europe about Japanese plants arose through Dutch trad-
ing connections. The botanical writing and descriptions of Engelbert
Kaempfer (1712, 1727), Carl Peter Thunberg (1784) and Philip Franz
von Siebold (1850) played a major role in raising expectations about the
new plants that could be found once trade took place more regularly.³8
The European collectors derived much of their knowledge from collect-
ing plants, botanizing with local experts and consulting texts, illustrations
and herbaria written, drawn and collected by them.³9 Early Victorians
therefore had some tantalizing knowledge about the diverse flora of

84
 Tree Movements

Japan and also had considerable experience from earlier introductions

of the likely potential of Japanese plants in British gardens and parks. It
was, however, only after 1858, when Japan opened three treaty ports to
the West, that British collectors and horticultural traders were able to
experience the Japanese landscape at first hand and exploit fully the
commercial potential of its trees and shrubs.
Western names were applied to plants that already had established
Japanese botanical and horticultural names, although these latter were
also used by Western nurseries to reinforce the exoticism of newly intro-
duced Japanese plants. The Japanese name for Larix leptolepis is frequently
given as karamatsu,40 although in the important Japanese plant encyclo-
paedia Kai (1763) this larch is given three different names: Kin sen shou,
Fuji matsu and Nikko matsu. The first name refers to the golden colour
of the autumn foliage, while ‘Fuji’ and ‘Nikko’ are both areas where
the tree grows naturally and matsu means pine. The tree is described as
having a thick, scaly bark similar to the Japanese white pine. It is noted
that after frost the needles fall, and the golden autumn colour of these
needles is particularly praised (illus. 34).4¹ The tree had a limited distribu-
tion, mainly at altitudes of between 1,000 and 1,400 metres, especially
on dry, volcanic soils. The main natural stands were found in central
Honshu, particularly in Yamanashi Prefecture, including the slopes of
Mount Fuji. But larch had long been planted in northern Honshu and
many more plantations were made in southern and central Hokkaido
after colonization.4² The Japanese larch, though known to Kaempfer and
Thunberg in the eighteenth century and mentioned by Lambert, was first
described by Lindley in 1833. The tree was included in Siebold and
Zuccarini’s Flora Japonica (1843) and illustrated with a spray of twigs and
needles, and cones with details of the needles and seeds, but it was not
actually grown in Britain until the 1860s.4³
John Gould Veitch (1839–1870), a leading British plant collector,
arrived in Japan in 1860. He worked for his family company at the
Royal and Exotic Nurseries based in Exeter and Chelsea. The Gardeners’
Chronicle of 15 December 1860 reported that ‘Japan stands pre-eminent’
as a place where the ‘vegetation is vigorous, and little known’. It had
a ‘climate like that of England, and a half Siberian or Himalayan and
half Chinese Flora’ and ‘offers the greatest inducement to Europeans
to investigate its productions’.44 In September 1860 Veitch discov-
ered what he called Abies leptolepis with three other conifers, and his
climbing companion, the diplomat Rutherford Alcock, reported that

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34 ‘Kin sen shou’,

illustration of 1763
from Shimada
Mitsufusa and Ono
Ranzan, Ka-i
(1759–63).

it grew ‘at an elevation of 8,000 to 8,500 feet on Mount Fusiyama’. He

thought it was ‘remarkable as being the tree which grows at the great-
est elevation on this mountain’. They found some specimens 40 feet high
but ‘on ascending the mountain’ it ‘dwindles down to a bush of 3 feet’.
He noted that the ‘Japanese name is Fusi matsu’.45 Initially there was
confusion as to whether the Japanese larch discovered by Veitch was the
same species as the Larix leptolepis described by earlier botanists. The
Gardeners’ Chronicle of 12 January 1861 noted that the cones described
in Siebold and Zuccarini were ‘four times larger than those sent home
by Mr Veitch’ and that ‘there is some doubt whether his plant is not dis-
tinct’. Elwes and Henry stated that ‘A stunted form, growing on the
higher parts of Fuji-yama, was collected by John Gould Veitch, and
was considered to be a new species by A. Murray; and is recognised as
a variety by Sargent.’46 They provided eight different botanical names
for the Japanese larch,47 eventually plumping for L. leptolepis, as ‘it is
the name by which this species is universally known’. They argued that
the use of L. kaempferi, as proposed by Sargent, ‘would cause great

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confusion, as this has been used for Pseudo-larix Kaempferi, the golden
larch of China’.48
The difficulties over naming the newly imported tree did not hinder
its appreciation by foresters and landowners. Although few trees were
established from the seeds collected by Veitch in 1861, trees grown from
other seeds ‘grew so well generally that it is now being planted almost
everywhere, and some of the older trees have produced good seed for ten
years or more’. Elwes was keen to assess the growing conditions and uses
of the tree in Japan and its suitability as a tree for forestry plantations.
He saw the trees growing in volcanic soils in Japan in 1904 and thought
they ‘were very similar in habitat to the larch in the Alps, and had not
an excessive development of branches’. He noted that the timber was
used for ‘ship- and boat-building’ and ‘railway sleepers and telegraph
poles’. The plantations in Japan were also closely connected to the
demands of modern development. Elwes saw many young plantations
which ‘were very similar to larch plantations in England in growth and
habit. I also saw it planted experimentally in Hokkaido, along the lines
of railway, where it seemed to grow as well in this rich black soil as in
its native mountains.’49
The tree became very popular in Britain and was ‘looked upon
by many foresters as likely to replace the common larch’. No recently
introduced conifer had ‘attracted so much attention among foresters as
the Japanese larch, which, during the last ten years, has been sown very
largely by nurserymen’. Elwes himself successfully sowed seeds col-
lected from trees from three different British estates in 1890 and after
six years they had grown to 4–8 feet in height. In his view the Japanese
larch had three main advantages. First, its establishment as a plantation
at 1,250 feet in Scotland, where it grew ‘very vigorously in mixture
with Douglas fir’, showed it to be hardy. Second, it appeared to be
immune from the canker Peziza willkommii, which affected European
larch. Henry examined in 1904 ‘six plantations of Japanese larch of
ages from five to sixteen years, and in none could detect any sign of
canker’. Third, it was a vigorous tree suitable for economic plantations,
as it grew in its first twenty years quicker than European larch, although
it appeared to have ‘a great tendency to form spreading branches’.50 By
the mid-twentieth century Japanese larch had become ‘one of the
most important exotics planted in Britain’ with about 14 million
seedlings planted annually, a number exceeded only by Sitka spruce
and Scots pine.5¹

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

The movement of Japanese larch to Britain demonstrates how there

were often several stages in the reception and transculturation of a new
tree as it was named, collected, transported, acclimatized and natural-
ized. The stage when new trees were conceptualized as exotic can itself
be recognized as one form of enculturation. A second stage is when
the tree became ‘culturally assimilated’. At this stage the trees are not
physically changed or modified, but they have been grown long
enough to demonstrate that they are well adapted to live in the open
air, and propagate well enough to become common plants in Britain.
A key factor in allowing a plant to become culturally assimilated is its
hardiness. Hardy plants were useful for ornamental and commercial
planting in existing gardens, parks and woods; they became common in
the British landscape and were no longer seen as exotic. In some cases
there was a third stage of physical hybridization. The crossing of exotic
and native species of plants was one way to produce new varieties of
plants; sometimes, however, hybridization occurred naturally. Larix
leptolepis became culturally assimilated through its economic timber
value and eventually became physically hybridized with the European
larch at Dunkeld in Scotland to produce L. eurolepis, which itself
became an important commercial tree species.
In 2003 the National Inventory of Woodland and Trees showed that
the three larch species together formed about 10 per cent of coniferous
woodland in Britain and 5 per cent of all woodland. The same year the
Forestry Commission reported on a breeding scheme to improve the
genetic quality of larch and noted that both European and Japanese larch
were ‘popular with foresters’ and had gained ‘a reputation as a good
nurse for hardwood species; casting a light shade so allowing ground vege-
tation to persist; a degree of fire tolerance and high amenity value’. The
timber was ‘valued for good durability’ and was used ‘in the manufacture
of outdoor furniture, bridges and fences as well as boatbuilding’. This
report noted that the ‘Japanese variety was observed to generally grow
faster than its European counterpart, although with perhaps poorer stem
form, and showed little sign of shoot canker which can be a problem’
for European larch.
This promising position, however, was very soon to change, for in
February 2002 five container-grown plants of the well-known garden
shrub Viburnum tinus ‘Eve Price’ from a garden centre in West Sussex
were spotted by Defra Plant Health and Seeds Inspectors to be suffer-
ing from ‘severe aerial dieback, stem base discoloration and partial root

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 Tree Movements

decay’. One plant was sent to be tested and was found to be infected
by the fungus-like pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, which was formerly
unknown in Britain. It is not known where the pathogen originated,
though there is some evidence that it is native to Asia. Once the pathogen
was known to exist in Britain it was searched for and found to be infect-
ing a wide range of exotic garden shrubs, including rhododendrons,
camellias and viburnums, but in 2008 it was also found to be infecting
the bilberry Vaccinium myrtillus, a native plant of considerable conser-
vation importance and characteristic of moorland and heathland. Until
2009 very few trees had been affected by the disease, and these were
mainly ornamental conifers growing in gardens or trees growing close
to infected stands of the common Rhododendron ponticum, which was
in the past widely planted in woodland as cover for game. But in August
2009 many thousands of Japanese larch trees in southwest England were
discovered to be infected by the disease. The Forestry Commission note
that this was ‘the first time it had been found causing lethal infection (in
the form of stem cankers) on a commercially important conifer species
anywhere in the world’. The disease was later confirmed in European
larch (L. decidua) in Cornwall in March 2011 and has also been found
in young Douglas fir of about five to ten years of age.5²
Suddenly, the whole future of Japanese larch, which had developed
into a welcome and secure additional British timber tree, was thrown
into doubt. The name ‘Phytophthora’ comes from the Greek for ‘plant
destroyer’ and it is one of the most destructive genera of plant pathogens.
It was soon discovered that ‘Japanese larch can produce very high quan-
tities of disease-carrying spores when actively growing in spring and
summer, at much higher levels than those produced by rhododendron.’
Phytophthora ramorum can spread rapidly over long distances and the
wet and damp atmosphere of western Britain encourages this spread. The
Forestry Commission notes that the disease can be spread ‘by animals
and possibly also by birds, as well as on footwear, vehicle wheels, and
machinery and equipment used in forests’. In addition to infecting larch
needles, the disease infects the tree’s bark, resulting in dieback and the
death of the tree. This takes place very rapidly and the disease is known
to kill trees ‘within one growing season after its presence is first detectable’.
The main symptoms of the disease are the wilting of the tips of the
shoots, premature shedding of the blackened needles and the develop-
ment of bleeding cankers on the upper trunk and branches. As no cure
has been found, the only treatment is for owners to cut down all infected

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

larch trees as quickly as possible. Many thousands of acres of larch

have been felled.5³
The movement of trees around the world has brought enormous
benefits. Gardens and parks are more diverse and varied and we can
touch, smell, study and enjoy trees from across the globe. The range
of trees available for commercial timber production has been greatly
enhanced. But there are also some negative and even dangerous conse-
quences. The excitement about the beauty of exotic trees can soon turn
to hackneyed acceptance. Popular garden trees in Europe such as the
American false acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia) can invade the countryside,
damage valuable conservation woodlands and prove almost impossible
to eradicate. Extensive monocultures of introduced eucalyptus and
spruce may irreversibly destroy important wildlife habitats. Perhaps most
dangerous, however, is the modern way of moving nursery stock around
the world. Foreign trees used to be grown from seeds and cuttings;
nowadays they are more likely to be moved around from country to
country as growing individuals in containers. This allows diseases such
as Phytophthora ramorum and Chalara fraxinea, which causes ash dieback,
to spread rapidly with disastrous consequences.

90
 m
four
Tree Aesthetics

T
he more adventurous British travellers to Italy started to visit
Sicily in the eighteenth century and one of the first and most
influential British guides to the island was Patrick Brydone’s
tour of Sicily, published in 1773. This was based on a visit he made in
1770 and it aroused controversy, since his interpretation of the local
priest and eminent naturalist Giuseppe Recupero’s observations on the
layers of lava suggested that the lowest strata must be at least 14,000
years old, considerably older than what was then the accepted age of
the Earth. Dr Johnson thought that if ‘Brydone were more attentive
to his Bible, he would be a good traveller’. Brydone was also an obser-
vant commentator on society and natural history. When climbing Etna,
following breakfast at Piedmonte, they rode on mules through ‘some
beautiful woods of cork and ever-green oak, growing absolutely out of
the lava, the soil having as yet hardly filled the crevices of that porous
substance’, and eventually reached ‘the great chesnut-trees’, many ‘of
an enormous size; but the Castagno de Cento Cavalli is by much the
most celebrated’. Brydone had found it ‘marked in an old map of Sicily,
published near an hundred years ago; and in all the maps of Ætna, and
its environs, it makes a very conspicuous figure’. But he was disappointed
and ‘by no means struck with its appearance, as it does not seem to be
one tree, but a bush of five large trees growing together’.
Brydone complained to his guides that this was not a true single tree,
but they ‘unanimously assured us, that by the universal tradition and
even testimony of the country, all these were once united in one stem’.
The British party then ‘began to examine it with more attention’ and
found that ‘there was indeed an appearance as if these five trees had really
been united in one’ as there was ‘no appearance of bark on the inside
of any of the stumps’. They measured it to be ‘204 feet round’ and

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

thought that ‘if this was once united in one solid stem’, it must have
been ‘looked upon as a very wonderful phænomenon in the vegetable
world.’ Moreover, he was subsequently told by the ‘ingenious ecclesi-
astic of this place’ Giuseppe Recupero that when he had paid for
‘peasants with tools to dig round the Castagno de Cento Cavalli’ he
found that ‘all these stems united below ground in one root.’ Brydone
noted several other huge chestnut trees nearby and thought that the
size of the trees was encouraged by the ‘vast quantity of nitre’ in the
‘thick rich soil’ formed from ‘ashes thrown out by the mountain’ and
‘the smoke of the volcano’, which ‘must create a constant supply of this
salt, termed by some, not without reason, the food of vegetables’. That
the tree was once an important supplier of chestnuts was indicated by
the ‘ruins of a house inside of the great chesnut-tree which had been
built for holding the fruit it bears’, where the party ‘dined with excellent
appetite’.¹
Seven years after Brydone’s visit the young, wealthy connoisseur
and tree enthusiast Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824) left Rome on
an expedition to Sicily with the German landscape painter Jakob Philipp
Hackert and the wealthy amateur painter Charles Gore, who later lived
at Weimar and became a great friend of Goethe.² Knight was on his
second visit to Italy, while his extraordinary new gothic castle at Downton
(1772–8) was being built near Ludlow, and travelling with the land-
scape artist John Robert Cozens. The aim of the trip was to record
and measure the Greek temples, but they also climbed to the crater of
Etna. Knight intended to publish his account of the journey with illus-
trations, but this was not completed, and it was not until 1980 that
Claudia Stumpf rediscovered the original English text at Weimar. On
1 June 1777 Knight’s party went a few miles out of the way to ‘see the
famous Chesnut-trees in which we were much disappointed’. The tree
called ‘la Castagna di cento Cavalli’ was ‘not a single tree but a groupe,
and the rest, tho’ very large, are all Pollards very low and much muti-
lated’. Knight noted acidly that in ‘Sicily they might be looked upon
as wonders, as a great part of the Inhabitants never saw a tree larger than
a Dwarf Olive’ but to people like him ‘who have been used to the
noble Oaks of England, they are very contemptible objects’.³
Unfortunately there is no surviving drawing by Knight’s travelling
companions Gore or Hackert of this tree, but Jean-Pierre Houël made
one at roughly the same time which shows the chestnut barn within
the tree.4 What is clear from the descriptions of the two British visitors

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 Tree Aesthetics

is that their aesthetic ideal of a worthy tree was one that had a large
single stem and which had considerable height. Brydone was clearly
relieved when he received the evidence from his friend Recupero that
the peasants’ excavations indicated that the tree had a single root, but
his initial lack of enthusiasm upon coming upon this clump of five
trees rather than one single stem remains dominant. In addition, the
accounts show that the ideal tree should not be tampered with by human
activity, should not be ‘mutilated’ by pollarding or cropping; such trees
had no right to be called ‘wonders’ but were merely ‘contemptible
objects’.
But how can this contempt for the mutilated pollard be squared with
the enthusiasm shown by painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Thomas
Gainsborough, whose representations of such trees gained great popu-
larity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? To understand this
apparent anomaly we need to consider the relationship between art
and trees and the influence of specific artists on the aesthetic interpre-
tations of trees. This relationship provides a context for the popularity
of the Picturesque in the eighteenth century. Authors such as William
Gilpin and Uvedale Price encouraged the celebration and enjoyment
of ancient, crooked trees in remnant areas of wood pasture and common
and old pollarded willows growing along rivers. Price was particularly
influential in encouraging delight in old, rugged, even decaying trees.
He was concerned that new plantings and woods, including intro-
duced species, should fit in with the existing landscape, and his ideas
were taken up by William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and many other
influential nineteenth-century figures.

y Drawing and painting trees

Early representations of trees in paintings are generalized, with little
indication of the species of tree concerned. The form of the tree is,
however, quite frequently indicated and it is possible to distinguish
fairly clearly whether a tree has been pollarded. One of the earliest rep-
resentations of cut trees is from a thirteenth-century Latin text on the
Welsh Laws which shows both coppiced and shredded trees.5 The series
of paintings in the illuminated manuscript Très riches heures, made for Jean,
Duc de Berry, in 1411–16 are some of the earliest true-to-life landscape
paintings showing trees. Most of the trees, whether pollards growing along
a river or next to a pool, trees in a wood with a man wielding an axe next

93
 Trees, Woods and Forests

35 Limbourg brothers, ‘December’, from the Très riches heures of the Duc de
Berry, 1411–16.

to a pile of faggots or dense trees surrounding a woodland clearing used

for hunting, indicate careful management. In most cases, however, the
tree species are not identifiable, although the pollards adjoining water
are most likely willows and the greyish bark and dense covering of brown
leaves on the floor of the wood in the hunting scene are reminiscent of
a beech wood. The wonderful image of pigs eating acorns on the edge
of a dense wood shows that the trees must be oaks, although they would
be unidentifiable were it not for the carefully depicted acorns.6
Although trees are important features of many Renaissance paint-
ings and drawings, most are not identifiable as individual species. One

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 Tree Aesthetics

of the earliest artists to draw recognizable tree species was Albrecht Dürer
(1471–1528), who made several drawings from nature of trees near to
his home in Nuremberg. In c. 1497 he painted one of his finest water-
colours, a study of a single spruce tree (Picea abies), which is thought to
have been made in the 1490s on his return home from northern Italy,
where he had been influenced by such artists as Mantegna and Bellini
(illus. 69). The tree is painted as an individual subject with no background
landscape, and Dürer brilliantly captures the colour and form of an
individual spruce. This is an example of one of his drawings from nature,
which he used to help design landscape backgrounds for his various
paintings and woodcuts. Another watercolour of a similar date is the
enigmatic study of water, sky and pine trees characteristic of the land-
scape near Nuremburg. This again clearly depicts a specific tree species,
the pine (Pinus sylvestris), with its dark blue-green foliage and reddish
bark, but here the trees are in a group and set within a landscape con-
text of sandy soil and a pool. The watercolour is probably unfinished and
the odd group of truncated trees adds a sense of desolation to this atmos-
pheric portrayal of trees in a landscape. It is likely that some of Dürer’s
work had an influence on the German printmaker and painter Albrecht
Altdorfer (1482/5–1538), who also depicted identifiable trees in his
novel and experimental landscape etchings of around 1520–21. It has
been argued that his ‘success in rendering a sense of airy atmosphere in

36 Albrecht Dürer, Pine Trees, c. 1497, watercolour and bodycolour.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

37 Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Spruce and Two Willows, 1520–21, etching.

his landscape etchings is quite unlike anything to be seen in Dürer’s work’

but his depiction of trees is less assured. In his Landscape with Spruce and
Two Willows the tree species are identifiable more from the form of
their trunks than their foliage: the two willows have both been recently
pollarded and have fresh regrowth, and their lush and artificial form
contrasts with the central trunk of the spruce.7 One of the most remark-
ably realistic scenes of a woodland interior is by the Flemish artist Pieter
Bruegel the Elder and is dated to the mid-sixteenth century (1540– 69).
This shows a family of seven bears around what appears to be their lair
in the roots of a tree. The woodland consists of a mixture of standard
deciduous trees with several coppiced trees in the middle distance. The
range of tree forms is splendidly captured, as are details such as the
single live stem growing from the otherwise decaying and hollow tree
to the left; but the tree species cannot be guessed.
Art historians argue that one of the greatest achievements of Dutch
artists of the seventeenth century was making landscapes acceptable
as serious art by patrons, collectors and the cognoscenti. Although
Rembrandt is not best known for his landscapes, several of his drawings,
paintings and etchings contain evocative representations of trees. His
St Jerome beside a Pollard Willow of 1648 was entertainingly described

96
38 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Woodland Scene with Bears, 1540–69, pen and brown
ink over black chalk.
 Trees, Woods and Forests

in 1932 as a ‘tree study with Saint Jerome thrown in’. The tree certainly
appears to be drawn carefully from nature, with the bark growing back
over the damaged trunk and the young branches sprouting from cut
boughs. Marijn Schapelhouman questions this and argues that one
‘certainly cannot rule out the possibility that Rembrandt simply “made
up” his pollarded willow’, and also emphasizes how St Jerome ‘is part
of a coherent triangular composition’ although the ‘melancholy lion
[that] looks out at the viewer from behind the tree with a somewhat
bewildered expression’ does not fit into this scheme. Dead or dying trees

39 Rembrandt, St Jerome beside a Pollard Willow, 1648, etching and drypoint.

98
 Tree Aesthetics

40 Rembrandt, The Three Trees, 1643, etching with drypoint and burin.

could represent the transience of life and for some Christians could be
interpreted as the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, which after the
Fall became the Tree of Death. St Jerome noted that Christ’s cross was
made from the wood of this tree, which symbolized redemption through
faith. Moreover the freshly sprouting leaves of the pollarded willow,
which is not actually of course dead, could be interpreted as a symbol
of the Resurrection.8
Perhaps Rembrandt’s most famous representation of trees is The
Three Trees of 1643, which shows a carefully delineated landscape popu-
lated with farm workers and travellers and a distant town under a stormy
sky. Concealed and sheltered in the vegetation below the three trees
are two lovers; the trees are starkly set against the light sky. The trees
are very difficult to identify: different botanical experts have recog-
nized them as willows, elms, birches, oaks and beeches. They have often
been associated with the three crosses at the crucifixion of Christ.
Cynthia Schneider argues that this etching influenced Jan Lievens’s
painting Landscape with Three Trees of c. 1645. This may be true, but
the form of the dark and gnarled three trees painted by Lievens is
very different; they appear to be ancient overgrown oak pollards that

99
 Trees, Woods and Forests

have been uncut for many years, which provide dense shade for those
resting underneath.9
Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682) has been described as ‘the father
of tree illustration’. Although many of the trees in the backgrounds of
his landscapes are unidentifiable, individual trees and groups of trees
in the foreground are usually clearly recognizable as oaks, elms, beech
and willow. A team of botanists and art historians at Harvard searched
many works of the Dutch school but ‘failed to unearth a single master
before Ruisdael who depicted a variety of trees using a suite of inde-
pendent characters that are botanically diagnostic’. Ruisdael was born
in Haarlem and lived there until around 1656 when he moved to
Amsterdam. The identification of his trees is helped by the fact that
most of drawings and paintings were made close to his home, where
the sandy soils supported a fairly limited range of trees. Moreover, this
was before the major period of plant introductions and so most of the
trees depicted are those that had traditionally grown in the area. The
complete catalogue of Ruisdael’s paintings, drawings and etchings
demonstrates that there are over 150 works of which woods and forest
are the main theme. Trees and groups of trees are also vital features in
his paintings of many other subjects, such as mills, cornfields and water-
falls. In his early period Ruisdael concentrated on the countryside near
Haarlem, with its ‘crowded woods with sandy footpaths and tangled

41 Jan Lievens, Landscape with Three Trees, c. 1645, oil on panel.

100
 Tree Aesthetics

42 Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with a Cottage and Trees, 1646, oil on panel.

trees set in thickets’. His later forest pictures are more spacious, with
more clearings, openings and distant views. Several of his paintings
include old fissured tree trunks and decaying branches, and these have
been interpreted as symbols of fragility and corruptibility, although
the art historian Seymour Slive questions whether Ruisdael ‘intended
them to have one of the multitudinous meanings that have been assigned
to them since the tree of life and tree of knowledge appeared in the
garden of Eden’.¹0
One of his earliest paintings, Landscape with a Cottage and Trees,
dated 1646 and painted when he was around eighteen, shows a dense
group of trees in the right foreground obscuring a small cottage. Two
trees dominate: an old and decrepit pollarded willow next to a small
pond, and an oak. The pollard is very accurately painted and clearly
shows the stubs where several branches have been cut; the foliage and
leaves of the oak are also very carefully depicted, and the trunk has
characteristic orange and white lichen. To the left of the cottage are two
young, healthy and vigorous willow trees. A few years later Ruisdael
made several etchings, of which The Three Oaks (1649, illus. 43) demon-
strates his astonishing ability to capture the form of the trunks, branches
and foliage of the oak tree. A similar group of oaks appears in his
painting Wooded Landscape with a Pond, which was in the Picturesque

101
 Trees, Woods and Forests

43 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Three Oaks, 1649, etching.

enthusiast Richard Payne Knight’s collection at Downton Castle,

Herefordshire. Another etching of a forest scene dated about 1650–55,
Forest Marsh with Travellers on a Bank, includes a depiction of a
remarkable oak with several branches bare of leaves. This is an accurate
representation of what happens to established and old oak trees where
the water table has risen. This etching was influential with succeeding
artists: Ruisdael’s pupil Meindert Hobbema painted a version of it in
1662, and well over 100 years later the young John Constable wrote to
his tutor John Thomas ‘Antiquity’ Smith that ‘I have a great mind to
copy one of Rysdael’s etchings, I have seen one at your house where there
are two trees standing in water.’¹¹
Thomas Gainsborough was an enthusiast for drawing trees and
landscapes from an early age. He recalled that

during his Boy-hood, though he had no idea of becoming a

Painter then, yet there was not a Picturesque clump of Trees,
nor even a single Tree of beauty . . . for some miles around the
place of his nativity, that he had not so perfectly in his mind’s
eye, that had he known he could use a pencil, he could have
perfectly delineated.

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 Tree Aesthetics

The first drawing he remembered making was of a group of trees, and

in one letter Gainsborough went so far as to argue – probably, as the
art historian Michael Rosenthal points out, to tease the recipient – that
historical figures in a landscape painting could be placed ‘for the Eye
to be drawn from the Trees in order to return to them with more glee’.
Trees are not only important in Gainsborough’s landscapes but also
very frequently occur as backgrounds to portraits and peasant scenes.
At the end of his life he felt a great ‘fondness for my first imitations of
little Dutch Landskips’, and his copy in chalk made c. 1747 of Ruisdael’s
La Forêt or Wooded Landscape with a Flooded Road survives. No print
of Ruisdael’s painting is known to have been made, and it is possible
that Gainsborough copied the original.¹²
Gainsborough’s trees had an enormous impact on the development
of Picturesque aesthetics. Uvedale Price’s grandfather Uvedale Tomkyns
Price was one of Gainsborough’s most important patrons at Bath; their
friendship developed around 1758 when Price was in his seventies and
Gainsborough was 31.¹³ Price’s portrait by Gainsborough (1761–3)
shows him seated next to a collection of drawings and holding a draw-
ing of trees with cut branches with his left hand and a porte-crayon with
his right. Gainsborough visited Price’s Herefordshire estate, Foxley, in
1760 and his Beech Trees at Foxley is signed and dated in that year. This

44 Jacob van Ruisdael, Forest Marsh with Travellers on a Bank, 1650–55, etching.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

45 Thomas Gainsborough, Beech Trees at Foxley, 1760, pencil, chalk and

watercolour.

shows two beech trees growing on a pronounced knoll or tump, with

a curving path leading to a distant tower. To the left is a pollarded tree
while to the right is a rustic fence. The ‘remote paths and rickety fences
dominated by the majestic old trees, seem to anticipate Uvedale Price’s
later theories of the Picturesque’. There is also a clear contrast of form
between the recently cut pollarded tree to the left and the two trees
on the tump.¹4
Pollards appear very frequently in many of Gainsborough’s later
paintings and this frequency can be put down to several factors. First, it
demonstrates the important influence of the Dutch landscape paintings
of Ruisdael and others, which we have seen were a crucial early influence
on Gainsborough. Second, it probably reflects their very common occur-
rence along roadsides and hedgerows in the English landscape. Most trees
adjoining fields would be pollarded, so their regular appearance in
Gainsborough’s work in that sense reflects the real landscape. Another
key factor is that they often form vital framing devices for his landscapes.
In Sunset: Carthorses Drinking at a Stream of c. 1760, for example, the
shape of the dead pollard helps to reinforce the circular structure of the

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painting, allowing a view through to a distant landscape. In portraits

such as William Poyntz (1762) and others, the gentlemen lolling against
pollarded trees demonstrate their close connection with rural life. But
the trees also form a useful dark contrast to the portraits and a framing
device. The portrait of William Poyntz also emphasizes the regrowth of
young leaves from the heavily cut young willow pollards in the middle
distance.¹5
Two other very significant influences on Picturesque aesthetics
were the Italian Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) and Claude Lorrain (Gellée,
1604–1682), who was born in Lorraine but lived most of his life in
Rome. These two painters were among the most sought-after artists in
British collections in the eighteenth century and were a strong influence
on English artists such as Turner and Constable. Trees were crucial to both
painters in providing contrasts of light and shade, in giving form and
structure and in provoking different atmospheres, but neither painted

46 Thomas
Gainsborough,
William Poyntz of
Midgham and His
Dog Amber, 1762,
oil on canvas.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

47 Salvator Rosa,
Study of Trees,
1640s, ink drawing.

trees whose species can readily be identified. In Rosa’s painting Mercury

and the Dishonest Woodsman (c. 1663; illus. 70), for example, which
depicts Aesop’s fable of the importance of honesty, the dark trees in the
centre of the painting provide a mysterious and gloomy backdrop,
while the jagged and broken trees frame the painting and give the
landscape a ‘brilliant structure’. The trees are not identifiable, and there
is no evidence of the quotidian tasks that the woodsman of the title had
been performing with his axe; rather the trees appear to have been dam-
aged by storm or tempest. Uvedale Price bought six drawings by Salvator
Rosa which he considered to be ‘admirable specimens of the unparal-
leled freedom & lightness of his pen’ in 1768, when he was in Perugia on
his grand tour. These included a Study of Trees, Study of Stump of Old Tree,
A Magnificent Study of a Tree and Four Monks Seated at the Foot of a Tree.
The Study of Trees shows extraordinarily shattered and contorted stems
characteristic of trees damaged by an ice storm or ‘galaverna’, which
epitomize aspects of the Picturesque later to be theorized by Price.¹6

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y Picturesque aesthetics and trees

Picturesque aesthetics became one of the most potent and influential
ways of interpreting and understanding landscapes and trees from the
eighteenth century onwards. The historian David Watkin considers that
‘the theory and practice of the Picturesque constitute the major English
contribution to European aesthetics’ and that between 1730 and 1830
the ‘Picturesque became the universal mode of vision for the educated
classes’.¹7 And yet the origin of the term and its varied meanings are
difficult to pin down. In the 1750s two works were published which,
while not using the term ‘Picturesque’, stimulated considerable debate.
William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) argued that the eye preferred
variety and intricacy to symmetry and that ‘those lines which have the
most variety themselves, contribute towards the production of beauty.’
His ‘line of beauty’ was not simply a curved line but a ‘precise serpen-
tine line’ which was neither ‘too bulging nor too tapering’.¹8 This was
followed a few years later by Edmund Burke’s enormously influential
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757).
When Horace Walpole published The History of the Modern Taste
in Gardening in 1780 as the last volume of his Anecdotes of Painting in
England, he made the link between painting and landscaping explicit.
Tying the new style of gardening directly to his project of encouraging
English painting, he asked that if ‘we have the seeds of a Claud or a
Gaspar amongst us, he must come forth. If wood, water, groves, vallies,
glades, can inspire poet or painter, this is the country, this is the age
to produce them.’¹9 Walpole traced the line in the development of
modern gardening from Charles Bridgeman, who ‘first thought’ of the
‘capital stroke’ of the ‘sunk fence’, through to William Kent, whose
‘great principles’ were ‘perspective, and light and shade’. Kent’s ‘Groupes
of trees broke too uniform or too extensive a lawn; evergreens and woods
were opposed to the glare of the champain’, and by ‘selecting favourite
objects, and veiling deformities by screens of plantation’, he was able
to realize ‘the compositions of the greatest masters in painting’. Walpole
noted that some of the newly created gardens and parks were directly com-
parable to the greatest art. At the Earl of Halifax’s Stansted, for example,
he relished that ‘great avenue’ which traversed ‘an ancient wood for
two miles’ and the ‘very extensive lawns at that seat, richly inclosed by
venerable beech woods, and chequered by single beeches of vast size’.

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He was particularly taken by the view from ‘the portico of the temple’,
where ‘the landscape that wastes itself in rivers of broken sea, recall such
exact pictures of Claud Lorrain, that it is difficult to conceive that he
did not paint them from this very spot.’ Walpole approved of much of
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s landscaping, noting that Kent had been
‘succeeded by a very able master’, although he could not name him,
since ‘living artists’ were not included in his history. Although he was
concerned that ‘the pursuit of variety’ threatened the modern style of
gardening, he stressed that ‘In the mean time how rich, how gay, how
picturesque the face of the country!’ and that there had been so much
improvement brought about by the modern style of gardening that
‘every journey is made through a succession of pictures’.²0
William Gilpin (1724–1804) was the most important and influen-
tial writer to spread the idea of the Picturesque in the second half of
the eighteenth century, through the publication of his Essay on Prints
(1768) and his subsequent tour journals, which offered observations on
‘picturesque beauty’. Gilpin, who had a combined career as a school-
master, vicar, philanthropist, scholar and artist, had first developed his
views on the Picturesque in an early essay, A Dialogue upon the Gardens
of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stowe (1748),
which characterized it as ‘a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty,
which is agreeable in a picture’.²¹ Gilpin argued in his Essay on Picturesque
Beauty (1792) that certain qualities present in nature – roughness and
ruggedness, variety and irregularity, chiaroscuro – could combine to form
‘picturesque beauty’, a phrase that Gilpin admitted was ‘but little under-
stood’, but by which he meant ‘that kind of beauty which would look well
in a picture’.²² The fullest exposition of Gilpin’s concept of the Picturesque
came from his various tour journals: on the River Wye (1770; pub-
lished 1782), the Lake District (1772; published 1786), North Wales
(1773; published 1809) and Scotland (1776; published 1789). Gilpin’s
ambition on these tours was to ‘examine the face of a country by the rules
of picturesque beauty: opening the sources of those pleasures which are
derived from the comparison’.²³ The manuscript versions of Gilpin’s tour
journals received wide circulation among an influential group of friends
and acquaintances including Thomas Gray, William Mason, the Duchess
of Portland, Mrs Delany and Queen Charlotte, to whom the volume
on the Lakes was dedicated when it was published in 1786.
The most careful elaboration of Picturesque aesthetics at the end
of the eighteenth century was Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque

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of 1794, which aimed ‘to shew . . . that the picturesque has a character
not less separate and distinct than either the sublime or the beautiful,
nor less independent of the art of painting’.²4 For Price, the study of
nature and the works of great artists – such as the landscapes of Claude,
Salvator Rosa and Nicolas Poussin as well as those of Dutch and Flemish
artists such as Ruisdael – was essential in understanding how to design
and lay out grounds and estates. His emphasis on connection and local
knowledge implicitly validated the authority of informed landowners
(such as Price himself ) as those best placed to effect changes to the
landscape. ‘He therefore, in my mind,’ he wrote, ‘will shew most art
in improving, who leaves (a very material point) or who creates the
greatest variety of landscapes’. He introduced a third category of ‘pictur-
esqueness’ which stood for ruggedness, variety and character. According
to Price, ‘the picturesque fills up a vacancy between the sublime and the
beautiful, and accounts for the pleasure we receive from many objects,
on principles distinct from them both.’ This allowed him to defend
aspects of the landscape that he saw were being cleared away by the
mania for improvement: ‘old neglected bye roads and hollow ways’,
‘old, mossy, rough-hewn park pales’, rustic hovels, mills and cottages. He
was particularly fond of old pollards that resulted from the ‘indiscrim-
inate hacking of the peasant’ and the ‘careless method of cutting, just
as the farmer happened to want a few stakes or poles’. He celebrated
the ‘spirit of animation’ found in ‘the manner in which old neglected
pollards stretch out their limbs across these hollow roads, in every wild
and irregular direction’ and found them in many ways more attractive
than ‘the finest timber tree, however beautiful’ in terms of health and
vigour.²5

y Forest scenery
William Gilpin was a successful schoolmaster at Cheam for several years.
One of his pupils was William Mitford, who owned an estate at Exbury
in Hampshire, was a verderer of the New Forest from 1778 and later
wrote a major History of Greece. It was he who encouraged Gilpin to
become vicar of Boldre in the New Forest in 1777, a post that produced
an income of £600 a year. Gilpin dedicated his lengthy Remarks on
Forest Scenery to Mitford in 1791. Gilpin was fascinated by the ancient
trees of the New Forest, and on his first visit there exclaimed in a letter
to the poet William Mason,

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

Such Dryads! Extending their taper arms to each other,

sometimes in elegant mazes along the plain; sometimes in
single figures; & sometimes combined! What would I have
given to be able to trace all their beauteous forms on paper!!
Alass! My art failed me. I could only sketch: and a sketch
amounts to no more, than, n.b. Here stands a tree.²6

Robert Mayhew has argued that many critics have underestimated

the moral seriousness of Gilpin’s Picturesque and emphasizes that his
theological position as a Low Church Latitudinarian, in which he used
‘the natural world as a mode of evidence that fitted their need for un-
controversial proofs of God and Christianity’, was of crucial importance
in informing his ideas of the Picturesque.²7 Latitudinarians such as
William Paley, in his enormously popular Natural Theology, first pub-
lished in 1803, reinvigorated old arguments that the form and structure
of nature were proofs of the existence of a creator. Trees and woods
were often used to elucidate the argument. The botanist and theologian
John Ray’s description of English plants Catalogus plantarum Angliae,
published in 1670, emphasized that there was a divine purpose in the
creation of different plant species. He later stressed in The Wisdom of
God Manifested in the Works of the Creation how the earth was ‘curiously
clothed and adorned with the grateful verdure of Herbs and Stately
Trees, either dispersed or scattered singly, or as it were assembled in
Woods and Groves’.²8
Gilpin rarely drew attention to his theological beliefs in his tours, but
in a note to his Remarks on Forest Scenery of 1791 he creates an allegory
of an acacia tree which grew in his garden at Boldre in Hampshire. ‘As
I sat carelessly at my window, and threw my eyes upon a large acacia,
which grew before me, I conceived it might aptly represent a country
divided into provinces, towns and families.’ The provinces were the
larger branches, the smaller branches the towns, and the ‘combinations
of collateral leaves’ represented the families made up of individuals. It
was autumn and ‘As I sat looking at it, many of the yellow leaves’ were
‘dropping into the lap of their great mother’; this was an ‘emblem of
natural decay’. A breeze caused many leaves to fall which ‘might have
enjoyed life longer. Here malady was added to decay.’ The ‘blast increased’
and a ‘shower of leaves covered the ground’ as when ‘pestilence shakes
the land’. After the storm a few remaining solitary leaves survived as an
‘emblem of depopulation’. Gilpin concludes by emphasizing that

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‘Nature is the great book of God’ and that while the ‘heathen moralist’
knew that ‘men, like trees, are subject to death’, the ‘same God presides
over the natural, and moral world’, and ‘that power which revives the
tree, will revive thee also’.²9
He claimed that it ‘is no exaggerated praise to call a tree the grandest,
and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth’. While there
was much beauty amongst the smaller flowers and shrubs, these could
not compete in terms of ‘picturesque beauty’ with trees whose ‘form
and foliage, and ramification’ brought about ‘the arrangement of com-
position in landscape’ and received the ‘effects of light and shade’. Moreover,
although he did not wish to ‘set the tree in competition’ with animal life
to which ‘we give the preference on the whole’, he noted that ‘every
animal is distinguished from its fellow, by some little variation of colour,
character or shape’, while the larger parts, such as the body and limbs,
are generally similar. With trees, however, ‘it is just the reverse’, and the
smaller parts such as the leaves, blossom and seed are the same in all
trees of a species, ‘while the larger parts, from which the most beautiful
varieties result, are wholly different’. But he saw as much difference in
the beauty of trees as in human figures: while some were elegant because
of their ‘harmony of parts’ and ‘ease and freedom’, in others ‘The limbs
. . . are set awkwardly; their trunks are disproportioned; and their whole
form is unpleasing.’³0
Gilpin was particularly concerned that landscapes which were chiefly
dependent on woodland scenery were always ‘open to injury’ compared
to those which depended ‘on rocks, mountains, lakes and rivers’. The
problem was that any ‘graceless’ hand could fell a tree and the ‘value of
timber’ was its misfortune. He pointed out that ‘in a cultivated country,
woods are considered only as large corn-fields; cut, as soon as ripe’; when
the timber was fit for particular purposes and uses, ‘’tho we may lament,
we should not repine.’ In the New Forest, for example, ‘the vast quan-
tities of timber, which are felled, every year, for the navy’ meant that
Gilpin’s description was ‘not the description of what it was in the last
century, nor of what it will be in the next’. On the other hand, it was
morally reprehensible when trees were cut prematurely ‘to make up a
matrimonial purse, or to carry the profits of them to the race-grounds,
and gaming houses’. In these instances Gilpin wished that ‘the profli-
gate possessors had been placed, like lunatics, and idiots, under the care
of guardians, who might have prevented such ruinous, and unwarrantable
waste’. He argued that ‘it is a much easier business to deform, than to

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restore’, but there was always hope that ‘as young trees are growing old,
nature is also working up new fore-grounds to her landscapes.’³¹
There was an inherent conflict between some aspects of Picturesque
aesthetics and the regular felling and cropping of trees. Gilpin lamented
the ‘capricious nature of picturesque ideas’, many of which celebrated
attributes ‘derived from the injuries the tree receives, or the diseases, to
which it is subject’. He demonstrates the changes in appreciation of trees
by quoting ‘a naturalist of the last age’, William Lawson (1553/4–1635),
the vicar of the village of Ormesby in Yorkshire, who wrote ‘the first
published work on gardening in the north of England, and . . . the
first horticultural work written specifically for women’. Gilpin quotes
Lawson’s enumeration of the defects of trees:

How many forests, and woods, says he, have we, wherein you
shall have, for one lively, thriving tree, four, nay sometimes
twenty-four, evil thriving, rotten, and dying trees: what rotten-
ness! what hollowness! what dead arms! withered tops! curtailed
trunks! what loads of mosses! drooping boughs, and dying
branches, shall you see every where.

But Gilpin goes to argue that ‘all these maladies, which our distressed
naturalist bemoans with so much feeling’ were now often recognized
as ‘capital sources of picturesque beauty’ in both ‘wild scenes of nature’
and ‘artificial landscapes’.³²
He felt that for examples of the use and beauty of the withered
top and curtailed trunk, ‘we need only appeal to the works of Salvator
Rosa’, who often used ‘the trunk of a tree in his fore-grounds’, where a
complete tree in its ‘full state of grandeur, would have been an incum-
brance’. Gilpin argues that ‘ruins’ of ‘noble’ trees are ‘splendid remnants
of decaying grandeur’ which ‘speak to the imagination in a stile of elo-
quence which the stripling cannot reach’. Their great age allows them
to ‘record the history of some storm. Some blast of lightening, or
other great event, which transfers it’s [sic] grand ideas to the landscape’,
and moreover in the ‘representation of elevated subjects assists the
sublime’. Gilpin felt that the blasted tree was ‘almost essential’ as a source
of beauty for some natural and artificial scenes. Thus when a ‘dreary
heath is spread before the eye, and ideas of wildness and desolation
are required’, he asked ‘what more suitable accompaniment can be
imagined, than the blasted oak, ragged, scathed, and leafless; shooting

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48 William Gilpin, An Unbalanced Tree Bending over a Road, ink and wash
drawing. The drawing was etched by Samuel Alken for Gilpin’s Remarks on
Forest Scenery . . . (1791).

it’s [sic] peeled, white branches athwart the gathering blackness of some
rising storm’.³³
Gilpin’s Picturesque way of seeing also focussed on ‘nature’s minutiæ’,
such as moss growing on trees, which ‘touches not the great parts, com-
position and effect’ but is a ‘beautiful object of imitation’ in ‘coloured
landscape’. On his walks around the New Forest he had ‘often stood with
admiration before an old forest-oak, examining the various tints, which
have enriched it’s [sic] furrowed stem’. Near the roots he often found
the ‘green, velvet moss, which in a still greater degree commonly occu-
pies the bole of the beech’. Higher up the trunk ‘you see the brimstone
colour taking possession in patches’, one kind smooth and the other of
which ‘hangs in little rich knots, and fringes’. In addition ‘you often find
a species perfectly white’ and there are also ‘touches of red; and some-
times, but rarely, a bright yellow, which is like a gleam of sun-shine’.
Gilpin referred to all these ‘excrescences’ as mosses but admitted that
‘those particularly, which cling close to the bark of the trees, and have a
leprous, scabby appearance, are classed, I believe, by botanists, under the
name of lychens: others are called liver-worts.’ But whatever they were

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called, Gilpin felt they added ‘great richness to trees’ and that the
painter admired them ‘among the picturesque beauties of nature’ while
‘the wood-man . . . brushes them away.’ Uvedale Price agreed and added
them to his catalogue of the features of ancient trees: ‘the deep hollow
of the inside, the mosses on the bark, the rich yellow of the touch-
wood, with the blackness of the more decayed substance’, which caused
a Picturesque ‘variety of tints, of brilliant and mellow lights, with deep
and peculiar shades’.³4
A key theme of Picturesque woodland management was to open up
views through woodland and framed by trees, as in a painting by Claude.
Here the trees were not so much the focus of attention as a means of dis-
playing landscapes. Uvedale Price, for example, managed his old coppice
woodlands and plantations carefully to open up the best views of the
surrounding countryside. He enhanced the views available from the
rides around the estate and framed what he thought of as a gallery of
pictures. He also worked within his woods and coppices to make com-
positions and pictures. In 1796 he told his friend Lord Abercorn how
he was ‘clearing some parts among the shrubs, & making glades &
openings on a small scale’.³5 Over twenty years later, in 1818, he was still
improving these landscape views and using the analogy that in every
block of marble there is a fine statue; it only needs to have the rubbish
removed from around it. He told Lord Abercorn that at Foxley the
blocks of marble were three unprofitable coppice woods which contained
‘treasures of beauty’ including ‘fine timber trees’ and ‘a number of old
yews, thorns, nuts, hollies, maples’.³6
Price ‘disguised the lines’ of his new paths, walks and rides by thin-
ning and pruning his trees with ‘a proper mixture of caution & boldness’,
stressing that this was ‘at least as necessary as planting’. To help in this
job he trained one of his workers to be ‘a pruner who gets up into the
very highest trees (not from my teaching however) & perfectly compre-
hends + executes my ideas’. The result of this vigilance was that ‘single trees
& groups’ which before were ‘uniformly heavy & massy’ were made
‘much more varied, light & airy’. In this way he tried to ‘apply to nature’
the principles of the art of which he was such a connoisseur. This prun-
ing and thinning he found to be ‘a source of great interest & amusement
both at the time & afterwards’.³7

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y Unnatural practices
For Gilpin, all trees which had forms ‘that are unnatural, displease’. He
found trees ‘lopped into a may-pole, as you generally see in the hedge-
rows of Surry’ to be ‘disgusting’. Clipped trees such as yews, lime hedges
and pollards were disagreeable because the trees were unnatural and
disproportioned and their branches joined the trunk awkwardly. An
overgrown pollard could sometimes, however, ‘produce a good effect,
when nature has been suffered, for some years, to bring it again into
form’. But when trees were repeatedly cut for leaf fodder they could only
be ugly. Ash trees in the New Forest, for example, had ‘leaf and rind’
which was ‘nutritive to deer’ and this ‘disagreeable circumstance’ meant
they were heavily browsed in the summer and became ‘mangled, and
deformed’. Very occasionally an individual pollard could achieve beauty
through peculiar and ephemeral circumstances. Gilpin remembered
that once ‘in autumn I have seen a beautiful contrast between a bush
of ivy, which had completely invested the head of a pollard-oak, and the
dark brown tint of the withered leaves, which still held possession of
the branches.’³8
Another common example of a displeasing ‘unnatural’ form was
where ‘some single stem was left to grow into a tree’ from a pollard. Here
Gilpin complained that ‘the stem is of a different growth; it is dispro-
portioned; and always unites awkwardly with the trunk’ (illus. 49). His
voicing of concern over the ghastly effects of unnatural pollarding and
shredding (in which side branches were removed) was added to an
already loud chorus of attack. One of the strongest opponents was
Arthur Young (1741–1820), Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, who
found pollarding and shredding barbarous and vile practices which
ruined timber and destroyed the landscape of southeast England: ‘The
beauty of all this country is wretchedly hurt by the abominable custom
of stripping up all trees; in so much that they look like hop-poles.’ The
strong regional variation in the frequency of pollarding was noted: he
did not find this ‘detestable practice’ in Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of
Essex. The ‘barbarous practice’ of converting ‘timber trees into pollards’
was strongly condemned. Many Middlesex hedges were ‘disfigured by
pollard trees’ which were ‘rotten’ and the shredded trees were ‘stripped
of their side-branches, like May-poles’. The rise of the Picturesque
movement meant that regularly cropped trees were seen as anachron-
istic adjuncts to agriculture while old, overgrown pollards became

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

49 William Gilpin, A Pollard on which a Single Stem is left to Grow into a Tree,
wash drawing. This drawing too was etched by Samuel Alken for Gilpin’s Remarks
on Forest Scenery . . . (1791).

celebrated. Uvedale Price told the landscape improver Humphry Repton

in 1792 that ‘he would deserve a statue if he could inspire Mr Pitt
with such an aversion’ to stripped elms ‘as to make him exert his great
authority & eloquence to put an end to such a horrid practice’. He
argued that the ending of such a practice ‘would do more towards
beautifying the face of England than all the sums that ever have, or
will be laid out in improvements’.³9

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Unnatural pollards and shredded trees continued to be castigated

for their ugliness and poor form in the nineteenth century and there
was debate as to whether a tree could ever recover its beauty once pol-
larded. In 1811 the Suffolk landowner Revd Sir Thomas Gery Cullum
considered that ‘trees in many parts of England’ were ‘like a cabbage stuck
on a May pole, or left with long stumps like the teeth of a rake’. Sir
Henry Steuart found it unlikely in 1828 that a tree that had been cut
in this way could ever recover ‘its natural and free conformation’. The
artist Jacob Strutt in Sylva Britannica (1830) found willows ‘disagree-
able to the eye of the painter’, especially after pollarding, when ‘their
decapitated trunks then present an unsightly spectacle, not much im-
proved when they again sprout forth.’ James Main argued in 1839 that
dismemberment was akin to ‘mutilation’, ‘distortion’ and ‘bad taste’,
and that ‘only natural disbranchement by wind or lapse of time’ could
produce a natural shape that could be admired.40
The tension between a liking for ancient pollards and a hatred of
recently cropped ones is quite striking in the middle years of the nine-
teenth century. As the practice became less common, abandoned and
overgrown pollards became increasingly valued for their Picturesque
qualities. William Craig found in 1821, for example, that ‘Lopping and
pollarding also produce wonderful changes on the aspect of trees, some-
times rendering them highly picturesque, and sometimes disgusting;
but always disproportioned from their natural character.’ The author
of Woodland Gleanings (1865) found that ‘pollards, being rendered

50 Paul Sandby, Mr Whatman’s Paper Mill, c. 1794, pencil drawing. Sandby has
carefully drawn a row of trees, probably elms, that have been shredded with fresh
foliage growing from their trunks.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

unnatural in form, are disagreeable; though sometimes a pollard produces

a good effect, when nature has been suffered, after some years, to bring it
again into shape.’ By the mid-nineteenth century authors were frequently
alluding to the historical associations of ancient pollards at sites such as
Burnham Beeches and Sherwood Forest. The author of Gleanings in
Natural History, writing of the pollards of Windsor Forest, was ‘imper-
ceptibly carried back to the many interesting historical facts which
have happened’ in their lifetime: ‘I can fancy that our Edwards and
Henrys might have ridden under their branches.’ The aesthetic view
that regularly cut trees were unsightly and exploitative had become
firmly entrenched in late nineteenth-century Britain. This Picturesque
sensibility eventually made pollarding a potent symbol of forest over-
exploitation and the practice was seen as incompatible with early ideas
of conservation.4¹

118
 m
five
Pollards

M
any trees in gardens, streets and orchards are regularly pruned,
pollarded and shaped, while those in the countryside are
generally left to grow untouched. It was very different in
the past, when most trees growing in hedgerows and on common land
throughout Europe and in many other parts of the world were pollarded
or shredded for the production of leaf fodder and firewood. There is no
doubt that pollarding and shredding are very ancient practices. In pre-
historic Europe elm and ash leaves from pollarded trees were of enormous
importance as feed for animals. This was particularly true in areas or
periods in which the availability of grass, in the form of pasture or hay,
was limited: for example during the winter or in periods of drought. Most
tree species were lopped for leaf fodder and fuel. The elm, lime, ash, oak,
alder, rowan, hazel, hawthorn and some conifers, such as silver firs in
the Apennines and northern Greece, were cut as fodder. This is a largely
forgotten history: forest historians have until recently tended to ignore
the practice because it was not seen as part of forest history; conversely
agricultural historians did not consider it part of agriculture. Pollarding
was thus of no more than peripheral interest to both groups. This lack of
interest has masked the importance of tree management in agricultural
and pastoral areas.
The value of the products of pollards is shown by the complex mix
of laws and rights over different parts of trees and by disputes over who
had rights to cut branches or take crops from trees. In present-day Crete,
for example, the rights to the acorns of certain oak trees can still be
divided between several different farmers. In England a legal distinction
can be made between timber trees, usually owned and managed by the
landowner, and other trees, which could be pollarded by their tenants.
This encouraged landowners to reduce the number of trees that could

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be pollarded and there was a sustained campaign over 200 years or so

by many agriculturalists and foresters to halt the practice. While there has
been a revival of interest in pollarding and old trees, which are increas-
ingly valued as important features of cultural landscapes and are included
in conservation programmes, in most Western countries pollarding is
nowadays almost a forgotten practice. This chapter uses examples from
Greece and Britain to examine the collapse of this traditional form of
management.¹

y Leaf fodder
Many animals have evolved to eat the leaves of trees and shrubs and
complicated ecological relationships have developed over centuries as
a consequence. Before humans started to domesticate animals, the
vegetation of many parts of the world was shaped and modified by
the browsing and grazing of many different species.² With the domes-
tication of animals such as sheep, goats and cattle, the large, mobile
flocks and herds produced began to exert an even greater effect on the
vegetation. With contemporary modern farming techniques the inter-
relations between animals and vegetation are often disconnected, but
for thousands of years the landscapes of many areas were created by the
complex interplay of pastoralists, their animals and the vegetation they
produced. Trees and shrubs, through the provision of leaf fodder, played
a crucial part in the animal and human economy and the various tech-
niques employed in cropping and preserving leaves have shaped both
trees and our perceptions of them.
One of the most common, and long-standing, methods of manage-
ment was to cut the branches of trees off at about head height. This had
three main benefits. First, as long as the branches were cut above the reach
of the thrusting tongues of cattle and goats, the tree would send out new
shoots that could be cropped at some future time. Second, regular and
fairly frequent pollarding meant that the branches to be cut were relatively
thin and hence easy to cut with a sharp, iron hook. Third, by cutting
at head height, the cropping could be undertaken without having to
climb high up into the branches of tall trees. Such pollarding was thus
a simple, renewable way of harvesting leaf fodder. There was no fixed
method of cutting branches; sometimes branches were lopped all the
way up a stem in a system often called shredding, but sometimes odd
branches were cut whenever needed. Trees that were regularly cut carried

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on producing a regular and healthy crop of leaves every few years.

Moreover, the branches that were also produced could be put to a wide
range of uses, especially the making of faggots for fires. If the branches
were allowed to grow for a few more years, depending on the species,
they could also be used for construction, making tools, fencing and
firewood.
Pollarding and shredding of trees have been widespread and com-
mon practices in many parts of the world, including Europe, Japan and
the tropics. In Britain they remained important until the eighteenth
century but by the mid-nineteenth century were becoming increas-
ingly rare and had virtually disappeared by the mid-twentieth century.
In contemporary Europe pollarding is undertaken to provide fodder
in the mountains of Greece and also takes place in mountainous parts
of Spain and in Bulgaria. In parts of northern Italy ash, alder, poplar
and beech are still used for fodder, directly consumed or stored in
barns (illus. 71). The poles are used for firewood and fencing. I still
remember the sight, in 1985, of a cyclist confidently yet precariously
carrying several poles he had just cut as he rode up one of the steeper
roads in the Euganean hills near Vicenza. Rows of freshly pollarded trees
can still be glimpsed from the Autostrada as they stretch out across the
Po Valley. In Norway the branches of poplars, ash, elms, pine, goat
willow and rowan were pollarded, dried and stored in the past and in
western Norway a few farmers continue to use leaf fodder because they
consider it good for the health of their animals. The Finnish botanist Carl-
Adam Hæggström describes pollard meadows which produce hay and
loppings along the shores of the Baltic in southwest Finland and in
the Åland Islands. Pollards are also still used for producing firewood,
charcoal and constructional wood. In France the demand for firewood
encourages pollarding, but, in contrast with the ancient practice, the
branches are cut at longer intervals to produce suitable logs.³
Recent studies have emphasized the enormous importance of the
practice for rural populations in tropical areas. The important research
of the French geographer Sandrine Petit and others has shown that tree
fodder is crucial for livestock bred extensively in dry areas like the Sahel.
The nutritional value of tree forage is recognized by the Food and Agri-
culture Organization and this resource is so important that it is traded
and pollarding is regulated locally. For example, in Mali the fodder of
Pterocarpus erinaceus has a ready market in Bamako, the capital city. In
1989–90, 1,400 tons of fresh fodder were sold in Bamako.4 The lopping

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and pollarding of trees is a common practice in Asian mountains and

fodder trees are cultivated by farmers in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and
other countries. In Rajasthan trees are appropriated for fodder collec-
tion and the rights to exploit a tree are the object of negotiation and
trade. In Nepal there is deep local knowledge about the different nutri-
tional values of the various fodder trees. Near Kathmandu the increase
in population has encouraged the planting of trees close to houses to
be lopped for fodder, litter and fertilizer. Pollarding is common in agri-
forestry systems, such as the traditional Quezungual system in Honduras,
where the naturally regenerated trees are retained and regularly pollarded
when land is cleared for cultivation. These examples are not exhaustive
but reveal the importance of pollarding in the systems of production of
rural areas. In addition to fodder, the leaves of trees serve as fertilizers
and trees are pollarded so the branches can be used for fuel wood, to make
tools and in building construction.5

y Leaf fodder in Greece

In the mountainous parts of Greece grazing is still an important part
of the local economy and the vegetation is heavily browsed by large
flocks and herds of sheep and goats. Every tree and shrub is nibbled and
the closely cropped vegetation is a continuum of shrubs and trees, many
of which, although only a few feet high, are many years old. At Kasteneri
in northern Greece in 2007, for example, I saw hornbeam and juniper
trees so closely grazed that they formed a green topiary carpet of heavily
browsed trees, which only occasionally grow above the height that can
be reached by the animals. The leaves that grow above the browsing line
are too valuable as fodder to be left alone, and for many hundreds of
years these leaves have been cropped. One way of gaining an understand-
ing of the practicalities and art of pollarding is to interview those people
who still pollard, or did so when they were younger. The Greek forest
historian Eirini Saratsi undertook an important study of this kind in
the Zagori region of northwestern Greece, in the Pindus mountains
not far from the Albanian border. She interviewed many of the older
residents to discover how they used trees in the past. Nowadays, follow-
ing a lengthy period of rural depopulation since the Second World War,
much of the woodland in the region has naturally regenerated over areas
which were formerly cultivated and grazed. This woodland is valued as
a habitat for bears and wolves, and traditional forms of management

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are discouraged so that these animals might thrive. Before that war,
however, the woods were used in three main ways: for firewood, fodder
for animals and timber. Goats were allowed to graze in some areas,
whereas wood pastures were usually devoted to sheep grazing. Leaf
fodder was provided by individual trees that were left to grow along
the edges of fields. The evidence for the importance of leaf collection
comes from legal documents, the shape and form of surviving trees
and the testimony of people who engaged in the practices.6
As in many mountainous parts of the Mediterranean, the upper
slopes in Zagori were traditionally grazed by nomadic or transhumant
flocks and herds while the lower slopes near villages were often terraced
and cultivated. When walking around villages such as Micro Papigo,
which nowadays survive largely through green tourism, it is possible to
spot many old pollarded or shredded trees growing along the edges of
fields, now largely abandoned, or in narrow strips of woodland, known
locally as kladera, which were used especially for the provision of
winter fodder. The pattern of small woods and fields was determined
to some extent by the topography. The fields were made and cultivated
on the less steep parts of the slope and the steepest, often very rocky parts
were left as woodland. The woods were a vital source of fodder for the
villagers, who, unlike the nomads, were not able to travel away from the
mountains in search of winter pastures.
By far the most common type of tree growing in the kladera was
oak; Eirini Saratsi found eight species of oak growing in Zagori, and all
were used in one way or another for feeding animals. One particularly
useful characteristic of the deciduous oaks is that when cut in the
summer, the branches retain their leaves when dried, which makes them
easier to store. The different species of oak had characteristics which were
well known to the people who fed the animals. A 70-year-old man said
‘Here we have Tzero [Quercus cerris], we have Drios [Q. frainetto], we
have Douskou [Q. robur] we have Granitsa [Q. petraea] . . . Tzero, we
did not cut it very much because it crushes into bits easily, and was also
a little sharp.’ A 90-year-old woman recalled that the evergreen prickly
oak was used differently: ‘we did not store it indoors, we used to go even
when it snowed . . . to bring a branch for the goats to eat.’ The branches
of other species of tree which goats preferred, such as the field maple,
hop hornbeam and hornbeam, did not retain their leaves once cut, so were
used only as fresh leaf fodder in the spring. The species most favoured for
young goats were the flowering branches of the lime tree (Tilia alba),

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locally called lipanthia; a man from Micro Papigo noted that ‘we used to
cut it a lot but the problem was where could we find it?’ The selection
of the correct type of tree for pollarding and shredding required detailed
and thorough knowledge.
There were also different strategies for the frequency of cutting
individual trees. In some cases a tree might be cut every year, while
others might be left to grow for three or four years. One 69-year-old
man celebrated the appearance of the pollarded trees:

You cut it this year, and the next year it grew big, so you cut it
again . . . Oh you should see how beautiful they were. Because
every year they were cut they become thick and the same again
and again . . . people used to cut the top as well, of course they
cut it because it was growing very tall . . . They became round,
can you imagine how beautiful they were? I have cut, ooooh,
maaaaaaaany loads.

In other places people remembered that they cut the trees every other
year, or half the branches off a tree one year, and the other half the next.
One man recalled ‘you climbed the tree and pruned all the branches,
you only left the stem and one or two shoots at the top. The rest of the
tree was pruned . . . Every three, every four years and it was growing
again.’ Clearly the exact practice varied from village to village depend-
ing on the type of trees and the uses to which the branches were put.7
Recent research by the Cretan forester Pantelis Arvanitis in a detailed
study of the history of woodland management practices in the Psiloritis
mountains of central Crete has shown the importance of different tree
species for the provision of leaf fodder for shepherds. The Cretan word
used for the whole process of collecting leaves and feeding the sheep
and goats in Psiloritis is kladizo, meaning ‘branching’. The most impor-
tant leaf fodder trees were the maple (Acer criticum) and the kermes oak
(Quercus coccifera); these are also the most common trees growing in the
Psiloritis mountains. Other trees, such as Q. ilex and Phillyrea latifolia,
were not used because shepherds considered that their animals did not
like to eat them. The cutting of branches was seen as beneficial to the trees.
One shepherd remembered that ‘Many times when someone had a
few goats, 100 animals, he could cut now and then kermes oak in the end
of the summer, autumn, and that was good for the trees.’ A local mayor
emphasized that the cutting did not damage the trees. The shepherd did

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51 Grazed
woodland, Zaros,
Crete, 2010.

not ‘go to cut kermes oak, to destroy it. He will cut specific branches, he
was pruning it and then it would sprout again later. It was revivifying
the tree and that was very important.’ He remembered that they would
say ‘I am going to kladiso the sheep. When they say kladizo, they would
climb in a tree with a saw that the shepherd had with him, and he
would cut three, four, branches, no more from each tree.’ The branches
fell to the ground and the animals rushed over to eat the fresh foliage.
Some shepherds reported that the animals so much preferred this lush
food that they would run as fast as possible to the tree where they were
cutting branches as soon as they heard the action of the saw or axe.8
It is possible that the dominance of the many shrubby maples and
kermes oaks in the area is due to careful protection by shepherds over
many centuries as it was in their interests to ensure that there was a regu-
lar supply of fodder. On the other hand, the survival of some areas of
large old holm oak (Quercus ilex) near the village of Zaros was ascribed
by one shepherd to the unpleasant flavour of its leaves: ‘goats do not
eat it as they eat the shrubby kermes oak. Kermes oak although it has

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spines goats like to eat it. It is sweet, although it has thorns.’ Phillyrea
latifolia and holm oak ‘have no thorns but they do not eat them, they are
avoided. I am saying that both are bitter. That’s the reason that holm-
oak survived, it is in the mountain, the side of Zaros village, very big
trees.’ Others argued that the young leaves of Q. ilex were palatable, and
that older trees survived on cliffs or other areas which sheep and goats
were not able to reach.
The shepherds agreed that the most important fodder tree was the
maple: it was favoured by their animals and the leaves have no spines.
Branches were cut throughout the summer period when the flocks and
herds were in the mountains. The best time for cutting, however, was
in July, when the maple seeds had formed and the foliage was at its
optimum extent. One 78-year-old shepherd pointed out that the best
time to cut the foliage was linked with the life cycle of their stock. ‘When
the tree had both leaves and fruits, we cut it in order to fatten the young
goats . . . And the ones that were planned to be killed, we feed them
as well, when the fruits of the tree were matured.’ The kermes oak was
shredded from August onwards, when there was much less grass, and
especially in September and early October, when the oak branches bore
acorns as well as leaves. Later the acorns would be threshed from the
trees to provide feed for the goats, and in October and November the
acorns would fall down from the branches themselves, especially in heavy
rain. Cutting the oak branches was not necessarily an easy job. Shepherds
had to be agile to be able to climb up into the trees, and the spiny oak
leaves meant that clothing was often damaged: one shepherd wryly com-
mented that every time you cut leaf fodder you needed a new shirt. The
leaf fodder could also be used as a management tool. Pantelis Arvanitis
found that shepherds gave their stock leaf fodder when new animals were
added to a herd, so that they would keep close to the shepherd’s hut until
they became used to their new home.9
But the branches do not always have to be taken to the animals;
sometimes the goats climb into the trees themselves to browse the
delectable fresh leaves. We saw clear evidence of this on a visit to the Forest
of Zagori in July 2010. Many trees had fresh marks and abrasions on
their trunks caused by hoofs where goats had climbed regularly into the
low canopy, and where goats had browsed along the branches, they
left characteristic flat areas of closely nibbled foliage. Several shepherds
described this, noting that the goats climbed into the oak trees, but
not every tree; it had to have the correct form of trunk. Once a goat had

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 Pollards

established a climbing route, others would follow, and all the leaves the
goats could reach, even at full stretch, they would eat. In eastern Crete
it has been reported that shepherds chopped small steps into the tree
and placed stones in to ease the path for the goats. But this was not
currently the case in Psiloritis. One shepherd stated that they used to
‘put some stones so that we could reach the tree and thresh it’ for acorns
and that they then removed the stones. He was adamant that he did not
want the goats to climb the trees and graze them because there was a
danger that the goat would be killed. It was relatively common for a goat
to slip in the act of reaching for the leaves, for its horns to get caught
in the branches and for the goat to hang until it died. This was most likely
to occur when the goats were grazing in trees well away from shepherds,
and in the past, when there were more shepherds and the herds were more
closely watched, such tree grazing was much more common. Certainly
the ability of goats to climb trees and eat the leaves themselves would
have reduced the need to cut branches; it is likely, however, that the two
practices ran side by side depending on the availability of suitable trees
and the number of stock and shepherds.
Leaf fodder in Crete, as in many parts of the Mediterranean, was
an important supplement to grasses and other herb species, and still

52 Grazed oak tree, Zaros, Crete (left).

53 The trunk of an oak regularly climbed by goats, Zaros, Crete, 2010 (right).

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provides essential nourishment, especially towards the end of the long,

hot Cretan summers. These two recent Greek studies, one from the
far northwest of the country and one from the deep south, emphasize
the widespread nature of the use of leaf fodder for sheep and goats
throughout modern Greece. Although the practice is now dying out,
the testimony of retired shepherds and farmers provides fascinating
insights into the specialized knowledge and techniques used to make
use of leaf fodder. Moreover, modern foresters are beginning to realize
that these old and indeed ancient management practices may be of
vital importance in the development of management strategies for the
conservation of old trees and associated habitats. This is true not only
for Greece but for many of the countries encircling the Mediterranean.

y Pollarding decline in Britain

In many parts of Britain old pollarded trees survive in fields, common
land, parks and hedgerows as witnesses of the former importance of
the ancient practice. They can be found in old hedges that predate the
enclosure movement and are typical of ancient countryside character-
ized by a high density of hedges, non-woodland trees and many small
woods. Many tree species growing in Britain, including ash, elm, beech,
oak, willow, alder, hornbeam, hawthorn, maple, blackthorn, holly and
sweet chestnut, were pollarded (illus. 72). The main species that is still
regularly cut in this way is the willow, and willow pollards are still a
frequent sight along rivers and canals. The importance and frequency
of the practice in the past can be explored by studying surviving ancient
pollarded trees, landscape paintings, maps and written documents. The
field evidence provided by the shape and form of old trees is an impor-
tant clue. Ruth Tittensor in her fascinating study of the Mens, a wooded
common in Sussex, notes that although pollarded beeches are very
common, there is little mention of the practice in documentary sources.
The frequency of pollarding depended on the product required: for
fodder, trees were often lopped annually; for firewood or poles, the
lapse was variable, depending on the species. Oliver Rackham has used
tree-ring evidence to show a pollarding cycle of 13 years in Epping Forest,
between 12 and 36 years in Hatfield forest and between 18 and 25 years
at Hainault.¹0
In order to gain a broad picture of changing attitudes to pollards
in Britain, Sandrine Petit and I examined around 200 published works

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 Pollards

by foresters, agriculturalists and gardeners from c. 1600 onwards. In

general, at the beginning of the period, pollarding, although a relatively
minor element in most texts, was at least mentioned and discussed. By
the late nineteenth century, however, it was largely ignored. The wide-
spread importance of the technique is indicated by the large variety of
synonyms and related words, such as ‘dodderel’, ‘dodder-tree’, ‘doddle’,
‘polly’, ‘pollenger’, ‘pollinger’, ‘stockel’ and ‘stoggle’. ‘Shredding’ and
‘shrouding’ are related terms which denote the removal of the side-
branches, but both techniques could be performed on the same tree at
different times. Terms used to designate trees from which branches had
been cut included ‘may-pole’, ‘hop-pole’ and ‘dottard’. Some terms had
negative or anthropomorphic connotations, such as ‘to mutilate’ and
‘decapitate’. Local names for pollards include ‘greenhews’ in the north
and ‘deer fall’ in Wensleydale. The word ‘rundle’, used in Radnor, is
equivalent to ‘runnel’ and both designate a pollarded tree, but especially
a hollow one.¹¹
In the seventeenth century the leaves of trees remained important in
Britain for winter forage. Elm was particularly valuable: John Worlidge
wrote in 1669 that branches and leaves of the elm were good for cattle
and that in the winter cattle would eat elm before oats. He noticed that
it was easy to shape the tree in any way one pleased and stressed that
pollards and shrouded trees were well adapted for grazed areas because
they could not be browsed by cattle. Pollarding was perceived differently
depending on the tree species concerned. Many authors condemned the
pollarding of oak, which was generally given a special status. The London
nurseryman, gardener to the Earl of Essex and influential author Moses
Cook argued in 1676 that ‘our Yeomen and Farmers are too much sub-
ject to spoil such trees as would make our best Oaks, by heading them,
and making them Pollards.’ He thought there should be a strict law
‘to punish those that do presume to head an Oak, the King of Woods,
tho it be on their own land’. He argued also that oaks located in hedges
should be shredded like elms so that they could grow up as timber. In
contrast the influential author Batty Langley (1696–1751) recognized
that the pollarding of oak was profitable: ‘Oaks being headed, and made
pollards, are in some countries very profitable, and will last for many
Ages.’ The pollarding of ‘Aquatiks’ such as willows and poplars was gen-
erally encouraged, although John Worlidge, writing in 1669, thought
that if you let Aquaticks grow without ‘topping’ them ‘they are then more
Ornamental’ but not economically ‘beneficial’.¹²

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Pollarding was extremely important for the production of firewood

which was the main fuel for cooking and heating. The agricultural
writer Arthur Standish argued that lopping trees was profitable: a land-
owner told him that ‘he did every year loppe five to fiftie of tenne yeeres
growing, the which wood he could yearly sell for fortie shilling’ on
land which if let normally would only produce an income of about 26
shillings. Worlidge encouraged tree planting in hedgerows: ‘For Ash,
Elm, Poplar, Willow, and such Trees that are quick of growth, it is a very
great profit that is made of them where Fewel is scarce, by planting
them in Hedge-rows, and other spare places, and shrouding them at
five, six, eight or ten years growth.’ The big advantage was that ‘They
are out of the danger of the bite of Cattle, and require no fence.’ Special
techniques were employed to help maintain a healthy and productive
tree. John Mortimer, a merchant with an estate in Essex, advised in 1707
that elm trees should be shredded from the bottom upwards, taking care
to preserve the top of the tree and leave it uncut. In this way a constant
supply of firewood could be produced by the side boughs and the
bodies of the trees could ‘afterwards be good timber’. If trees were kept
as pollards he recommended that they were cut every ten years.¹³
Most seventeenth-century authors were not opposed to pollarding,
but they were concerned about its effect on the supply of naval timber.
In the first edition of his enormously influential Sylva of 1664, John
Evelyn declared that he was ‘no great Friend’ of pollarding because ‘it
makes so many Scrags and Dwarfes of many Trees which would else
be good Timber.’ However, he accepted that pollards had their uses, and
advised that they should be cut every ten or twelve years ‘at the begin-
ning of the Spring or the end of the Fall’. In subsequent editions of Sylva,
Evelyn modified his initial text, taking account of the views of other
contemporary authors. In 1670 he added that ‘The Oak will suffer it
self to be made a Pollard, that is, to have its head quite cut off ’ and in
1706 that ‘it may be good for Mast, if not too much prun’d, but not for
Timber.’ An analysis of the different editions of Sylva shows that Evelyn
had a nuanced and complicated view on pollarding. His opposition
was strongest when pollarding destroyed the potential for producing
high-quality timber; yet he was able to see that it could lengthen the life
of trees, which he thought explained why many ancient trees in church-
yards were pollards. He hated the fact that hornbeams were so frequently
lopped for firewood, making them deformed and hollow, but recog-
nized that this did not stop the trees from flourishing. He reported

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 Pollards

that pollarding of oak and ash meant that they grew in circumference
but were usually hollow, that black poplars were frequently trimmed in
Italy for vine growing and that the elm should not be topped.¹4
Moses Cook was more positive about pollards than John Evelyn and
his writings show that pollarding was a widespread and valued practice
in the late seventeenth century. He used the phrase ‘good pollard’ sev-
eral times for species such as ash and elm and noted that willows and
poplar ‘are set for Pollard’. He recommended that pollarded poplars,
willows, ash, elm and alder should not be left unlopped too long.
Cook saw pollards as a profitable resource, giving as an example the
high yield of firewood from growing hornbeam at Hampton Court,
and argued for the establishment of ‘Water-poplar’ pollards for wood
production. Even as late as the mid-eighteenth century, pollarding was
being written about in a positive manner by one of the most influen-
tial agricultural writers. William Ellis, a farmer from Little Gaddesden
in Hertfordshire, one of the most widely read farming authors, devoted
a chapter to the ‘Pollard ash’ and one to the ‘Standard ash’ in his book
The Timber-tree Improved. Ellis considered pollarding to be damaging
to the oak, but for other trees such as ash, alder, willow, elm and maple,
he supported pollarding and made ‘pollard’ one of a threefold categor-
ization of tree shapes along with ‘standard’ and ‘stem’. He noted that
‘The pollarded willow is of great service in returning a Top at three or
four years end.’¹5
But most commentators in the second half of the eighteenth century
saw pollarding as a relict practice which was anti-improvement and a
threat to potential timber trees. The enormously influential Arthur Young
argued against the use of leaves as fodder. He noted that the French used
the leaves of poplar and elm to feed sheep and thought that the young
leaves of ivy increased the milk of ewes. He reported that the harvest-
ing of shoots of elm, poplar, ash, hornbeam, white hawthorn and beech
was common in both Italy and France, that the leaves of oak and
chestnut were mixed with other sorts of leaves and that this forage was
seen as excellent. But Young argued against the practice, stating that the
feeding of sheep with elm leaves was obsolete. William Marshall asserted
in 1796 ‘We declare ourselves enemies to Pollards’ in a phrase echoing
John Evelyn’s declaration of 1664. Marshall disliked woody hedgerows
around arable fields and condemned the presence of pollards, especially
low ones, in hedgerows which were the ‘bane of corn fields’. He argued
that low pollards formed a barrier to air and affected the growth of

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crops. He also condemned the injudicious lopping of hedgerow trees,

but did recognize that hedge pollards provided a valuable supply of fuel
and stakes for farmers and were necessary when woodlands and coppices
were scarce.¹6
Between 1793 and 1813 the Board of Agriculture commissioned
General Views to provide a county-by-county picture of agricultural
conditions. Of 120 reports, 40 refer to pollarding, shredding or lop-
ping hedgerow trees; most were highly critical, using negative vocabulary
to describe these ‘infamous’, ‘injurious’ and ‘disgusting’ activities. John
Middleton compared Middlesex favourably to Suffolk, ‘whose hedges
are filled with pollards of every age, under perhaps two hundred years,
of no value to the tenant, and worth to the landlord only a twentieth,
or thirtieth, part of what those identical trees would have been worth,
had they been protected from the spoliation of the farmer’s axe’. He
thought that the ‘best remedy for this evil would be for every landlord
to cut down all the pollards over the whole of his property’ and that ‘the
longer the pollards stand, the less valuable they will be.’ Although most
authors of the General Views were opposed to pollards, some gave evi-
dence of their importance for wood production. W. T. Pomeroy wrote
in 1794 that in Worcestershire the ‘hedge-rows are everywhere crowded
with elm, and though the present custom of lopping and pollarding
must certainly injure their growth, they often produce timber of consid-
erable dimensions’. Such wood was used for firewood, to repair gates
and buildings and to make agricultural and other tools. Pollarding and
shredding were also seen as ways of controlling hedges and reducing the
effects of shading on crops. John Clark reported that in Herefordshire
the lopping of hedges was essential for crops: ‘The lopping of hedge-
row timber, while it hurts the beauty of the country by doing a violence
to nature, proves beneficial to all vegetables that are placed immediately
under the trees.’ Moreover, as the branches were necessary ‘to mend the
hedges, to abolish the practice would be impossible’.¹7
The authors of the General Views are virtually unanimous in blaming
tenant farmers rather than landowners for the ‘abominable practice’
of pollarding. Tenants were likely ‘to make every tree a pollard’ and to
‘prune or lop his landlord’s trees, under the mistaken notion, that it im-
proves their growth’. Pollarding was a way for tenants to harvest wood on
a regular basis; it could also be a means of affirming a tenant’s rights over
trees. In Bedfordshire pollarding was seen as the appropriation of trees
by farmers: ‘this abominable practice generally originates with neglect

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 Pollards

of the quickset hedges, which when fallen into decay, must be supplied
by dead ones’ and ‘the farmer ascends the neighbouring trees, to lop off
the necessary materials’. Moreover to ensure ‘a constant supply of
hedging stuff, he cuts off the leading branches, and afterwards claims
the succeeding crop as his own’. In Radnor it was reported that ‘tenants
of superior ingenuity’ appropriated trees by pollarding. In some cases
‘the property in trees, which by their own or their predecessor’s negli-
gence had been suffered to arrive at maturity . . . became the property
of the landlord.’ To get this property back ‘a few of the lower boughs
are cut off and burned out of sight’ by the tenant. The following year
‘a few more share the same fate; the third year the top is cut off, after
which the tree becomes for ever afterwards the property of the tenant’.
By local custom the tenant was then ‘entitled to top it as often as he
pleases, coming then under the denomination of a rundle’.¹8
By the early nineteenth century most agricultural commentators
were agreed that pollarding was a practice worth stopping and some
castigated it as a type of theft. It was identified as a relict of an earlier
agricultural system. Very few commentators discuss the use of leaves
for fodder. Those that did, such as James Anderson, who mentions the
use of twigs of Scots fir as fodder for cattle and sheep in the cold spring
of 1782, saw this as an unusual and exceptional use of leaves rather than
a normal practice.¹9 The agricultural changes of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century had made leaf fodder superfluous for progressive
farmers. Hay, lucerne and turnips were used to feed livestock during
the winter. In addition the rise of coal consumption in rural areas was
by the mid-nineteenth century to make pollarding and shredding
much less important as a source of firewood. But how could pollard-
ing be stopped? One answer was for landowners to exert their power
through the imposition of new clauses in their leases which stopped their
tenants lopping and cutting boughs.
This was the approach recommended by Uvedale Price, who wrote
in 1786 ‘On the Bad Effects of Stripping and Cropping Trees’ in the
Annals of Agriculture, a major periodical venture launched by Arthur
Young in 1784 to publicize the views of leading agriculturalists. Price
opened his essay by expressing surprise that the management of timber
trees on farms was often left to the tenant, ‘who is too apt to consider
them merely as furnishing him with fuel, and hedge-wood, and to send
his workmen to cut off their boughs in what manner they please’. He
makes a clear distinction between pollarding and stripping. With the

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former, ‘cutting off the head of the tree causes it to shoot vigorously
both at the top, and at the sides’; if such trees were allowed to grow again
they can ‘swell to a great bulk’ and ‘make a noble appearance’ and even
‘produce very valuable timber for purposes that do not require length’.
Pollarding, then, could be ‘less disfiguring to the country’, although ‘in
one respect’ it was ‘still more pernicious’ than stripping, as it generally
affected oaks, which were ‘the most valuable of timber’. Thomas Hearne
drew just such an overgrown oak pollard at Downton in north Hereford-
shire in 1784–6 for Price’s friend Richard Payne Knight (illus. 73).
Price thought that ‘Stripping a tree to the top (as chiefly practised
with elms)’ was ‘the most pernicious, as well as the most disfiguring’
practice. Once stripped, ‘the lower part of it shoots out very strongly’ but
‘the top hardly pushes at all’ and if the tree is repeatedly stripped it ‘at last
decays’. He backed up this argument by reporting a ‘very observing
timber merchant’ who told him that stripped elms, ‘being full of holes’,
were particularly unfit ‘for what they are most used in the neighbourhood
of London, that is for pipes, as the water is frequently bursting out at the
knots unless they are secured by lead’. He went on to argue that although
it was ‘a very general notion among the common people, that the strip-
ping an elm makes it grow faster’, this was a misconception derived from
the ‘shoots being longer and fresher the first year after it is stripped’, and
that overall the growth of a tree was checked by the removal of boughs
as trees need leaves to grow.
To give greater strength to this argument he reported an experiment
‘that was made to convince a gentleman of large property, at Ledbury, in
Herefordshire, that the custom of stripping elms was extremely hurtful
to the timber’. This person

desired that an elm might be felled that was known to have been
stripped to the top twice within a certain number of years, and
the particular years when it was stripped exactly remembered. It
is well known that trees when sawed across show the increase of
each year by circles, and that when a tree grows much in any
one year the circle is enlarged, and the contrary when it grows
but little; when this elm was felled, the person showed that the
year after it was stripped the circle was very contracted, the next
year it was wider, and the circles continued to increase with the
quantity of boughs till the next stripping, when the circle was
again contracted in the same manner.

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 Pollards

Price recounted that the ‘gentleman was so struck with the truth of
this experiment, that from that time he never allowed a tenant to touch
any of his trees’ and that ‘the size and beauty of the elms about Ledbury’
were a ‘standing proof ’ of the ‘effect this experiment produced in that
neighbourhood’.²0
Price blamed landlords for allowing their tenants to convert timber
trees into pollards and hence ‘the profit of trees on each farm is, in a
manner, transferred from the landlord to the tenant.’ He recognized that
tenants would object ‘that if they are not allowed to crop or strip their
trees, they can neither get fuel nor hedge-wood, and that their hedges
will be hurt by the trees growing over them’. Moreover he was told by
some farmers that their workmen ‘made it a point of honour to get as
high as possible, and that they despised a workman who left many boughs
at top’. Price argued that a compromise would be ‘to allow the tenant to
take off the lower boughs to a certain height, as one quarter, one third,
or at most one half of the height of the whole tree’. Price felt that this
could be achieved by modifications to tenancy agreements. In addition,
however, he argued that landlords themselves had to be much more
active in their management of timber on farmland, to the extent that
every tree, whether in a hedge or within a field, should be documented.
His principal recommendation was ‘to number all the trees on each
farm, and in every piece of ground, and to enter them in a book, distin-
guishing the sorts, as oak, elm, ash &c. those that have been cropped, and
those that are in hedge-rows from those in the open parts.’ He thought
it would be ‘very useful to have each tree measured in the girth, and
roughly valued’; this would allow ‘the encrease of each tree, both in size
and value’ to be seen from the time the account was taken. An additional
benefit of this level of management was that ‘all tenants would be very
cautious how they cropped, stripped, or felled any tree without leave,
when there was so certain a method of detecting them.’²¹ These sug-
gestions were put into practice a few years later by Price’s friend the
banker John Biddulph of Ledbury Park. In his ‘Timber Book’ of July
1817 there is a ‘Survey and Valuation of all the Timber Trees and
young trees growing on the several Estates in the parishes of Ledbury
and Donnington’.²² Every tree on the farms was ‘blazed and numbered
with white paint’; the totals listed were ‘Maiden Oak Trees’: 493; ‘Pollard
Oaks’: 320; ‘Elm Trees’: 619; ‘Ash Trees’: 181; ‘Poplar Trees’: 31; and one
‘Wich Elm’. The profusion of pollard oaks and elms is remarkable; sales
of trees were noted in this book through the 1820s until 1829.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

Price encouraged landlords to take minute control of timber trees

through documentation and surveillance. The General Views generally
took a similar line and the use of anti-pollarding clauses within leases was
strongly supported. In Buckinghamshire it was noted that ‘Upon Lord
Chesterfield’s estate the practice of lopping has been prohibited by Mr
Kent, in his regulation for the management of that estate.’ Nathaniel
Kent was a leading land agent who had been a strong influence on
Uvedale Price. John Middleton suggested that ‘a covenant should be
entered into by the tenant, not to top any tree . . . under a penalty of five
pounds for each offence.’ He thought that ‘any tree recently pollarded,
would be evidence against the tenant; who should be invariably required
to pay the penalty.’ But others felt that such clauses were ineffective: ‘It
is true, in all leases there is a clause – that the tenant shall not cut, lop or
top any timber’ and that ‘this looks very pretty in theory – but behold
the practice.’²³
The ancient practices of pollarding and shredding declined in
importance in the three centuries from 1600 to 1900. Many arguments
were used against pollarding. First, in the late seventeenth century,
pollards were perceived as an old-fashioned way to produce wood or to
feed animals. In the context of widespread enclosure and the moderniza-
tion of land management, which led to a gradual differentiation between
those concerned with farming and those concerned with tree and wood-
land management, pollarding and shredding were increasingly marginal.
They were seen as practices that created neither high-quality timber nor
high-quality fodder. Second, pollarding was a practice that was seen to
have few benefits for the rising class of improving farmers and estate
owners. It was tainted by association with small farmers and commoners
and was a nuisance to estate proprietors. Active pollarding was to every
passing member of the gentry a highly visible reminder, scattered along
hedgerows and within fields, of the activities and practical demands of
small farmers. Third, pollarding was increasingly seen as an unnatural
element of a landscape that was being consciously redrawn and celebrated
as a naturalized landscape. These three groups of negative arguments
transformed pollarding from a relatively benign, bucolic activity in 1600
to one seen as backward, barbaric and even threatening in the late
eighteenth century.
The critique of pollarding gained greater force because of the
increasing concentration of land ownership, the continued decline in
the importance of leaf fodder and the rise in the use of coal to replace

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 Pollards

firewood as a fuel in country districts. In general terms the authors most

critical of pollarding and shredding were also the most influential. Minor
authors provide a more practical view of the practice and in some cases
espouse pollarding as profitable and beneficial. Certainly by the nine-
teenth century, pollarding was generally seen as an outdated, exploitative
practice that damaged an important resource. But the rights to lop
trees were still jealously guarded in particular places until the end of the
century, the most famous instance being the battle over such rights in
Epping Forest.
By the mid-nineteenth century the management of Epping Forest
was in disarray and the growth of London and rising property values
brought enormous pressure for the building of new houses. The Lord
Warden until 1857 was the notoriously extravagant Lord Mornington,
a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, whose obituary in the Morning
Chronicle claimed that ‘he was redeemed by no single virtue, adorned by
no single grace.’ He was keen to enclose sections of the forest and profit
from property sales. Landowners, who were often magistrates, spread
the belief that the rights of the poor to lop trees and gather firewood
were defunct. Although a minority of landowners defended the open
forest landscapes, as they increased the value of their estates, most saw
the continuance of such rights as encouraging ‘waste’ and ‘demorali-
sation’, and favoured enclosure and the erasure of forest rights, which were
‘primitive estates and interests founded on the rules of antique societies
and trammelled by vexatious usages’.
Three Loughton men, Samuel and Alfred Willingale and William
Higgins, who obtained their livelihood from pollarding and selling fire-
wood, were found guilty of malicious trespass after lopping trees. They
chose to go to Ilford Gaol in 1866, rather than pay a fine and costs, to
publicize their claim to ancient rights. These disputes were influenced by
more general demands for public recreation promoted by the Commons
Preservation Society from 1865 and complicated by the legal disputes
and debates associated with easements and profit à prendre. Eventually
the remaining wastes were ‘secured for public use’ under the Epping
Forest Act of 1878. Queen Victoria, who opened the forest in May
1882, noted in her journal that ‘the enthusiasm was very great’ and that
it had ‘been given to the poor of the East End, as a sort of recreation
ground’.²4 The terms under which Epping Forest was saved from clear-
ance provided that the woods should remain in a ‘natural state’; the new
Commission stopped the practice of lopping in order to encourage

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

54 Doorway at Lopping Hall, Loughton, Essex, 1884; architect Edmond Egan.

the growth of ‘ornamental trees’. Compensation was paid to the villagers

of Loughton and £6,000, known as the Lopping Endowment, was
given for the construction of a large working men’s hall in 1884. To this
day, Lopping Hall, as it is known, remains a memorial to the lost and
ancient practice of pollarding. The Arts and Crafts designer and social
campaigner William Morris celebrated the appearance of the hornbeam
woods where the lopping had ceased and argued that ‘I would leave them
all to nature’ and not to the villager’s axe. But the many remaining uncut
and rapidly growing pollards caused management problems from the
1890s onwards and there were extended debates over the future of the
unnatural practice of pollarding. The debate was won by the middle
classes, backed by ‘aesthetic tastes and scientific principles which were
national or international rather than local’, only to be reversed 80 years
later with the reintroduction of pollarding by land managers informed
by the research of historical ecologists.²5
By the 1950s, in general terms, pollarding had become a moribund
and almost forgotten practice in Britain. It is only in the last twenty years
or so that there has been increased interest in it. This is due largely to the
survival of the Picturesque aesthetic and the associated desire to main-
tain ancient pollards, and the recognition of their importance as a
habitat for rare beetles, spiders and fungi. Such conservation pollarding

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is as yet in its infancy but there is now great enthusiasm, encouraged

by organizations such as the Ancient Tree Forum, for the recording and
mapping of surviving ancient pollards across Britain and more widely
in Europe. Great attention is being given to developing effective and safe
ways of managing and conserving large, overgrown pollards and estab-
lishing new ones. However, much local knowledge associated with the
different stages of the practice – the lopping of branches, the drying of
leaves, their storage, the nutritive value of the different species and their
influence on animal health – has already been lost.

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 m
six
Sherwood Forest

T
he same trees and woods are perceived very differently by
different people at the same time, and by groups of people
through time. These different meanings and values add rich
layers of association and understanding to trees and woods, which can
be examined by exploring changing interpretations of Sherwood Forest.
Foresters, landowners, archaeologists, historians, writers and tourists
from the eighteenth century to the present have recorded contrasting and
conflicting views of the ancient Sherwood oaks. The Royal Forest was
established in the twelfth century and in the thirteenth century covered
an area about 20 miles long and 8 miles wide on the dry sandstone
heaths of Nottinghamshire. At this time the forest was characterized by
a shifting mosaic of unenclosed oak and birch woodland and heath
with many temporary arable enclosures known as brecks. Several of
those oaks which survive today are over 500 years old. These trees
have at different times, and sometimes at the same time, been valued
for naval timber supply; for their connections with Druidic rites; for their
‘essential’ Picturesqueness; as symbols of aristocratic power; for their
Robin Hood associations; as a habitat for rare insects; and as relict
‘native’ oak populations.

y Romance
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) almost single-handedly created the most
famous imaginative historical forest in the world in 1820. He did this by
setting a crucial meeting between Richard i and Robin Hood within
Sherwood Forest in his historical romance Ivanhoe.¹ This novel was a
runaway success in Britain, the United States and around the globe
and went into many editions throughout the nineteenth century. Scott

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 Sherwood Forest

was enormously influential in bringing about a revival of interest in

the Middle Ages and created at his home Abbotsford in the Scottish
Borders a gothicized mansion surrounded by many acres of trees, enthu-
siastically planted according to Picturesque rules.² But by powerfully
evoking a medieval world of friars, maidens and battling monarchs he
also unwittingly unleashed a desire by many to visit Sherwood Forest.
In the novel Sherwood Forest is only loosely placed somewhere
between Ashby-de-la-Zouch and York, but the quality of the ancient
trees is precisely drawn. A ‘mysterious guide’ leads characters to a ‘small
opening in the forest, in the centre of which grew an oak-tree of enor-
mous magnitude, throwing its twisted branches in every direction.
Beneath this tree four or five yeomen lay stretched on the ground, while
another, as sentinel, walked to and fro in the moonlight shade.’ The
meeting between Richard Coeur-de-Lion, who had ‘the brilliant, but
useless character, of a knight of romance’, and Robin Hood took place
‘beneath a huge oak-tree’ and a ‘silvan repast was hastily prepared for
the King of England, surrounded by men outlaws to his government,
but who now formed his court and his guard. As the flagon went round,
the rough foresters soon lost their awe for the presence of Majesty’. In
this company ‘Richard showed to the greatest imaginable advantage. He
was gay, good-humoured, and fond of manhood in every rank of life’
and was happy to call ‘Robin of Sherwood Forest’ the ‘King of Outlaws,
and Prince of good fellows!’³
Sherwood Forest was not without literary connections before Ivanhoe.
William Shield’s comic opera Robin Hood, or Sherwood Forest, which
opened at Covent Garden on 17 April 1784, was frequently performed
throughout the late eighteenth century and Sherwood Forest or Northern
Adventures, a now obscure novel by Mrs Elizabeth Sarah Villa-Real Gooch,
was published in 1804. But it was Ivanhoe which catapulted Sherwood
Forest into the international popular imagination of the early nine-
teenth century. Soon tourists demanded to explore in Nottinghamshire
the Sherwood Forest so vividly yet imprecisely imagined by Scott. The
impact of the novel can be seen through the eyes of the American author
Washington Irving, who rode from Lord Byron’s former home Newstead
Abbey (illus. 55) to the Forest

among the venerable and classic shades of Sherwood. Here

I was delighted to find myself in a genuine wild wood, of
primitive and natural growth, so rarely to be met with in this

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

55 After William Westall, Newstead Abbey, 1832, etching and engraving.

thickly peopled and highly cultivated country. It reminded

me of the aboriginal forests of my native land. I rode through
natural alleys and greenwood glades . . . What most interested
me, however, was to behold around the mighty trunks of veteran
oaks, the patriarchs of Sherwood Forest. They were shattered,
hollow and moss-grown, it is true, and their ‘leafy honours’ were
nearly departed; but, like mouldering towers they were noble
and Picturesque in their decay, and gave evidence, even in their
ruins, of their ancient grandeur.

He relished the literary associations:

As I gazed about me upon these vestiges of once ‘merry

Sherwood’ the picturings of my boyish fancy began to rise in
my mind, and Robin Hood and his men to stand before me
. . . The horn of Robin Hood again seemed to sound through
the forest. I saw his sylvan chivalry, half huntsmen, half free-
booters, trooping across the distant glades, or feasting and
revelling beneath the trees.4

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 Sherwood Forest

This contagious enthusiasm for visiting untrammelled tracts of wild

medieval forest precisely coincided with the final stages of the dissolution
of the ancient forest laws at Sherwood. Although some of the remnants
of the medieval English Royal Forests, such as the New Forest and the
Forest of Dean, remained actively managed by the Office of Woods
throughout the nineteenth century, most, including Sherwood Forest,
were disafforested and sold off to private landowners. Like other medieval
Royal Forests, Sherwood had come into being to protect monarchical
hunting rights.5 Most forests contained villages, heaths, arable land,
pasture and woodland. A survey of Sherwood Forest made by Richard
Bankes in 1609 showed that by far the greater part of the forest was
agricultural land and heath and that it even included the whole town
of Nottingham.6 There was no direct connection between the idea of
forest and the concept of woodland but with the decline in Crown
interest, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, the term ‘for-
est’ became increasingly associated with those wooded areas which
survived in areas that remained or were once Royal Forests in the legal
sense.
In the Victorian period the ancient trees found in many forests
became increasingly celebrated by tourists and authors. Trees mirrored
human existence; in 1826 Jacob Strutt restated a commonplace when
he noted that

among all the varied production with which Nature has adorned
the surface of the other, none awakens our sympathies, or interests
our imagination, so powerfully as those venerable trees . . . silent
witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny
they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding,
their prime and their decay.7

Some areas that had many old trees, especially if they were of a grotesque
appearance and had legendary connections, such as Sherwood Forest,
became important tourist attractions. There was great antiquarian inter-
est in the ancient trees which soon became overwashed by Picturesque
sensibilities. These provided fertile ground for the rapid spread of
Romantic ideas drawn from Ivanhoe and developed by both local authors
and the aristocrats who now owned the land. Notwithstanding schol-
arly research that indicates that the real or mythical figure of Robin
Hood had only the loosest of connections with Sherwood Forest, he

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remains a dominant cultural association.8 But this is only one of the

layers of meaning which have become attached to the trees. The same
individual trees, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, have been ascribed
a catalogue of changing values and meanings. They have been prodded
and probed, lopped and pollarded, exploited and felled. They have
designated status and power and caused legal disputes. They have been
the subject of archaeological experiment and aesthetic reflection. They
have been categorized as fuel, timber, Picturesque, dead and wildlife
habitat.9

y Corruption
In the late eighteenth century the surviving Royal Forests were iden-
tified both as anachronistic and a potential source of revenue. A Royal
Commission was established to examine the extent of surviving Crown
rights. The report on Sherwood was published in 1793 and undertaken
by Charles Middleton, John Call and John Fordyce of the Land Revenue
Office, based in Scotland Yard, London. It drew on a wide range of
evidence that included perambulations of the forest preserved in records
kept in the Tower of London and in the Court of Exchequer and

56 George Sanderson, Birkland and Bilhagh, Nottinghamshire, in a detail from an

1835 Map of the Country Twenty Miles round Mansfield . . ..

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 Sherwood Forest

57 The Birklands, c. 1890.

various surveys of the forest. They also ‘thought it necessary personally

to view the Forest, and make Enquiries on the Spot’ and interviewed John
Gladwin, steward of the courts of the forest, and George Clarke, wood-
ward of the two main surviving woodland areas, Birkland and Billhagh,
in November and December 1791. They learnt from Mr Gladwin that
‘there was lying in the Swan Inn, in Mansfield, a voluminous Collection
of antient Papers, supposed to relate to this Forest, and locked up in a
Chest, which had formerly been kept in the Castle of Nottingham’ and
they also found ‘antient Forest Books and Papers in the Possession of
different Gentlemen residing in the neighbourhood of the Forest’. The
three surveyors found ample evidence of ‘old corruption’ within the
management of the Forest.¹0
Sherwood Forest, first mentioned in 1154, covered most of Notting-
hamshire north of the River Trent until 1227, after which the legal
boundaries of the forest were restricted to an area roughly 20 miles long
and 8 miles wide, largely on sandy and relatively poor soils. The forest
was a shifting mosaic of heathland and unenclosed oak and birch wood-
land and enclosed arable land and woodland. Some of the arable land
was in the form of temporary enclosures, or ‘brecks’. Most of the land
was in private ownership but large areas were subject to common graz-
ing and other common rights until these rights were extinguished by
enclosure. By the end of the seventeenth century the area of woodland

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

in Sherwood had reached its lowest point. The report was damning of the
forest officials. It argued that ‘the Rights of the Crown had been lost Sight
of ’ and were ‘very imperfectly known’. The nine forest keepers ‘knew
very little of their Walks’ and ‘never acted’ other than in ‘receiving their
trifling salaries’. They found that no deer survived in most of the for-
est and that the only remaining property of the Crown consisted of

the Soil in Birkland and Bilhagh, where neighbouring

Inhabitants have Rights of Common; of Timber in a State
of Decay, and exposed to constant Injury; and of Forestrial
Rights over an extensive District, which tend to obstruct
Improvement, and lessen the Value of private Property,
without bringing, at present, any Profit to the Crown.¹¹

The commissioners examined old surveys of Birklands and Bilhagh

and found that ‘the Number and Value of the Trees appear, for two cen-
turies, to have been in a State of continual Decrease.’ In 1608 there were
49,900 trees of which 23,100 (46 per cent) were ‘Tymber Okes’ and
26,800 (54 per cent) were ‘Okes not Tymber’ which were also classed as
‘decayed’. By 1680 the number of trees had fallen to 33,996, of which
only 1,400 (4 per cent) were suitable for ‘His Majesty’s Shipping’ and
32,596 (96 per cent) were for the ‘Country’s use’. Many of the trees were
‘frow’ and ‘shaken’ and had many ‘dead Knotts’. In 1788/9 George
Clarke’s survey found only 10,117 oak trees left, of which only 1,368
(14 per cent) contained ‘Timber fit for the navy’. The surveyors were keen
to establish the value of the surviving trees. Their earlier reports on the
Forest of Dean and the New Forest had shown ‘how loose the Manage-
ment in Forests has been’ and they were not surprised to find ‘many
abuses’ at Sherwood, which was so far from any dockyards.¹²
But they were appalled to find timber trees of such potential impor-
tance for the Navy ‘going fast to Decay’ and made special enquiries.
George Clarke confirmed there were about 2,000 acres of Crown trees
at Birkland and Bilhagh and that ‘no Timber or Wood is cut there for
the Use of any private Person.’ But when they visited the woods they
were shocked by the great age of the trees, most of which ‘are now in
a State of Decay, and it is not easy to find such as have not some Defect
in the Heart, where Trees first begin to fail. This Difficulty gives rise to
the greatest Abuse which we have found to prevail in this Forest.’ The
problem was that various officials could take ‘fee trees’ as payment for

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 Sherwood Forest

their posts. They could choose the most valuable trees, and to ensure
they obtained good ones it was ‘a common Practice to bore the Trees
first, to see if they are sound; and if a Tree after being bored is not liked,
other Trees are tried in the same Manner, until the Party finds one he
approves of ’. Moreover, the very officers whose duty it was to prevent
abuses frequently sold their fee trees to individuals who were able to
choose which tree they wanted. The purchaser ‘to guard against the
Danger of buying [a tree] that is unsound, bores the best-looking Trees
to the Heart with an Auger, rejecting everyone in which there is any
Mark of Decay’. As this happened every year, many of the better trees
were damaged and the surveyors found that ‘each Time that we viewed
this Forest, we found some which had been recently bored.’¹³
In addition to this extraordinary damage the commissioners found
a system of enumerating the trees which itself damaged the trees.
George Clarke reported that in 1775 he had been directed to mark and
number the trees by ‘cutting off a Piece of the Bark about Five Inches
Square, and stamping the Crown, the Number of the Tree, and the
Name of the Forest, on each Tree, with an Iron Instrument, on the solid
Wood. Many of which Numbers and Marks are now partly grown over
by the Bark.’ The order was changed ‘from an Apprehension the Trees
might be injured from that Mode of marking’, but this was much too
late to save the majority from this mode, which had been introduced to
help preserve them. The commissioners also found historical evidence
of damage to 8,060 trees in Bilhagh caused by the frequent lopping of
branches in the survey of 1680. Although the residents of Edwinstowe
retained a right to collect firewood in the late eighteenth century, it
appears that pollarding had been largely stamped out by that time. In
addition to the decline in the number of trees, there was a lack of regen-
eration of young oak trees, probably due to grazing. George Clarke told
the commissioners that the parishioners of Edwinstowe ‘claim a Right
to the Acorns, when they fall, and take in Swine to feed on them, at cer-
tain Rates per Head, according to the Plenty or Scarcity of Food. They
also depasture their Sheep in those Woods.’¹4
The corruption uncovered by the commissioners was widespread.
Forest officers claimed excessive expenses and officers were appointed
who ‘for many Years, have been chosen for no other reason than to
entitle them to their Fees’. The officers were destroying the very trees
they were paid to protect because the trees themselves were used as
a medium of exchange. And to gain the maximum value of a fee tree,

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

it was bored to the centre to check it was not hollow. The remoteness
of the Forest from naval dockyards, together with the enormous power
of local landowners who were the principal forest officers, had resulted
in a massive decline in the power of the Crown in this remnant of
Sherwood Forest. It was only after a thorough examination of surviv-
ing documents that the commissioners were able to demonstrate that
the Duke of Portland’s claim to own the soil of Birkland and Bilhagh
was unfounded in law. And yet it was to the Duke of Portland that
the commissioners recommended the land should be sold. The report
emphasized that it was under Crown ownership and control that the
abuses it uncovered had been allowed to unfold and develop. It saw
private ownership as the only satisfactory way of encouraging the future
management of Birkland and Bilhagh.

y Privatization
The rump of Sherwood Forest in the 1790s was an isolated island of
Crown land in a sea of private property. Aristocratic landownership was
so dominant that the northern part of the forest was nicknamed ‘the
Dukeries’. These landowners produced a landscape of ‘improvement’
consisting of parks, mansions, plantations and modern agriculture
associated with the great estates of Clumber, Welbeck, Thoresby, Rufford
and Worksop Manor which were wrought from the poor sandy soils of
Sherwood Forest and from smaller landowners. One expression of the
dominance of these great landowners was the construction of long,
wide, straight rides through the old woods. One was cut through Birkland
and Bilhagh in 1703, and in 1706 another was made from Thoresby
House through Bilhagh Wood. The Commissioners of 1793 noted acer-
bically that in 1709 the Duke of Newcastle (Lord Warden of the Forest)
had cut ‘a very broad Riding . . . through the Whole of Birkland Wood,
from one End to the other; and the Timber, which was valued at £1,500
was given to his Grace; but the Expences attending the Fall, amounting
to £118. 17s. 2d. were charged to the Crown.’ These rides allowed
neighbouring ducal owners to take full advantage of the Crown Forest
for hunting: riders could traverse the woodland quickly and view the
deer clearly. In the case of the Duke of Newcastle, his local power was
so great that he was able to charge the Crown for the cost of making
the ride and take the profit from the trees felled. The rides demon-
strated to all and sundry the status and power of the landowners.

148
 Sherwood Forest

They were linked with avenues of trees, which radiated out across the
open agricultural lands in complex geometrical patterns advertising
a controlled and subordinated landscape.¹5
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the old Sherwood oaks
attracted the attention of Major Hayman Rooke, a retired army officer
who lived at Woodhouse Place just outside Mansfield. He has been
described as ‘the real pioneer of archaeology in Nottinghamshire’ and
was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. A man of wide interests he
excavated a Roman Villa at Mansfield Woodhouse and published a
meteorological register from 1785 to 1805. Humphry Repton in his
memoirs vividly describes in a scene reminiscent of Northanger Abbey
how Rooke came to his aid when Repton thought he had discovered
a corpse in the middle of the night in a remote room at Hardwick Hall.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century Rooke turned his attention
to the ancient oaks of Sherwood.¹6 He allows us to view the Sherwood
oaks through the eyes of a scholarly, late eighteenth-century antiquar-
ian. The trees are celebrated for a variety of reasons. There is wonder at
their size, form and dimensions; there is keen interest in their age; there
is fascination with their royal and other historical associations. These
aspects are combined with a desire to dissect the trees with a scientific
purpose: to gain knowledge of their origin and age.
Rooke was keen to marshal statistics about the decline in the num-
ber of trees and the scale of destruction and drew heavily on the Report
of the Commissioners of 1793. But he combined this statistical approach
with an attempt to link the oaks with both the classical world and the
ancient Britons and more particularly the Druids. He thought that the

venerable and majestic Oak seems to claim superiority over all

other trees. It was styled by the ancients Jovis Arbor; and the
Celtic statue of Jupiter was a tall oak. Our ancestors, the ancient
Britons, held the oak sacred; and their priests the Druids, who
took their name from the British Derw, an oak, and esteemed
the mistletoe of that tree above that of all others, consecrated
groves of oaks as one species of temple worthy of their religious
ceremonies.

He then connects this historical understanding of the ancient trees

with the experience of contemporaries visiting the oaks: ‘Were we, even
now, to enter a grove of stately oaks, seven or eight hundred years old,

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

whose spreading branches form a solemn and gloomy umbrage, I think

we could not behold them without some degree of veneration.’¹7
Rooke drew on classical and modern authorities to ascertain the
possible ages of oaks. He argued that it ‘has generally been thought,
that the age of an oak seldom exceeds three hundred years’, but that
this is ‘certainly an erroneous calculation’. He used archaeological and
antiquarian knowledge to attempt to date the trees. He considered the
principle of the annual growth rings of trees and quotes from John
Evelyn:

It is said, that the trunk or bough of a tree being cut transversely,

plain and smooth, sheweth several circles or rings, more or
less orbicular, according to the external figure, in some parallel
proportion one without the other, from the centre of the wood
to the inside of the bark, dividing the whole into so many circular
spaces . . . It is commonly, and very probably, asserted, that a tree
gains a new ring every year.¹8

But Rooke is able to go beyond paraphrasing John Evelyn. Using his

own local knowledge and observation he recounted how:

There are now and then opportunities of knowing the ages

of oaks almost to a certainty. In cutting down some trees in
Birchland . . . letters have been found cut or stamped in
the body of the tree, marking the king’s reign, several of
which I have in my possession. One piece of wood marked
J.R. [James Rex] was given me by the woodman, who cut
the tree down in the year 1786.

The woodman told him that ‘the tree was perfectly sound, and had not
arrived to its highest perfection. It was about 12 feet in circumference.’
Rooke was told that ‘the letters appeared to be a little above a foot
within the tree, and about one foot from the centre; so that this oak must
have been near six feet in circumference when the letters were cut.’
Rooke went on to argue that a ‘tree of that size is judged to be about
one hundred and twenty years growth. If we suppose the letters to be
cut about the middle of James the First’s reign, it is 172 years to the year
1786, which, added to 120, makes the tree 292 years old when it was
cut down.’¹9

150
 Sherwood Forest

58 Hayman Rooke, Plantations at Welbeck, 1790s, watercolour. Hundreds of acres

of broadleaved trees were planted on private estates in Sherwood Forest. Rooke
depicts the browse-line caused by deer.

Rooke was a detective who dissected the trees in order to understand

their origin; he was also a publicist who espoused the aristocratic Whiggish
landed interest. He organized a special celebration in 1788 of the cen-
tenary of the Glorious Revolution. He identified even the old and
decrepit Sherwood oaks with the greatness of the British Navy and
elided their Druidic ancestry with the new plantations of the aristoc-
racy, relishing with pleasure the efforts being made ‘to adorn this ancient
Forest in a manner truly patriotic and worthy of imitation; the many
respectable Persons, whose Mansions and Parks border on the Forest,
have made, and continue to make, large Plantations in honour of the
splendid Victories gained by our gallant Admirals.’²0 His views are those
of the establishment, and were heavily influenced by John Evelyn,
whose Sylva was reissued in many editions in the eighteenth century and
remained a staple of libraries of the landed gentry. The spirit of improve-
ment backed by the Industrial Revolution and by the demands of
modern naval warfare clothed the heaths of Sherwood Forest with new
private, rather than Crown, plantations of pine and oak.

y Tourism
From the 1820s onwards, tourists began to visit Sherwood in pursuit
of Walter Scott’s Robin Hood and the forest they so wanted him to have
known. But the ancient oaks had been disappearing fast, the heaths

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

were rapidly being converted to modern agriculture and the medieval

parks of Bestwood and Clipstone were enclosed. The vibrant medieval
identity created by the popularity of Ivanhoe began to exert a protec-
tive shield over the remnants of the forest. Local authors were taken
by the medieval romance of the forest and wrote poems and essays
in celebration of it. Aristocratic owners incorporated the chivalric and
medieval motifs into their new estate buildings and supported the
development of tourism by maintaining the surviving ancient trees
and allowing organized parties to visit the forest. The trees also fitted
perfectly with the Picturesque ideals of landscape appreciation that
William Gilpin and Uvedale Price had presented in the late eighteenth
century and which soon became the dominant arboreal aesthetic. The
ancient Sherwood oaks, however hollow and rotten, found themselves
at the forefront of fashion.
One of the most effective local proselytizers for Sherwood was
William Howitt (1792–1879), whose father was a mine superintend-
ent and whose mother was a herbalist. He was born in Derbyshire and
apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Mansfield in the heart of Sherwood.
Enthused by the forest landscape, he started to write essays and poems
influenced by Byron, Scott and Washington Irving. He became a phar-
macist in Nottingham and around him and his wife Mary, who published
The Forest Minstrel in 1823, gathered a group of poets and authors known
as the Sherwood Group. These included William’s brother Richard Howitt
(1799–1869), called ‘The Wordsworth of Sherwood Forest’; Robert
Millhouse, who published Sherwood Forest and Other Poems in 1827; and
Spencer Hall, the phrenologist and poet who published the Sherwood
Magazine. William Howitt’s essay on Sherwood Forest in his influential
collection The Rural Life of England (1838) marvelled at the great age of
the trees:

A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and

wintry violence, have all flung their utmost force on these trees,
and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey,
gnarled; stretching out their bare sturdy arms, or their mingled
foliage and ruin – a life in death . . . it is like a fragment of a
world worn out and forsaken.

He contrasts this Sublime yet pantheistic vision with the life of the
town worker and celebrates their potential for recreation. ‘These woods

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 Sherwood Forest

and their fairy-land dreams are but our luxuries; snatches of beauty
and peace, caught as we go along the dusty path of duty. The town has
engulphed us; a human hum is in our ears; and the thoughts and cares
of life are upon us once more.’ At the same time he closely notices the work
of the woodmen who ‘felled trees that were overtopped and ruined by
their fellows; and their billets and fallen trunks, and split-up piles of
blocks, are lying about in pictorial simplicity’.²¹
A fascinating insight into the life of the workmen of Sherwood is
provided by Christopher Thomson, who published his Autobiography
of an Artisan in 1847. Thomson settled in the Sherwood Forest village of
Edwinstowe as a painter and decorator. The author January Searle found
him working in his garden ‘and directly he saw us enter the gate, he
dashed his spade in the ground, and came forward with his hearty right
hand, to welcome us’. He established an artisan’s library and reading room
and was ‘a landscape painter, too, and his pictures of forest scenery are
as truthful as Nature herself. We found the walls of his parlour covered
all over with the works of his easel. He is married with twelve or thirteen
children – a whole house full at least – although I am not sure about the
exact number.’²² Thomson’s artisanal Picturesque views, together with
his written descriptions, provide a remarkable entry into mid-Victorian
rural sensibility (illus. 59, 60).
His writings nostalgically recall the loss of common rights to fuel and
fodder following the sale of the Crown lands:

Half a century ago, the people of this district retained many

of the privileges which anciently belonged in common to the
inhabitants of Sherwood Forest. Here the hays of Birkland
and Bilhagh . . . were open for them to range in, and indirectly
to profit by; . . . they could supply themselves plentifully with
firewood, during the whole year.

In the autumn the women and children harvested the bracken, burnt it
and sold the ashes to alkali manufacturers. This produced enough income
‘to pay off the year’s shoe bill for the family, or . . . other tradesman’s
bills’. They could also ‘turn their swine into the forest, where they were
allowed to fatten upon the mast’. In addition there ‘was no lack of amuse-
ment’ as ‘the villagers residing on the forest skirts, could go forth with
their guns, and kill the young jackdaws, starlings or small birds, without
having fear of gamekeepers and trespass warrants before their eyes.’²³

153
59 Christopher Thomson, ‘The Major Oak, Sherwood Forest’ (top).
60 ‘“Simon the Forester”, Sherwood Forest’ (bottom), from The Hallamshire Scrap
Book: containing views of Hallamshire, Derbyshire, Notts., and adjoining counties.
Drawn on stone from nature (c. 1867).
 Sherwood Forest

All this had changed when the woods were privatized; but the
new owners had made some improvements. Thomson’s view of the
Edwinstowe of 1857 ‘as it appeared ten years ago’ shows a row of cottages:
‘as far as broken lines go they are picturesque indeed. But . . . cold clay
floors, want of room . . . a chamber, in which a family of five persons
and upwards all lay down’. His accompanying text points out that ‘some
would doubtless prefer the group of modern cottages erected by the good
Earl Manvers for the use of his workmen, where comfort and cleanliness
have each a local habitation, and where useful garden plots worthy of the
name are added.’ Thomson also shows how trees became renamed to
make them fit for tourists. He describes how 50 years ago the ‘Cockhen
Tree’ had ‘reigned unobserved in the centre of a ring of birches . . . his
locality known only to a few . . . an old farmer . . . [kept] game fowls in
the wasting heart’ of the tree with ‘an improvised oaken door of rude
construction.’ However, when

the vast size of this noble tree began to excite the curiosity of
the outer world one by one the birches around him began to
fall before the axe, and the noble Earl . . . instructed his chief
Forester to give him fair play – banish the game cocks – and
let the old monarch look royally around on all he could survey.
He was locally re-christened and called the ‘Major Oak,’ in
compliment to Major Rooke, the celebrated antiquarian.²4

Tourist guides such as James Carter’s A Visit to Sherwood Forest

including the Abbeys of Newstead, Rufford, and Welbeck . . . With a Critical
Essay on the Life and Times of Robin Hood (1850), began to appear. The
great landowners were quick to appropriate this democratic symbol. The
Duke of Portland built a new lodge at Clipstone in the forest in 1844
(illus. 61). The main room over the arch was ‘dedicated by its noble
founder to the cause of education, for the benefit of the villagers of
Clipstone’. ‘The prospects from this room are most beautiful, including
Birkland with its thousand aged oaks, the venerable church of Edwinstowe,
and a wide expanse of forest scenery.’ January Searle noted ‘on the
north side, there are statues of King Richard the lion-hearted, Allan o’
Dale and Friar Tuck; on the south side there are similar sculptures of
Robin Hood, Little John and Maid Marian.’ Another guide describes
three of the sculptures as ‘the ancient frequenters of the neighbour-
hood: one its presiding deity, Robin Hood; the other Little John; and,

155
 Trees, Woods and Forests

61 The Archway School, Clipstone, c. 1890.

bearing them pleasing company, as was her wont formerly, Maid

Marian’.²5 These locally inspired buildings were joined by exotic ones
such as the Duke of Portland’s ‘Russian Cabin’; the Russian writer Ivan
Turgenev saw the ‘semi-feudal, semilibertarian great estates in the English
Dukeries’ as a possible model for Russian estates after the emancipation
of the serfs.²6 The great new mansion built from 1864 to 1875 at Thoresby
for Earl Manvers, designed by Anthony Salvin, incorporated a vast
library fireplace celebrating Sherwood Forest. Its iconography confirmed
the historical connection between Robin Hood and the ancient oaks for
the mid-Victorian mind. The huge chimney piece

consists of an elaborately carved representation, in Birkland

oak, of a scene in Sherwood Forest, in which are introduced
the venerable ‘Major oak’ with his knotted and gnarled
branches, a foreground of botanical specimens, and a herd
of deer – all chiselled with much similitude to Nature . . .
Statuettes of Robin Hood and Little John support each side
of the piece.²7

The combination of medieval legend and trees old enough to have

witnessed the scenes depicted by Walter Scott was enormously potent.
By the mid-nineteenth century the ancient oaks of Sherwood had
become firmly fixed in the popular imagination as medieval icons. Within
a few years several more individual trees, such as ‘Robin Hood’s Larder’,

156
 Sherwood Forest

‘Simon the Forester’ and even the ‘Ruysdael Oak’, were imaginatively
named, gaining credence through being identified on Ordnance Survey
maps (illus. 63, 64).
The second half of the nineteenth century saw increasing interest
in the natural history of Sherwood Forest. Some locals became pro-
fessional collectors. John Trueman of Edwinstowe was a ‘first-rate
entymologist, who although a shoemaker by trade, corresponds with
the first men and societies in the kingdom, and is known as a valuable
entymological contributor to the cabinets of our national institutions’.
He told January Searle ‘of the haunts, nature, habits, and metamor-
phosis, of the various insects and butterflies’ he collected and how he
‘got together one of the rarest cabinets in the kingdom’. On

dark nights he goes out into the Forest with a pot of rum and
honey which he smears over the bark of the trees, to lure the
insects he wishes to take. After waiting some time, he pulls a
dark lanthern from his pocket, and throws the light full upon
the tree, where he beholds his victims enjoying their death-
supper, with no small satisfaction. He then quietly brushes them
into a tin box . . . and kills them with spirits of camphor.²8

Many of the most zealous collectors were clergymen and John Carr
described the ‘rich district of Sherwood Forest’ as ‘one of the best col-
lecting grounds in the country’. Many ‘rare species’ had been discovered

62 The Russian Cabin, Sherwood, c. 1890.

157
63 The Major Oak, c. 1890.

64 The Ruysdael Oak,

Welbeck, c. 1890.
 Sherwood Forest

by workers such as the Revd Alfred Thornley, ‘who has devoted many
years to the investigation of the Coleoptera of the county’.²9 Another
enthusiast was the Revd A. Matthews, who found rare beetles associated
with the ancient oaks ‘by sweeping under oaks’ and ‘taken in faggots’.³0
The forest also became famous for fungus: over four days in September
1897 the British Mycological Society added 250 species to the known
fungus flora of the district. The ornithologist Joseph Whitaker celebrated
‘the considerable area of ancient woodland, largely consisting of fine
old oaks, with a sprinkling of birch and an undergrowth of bracken’
surviving in Sherwood Forest for birds.³¹ The ancient oaks were ideal for
woodpeckers and in the 1860s an ornithologist pointed out that ‘nearly
all the old oaks of the forest have suffered the loss of their tops by the
agency of wind and lightning, aided by natural decay. Sometimes you
see the upper portion of one of these venerable trunks quite denuded
of its bark, and riven with many fissures, though the tree is all the
while in vigorous growth.’ He enthusiastically described how he had

often noticed the green woodpecker practise a singular feat.

Placing its bill in one of the long cracks I have mentioned,
it produces, by an exceedingly rapid vibratory motion, a loud
crashing noise, as if the tree was violently rent from top to
bottom . . . It would eventually rouse up all the insects, for
it seemed as if the tree quivered from top to bottom.³²

By the end of the nineteenth century Sherwood Forest was a

popular tourist destination. Special tours were established around the
parks and through the ancient woods. A guide of 1888 extolled the
‘wild rusticity of Nature in her primeaval loveliness’ to be found in the
Forest combined with the ‘fertile pastures’ of improved agriculture.³³
Earl Manvers, who owned most of Birklands and Bilhagh, commis-
sioned the leading forestry expert W. H. Whellens in 1914 to write a plan
for the management of the 1,270 acres of ancient oak and birch wood-
lands on his estate. Whellens argued that the Picturesque and ornamental
value of these woods equalled their timber and game value and that every
attempt should be made to ‘preserve the natural appearance of these
woodlands’ for their ancient oaks and the ‘Birch with their silvery barks
and graceful foliage’.³4 A tourist guide celebrated the ‘Assiduous care’
that was ‘ever manifested by the noble owners that Sherwood, though
sadly shorn of her fair proportions, may yet be preserved in Birkland

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

and Bilhagh in all her primitive beauty and sylvan splendour’. The
pleasures to be found were many. The guide emphasized the ‘scenes
of jollity and mirth within the shadows of the “Major” Oak’ and how
a ‘dozen can enter the hollow trunk at once, and if it is a very gleeful
party of youthful Tourists, the girls, on emerging from the cavern, have
been known to be subjected to a kiss from the more ungovernable
members of the company.’³5

y Destruction
The impact of the massive social and economic changes of the early
years of the twentieth century on Sherwood Forest was intensified by
exploitation of the underlying coal reserves. In addition to the spread
of coal tips over ancient woodland and heath the demand for pit props
encouraged the planting of Scots and Corsican pines on the heathland.
Joseph Rodgers had noted in 1909 that ‘Coal pits are already opened
within the near neighbourhood, and no great length of time is likely
to elapse before the forest in its beauty, as we know it, will be a thing
of the past.’ In 1919 adverse economic conditions caused Lord Manvers
to lease Thoresby’s mineral rights.³6 Income from the colliery’s rents,
totalling £60,000 by 1931, clearly overcame the pre-war resolve of his
agent not to give in to requests for mineral rights on account of pro-
tecting the woodland scenery.³7 The unremitting spread of the coal tip
did not proceed without resistance: in the 1920s the Beech Avenue, con-
sisting of four rows of trees, which in its time rivalled the Major Oak as
a place of local and national interest, was threatened by a proposed
colliery railway.³8 The strength of national concern for the avenue,
hailed in The Times on 16 January 1925 as ‘Probably the most remark-
able and beautiful woodland sight in England’, clearly aided the success
of a Manvers-led petition to protect it.³9 During the 1920s and ’30s the
Forestry Commission, established in 1919, started to acquire large areas
of Sherwood Forest heathland from the established estates to make
extensive plantations of Scots and Corsican pine. Woodland grants were
introduced by the Forestry Commission as an ad hoc measure in 1922
and were later fixed at £2–£4 per acre in 1927 to encourage planting
by private landowners.40
The impact of the Second World War on the ancient oaks was
to be decisive. Military requisitioning began in March 1942 and large
areas of the Birklands and Bilhagh ancient oaks were used as stores for

160
65 Paliama monumental
olive tree, approximately
3,000 years old, Paliama,
southern Crete, 2011.

66 Japanese alpine
forest, Hayachine
Mountain, Honshu,
Japan, 2013.
67 Thomas Jones, On the Banks of the Lake of Nemi, 1777, watercolour drawing.

68 Thomas Bewick, Red Deer Stag, c. 1780–90, hand-coloured wood engraving.

69 Albrecht Dürer,
Spruce, c. 1497, water-
colour and body-
colour.

70 Salvator Rosa,
Mercury and the
Dishonest Woodsman,
c. 1663, oil on canvas.
71 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1500, oil and egg tempera on
panel. The trees in the background have had their branches cropped for fodder.

72 John Dunstall, Pollard Oak near West Hampnett Place, Chichester, c. 1660,
watercolour drawing.
73 Thomas Hearne, Oak Trees, Downton, 1784–6, ink, watercolour and wash
drawing.
74 Epping Forest, London & North Eastern Railway poster (designed by
F. Gregory Brown), 1923.
75 Birnam Wood, 1801, hand-coloured aquatint with etching by James Mérigot
after Hugh William ‘Grecian’ Williams.

76 Giovanni Bellini, Assassination of St Peter the Martyr, 1507, oil and tempera
on wood. In the wood four men are felling trees. This is an early represention
of coppicing.
77 Invasive Robinia pseudoacacia (black locust) near Tokyo, 2013.

78 Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918, oil on canvas.

 Sherwood Forest

ammunition; the old trees were now valued as camouflage.4¹ In addition

large parts of the forest were used for military practice, the sandy heath
providing an almost perfect location for tank training in preparation for
the north German plain.4² Coal production increased rapidly and Lord
Manvers expressed concern that his young pine plantations had to be
felled prematurely for pit props and to allow expansion of the spoil
tips. A government official thanked him for continuing ‘to sacrifice
your young plantations for pitwood. This destruction of immature
woodlands is a miserable business, but I am afraid there is no alterna-
tive.’4³ The timber merchants argued that ‘In sacrificing his woods, he
is rendering a very real service to the state.’44 Even during the war some
trees were retained because of their aesthetic value and the Beech
Avenue was exempted from wartime clearance in April 1942.45 But
the Earl demonstrated considerably less regard for the ancient oaks than
his predecessors. In June 1942, at the same time that he was bemoan-
ing the loss of Thoresby’s young plantations, he felt able to offer the
Timber Supply Department his old oaks on a plate: ‘As regards saw-
timber, I have a large number of “stag-headed” oak-trees aged I believe
about 800 years, which could be promptly made available if and when
required.’46 The Earl clearly felt that the Picturesque form of the oaks
provided them no protection under conditions of total war (illus. 79).
It might be thought that the end of the Second World War would
halt the relentless pressure on the ancient Sherwood oaks, but instead it
was during the 1950s and ’60s that they almost reached their nemesis.
Commercial forestry received a boost after the war with substantial tax
concessions and government grants designed to encourage the rapid re-
planting of thousands of acres of woods and the afforestation of heaths
and moors. This post-war confidence in commercial forestry was backed
by the Forestry Commission’s Dedication Scheme for Private Woodlands
of 1946, which provided financial assistance for woodlands managed
in a state-approved manner.47 This facilitated the further clearance of
ancient trees from 1948 onwards.48 The fate of many ancient trees was
sealed by the arrival of a new Thoresby land agent in 1955 who instigated
an extensive planting programme of 60 acres per annum that was to
prevail for twenty years and transform many of the estate’s woodlands.
Planting shifted to the modern commercial system of even-aged, single-
species stands. Many new coniferous plantations were established and
Corsican pine, rather than Scots pine, became recognized as the optimum
species for the sandy soils.49 The estate was well known for its excellence

169
 Trees, Woods and Forests

79 The Wounded
Giant, Sherwood
Forest, 1908,
photograph.

in forestry practice and was awarded a silver medal for the best managed
woods over 500 acres in a competition run by the Royal Forestry Society
and the Royal Agricultural Society of England.50 Many old oaks and
young birches were cleared to facilitate the new plantations. One of the
estate workers, John Irbe, recollected felling ancient oaks, which were
cut into 3-foot sections and split with axes in the 1950s. George Holt
recounted how ancient oaks were removed in the 1960s by cutting out
square sections to allow the trees to be set alight, their hollow interiors
acting like chimneys. Field evidence of this practice remains to this day
in some of the surviving ancient oaks.5¹
Other more subtle changes were taking place. The traditional graz-
ing of most of the woodlands was brought to an end through the
conversion of pasture and park into arable farmland hastened by farm

170
 Sherwood Forest

amalgamation and mechanization.5² The lack of grazing throughout the

forest, together with the destruction of the rabbit population through
myxomatosis from 1953 onwards, transformed the vegetation. The exten-
sive areas of bilberry and heather became much reduced and shaded
out by the natural regeneration of birch and by the new coniferous
trees. In the early years of the twentieth century birch had been highly
valued as an essential part of the Picturesque Sherwood ensemble.
Grazing stock and rabbits had hindered regeneration, but after the
Second World War, when grazing ceased, birch grew so vigorously on
the sandy soils disturbed by military manoeuvres that by the end of the
century the regrowth was seen as a threat to the characteristic open
grazed woodland and heathland. Certain areas of Sherwood were retained
for amenity purposes, notably large parts of Birklands, but many were
removed in the early stages of the replanting programme or fell into
disrepair, as with the Chestnut and Beech Avenues. Chestnut Avenue
was fortunate to survive: John Irbe remembered that Lady Manvers
accidentally came across men preparing an ancient chestnut to be felled
and that this immediately precipitated the sacking of the land agent
responsible. But the Beech Avenue was cleared in the years 1976 to 1978
for new plantations following the effects of storm damage, neglect and
old age.5³ By the late 1960s many of the ancient oaks had been removed
or were rapidly becoming shaded out by the vigorous plantations of
Corsican pine or encroached on by the looming colliery spoil.

y Conservation
Contrasting views of the ancient oaks in the late 1960s are exemplified
by the fate of two sections of Birklands. In one part leased to the Forestry
Commission the oaks were simply seen as obstacles in the way of plant-
ing conifers and most were felled, while those that remained were rapidly
surrounded and shaded by dense pines. In the other part the oaks were
the raison d’être of a new country park established by Nottinghamshire
County Council in 1969. The driving force behind this was increasing
demand for public access to popular sites such as the Major Oak, and
the lease of the land by the Thoresby estate to the County Council was
seen as its ‘contribution to the general public’.54 The council built a large
visitor’s centre under the ancient oaks including shops, a café, lecture
room and other educational and administrative buildings in a ‘series of
hexagonal huts or “pods” grouped in a compound, inspired by the dugout

171
 Trees, Woods and Forests

shelters of early forest dwellers’.55 Paths were laid out, by far the most
popular of which led from the visitor’s centre and its extensive car parks
to the Major Oak. The role of Robin Hood was maximized and by the
end of the century Sherwood Forest had become reconstituted as a tourist
destination with over a million visitors a year.
The tide of enthusiasm for lowland commercial coniferous forestry
in Britain, especially for plantations on heath and ancient woodland,
began to turn in the 1980s. At Sherwood the extent of plantations made
over the previous twenty years meant that there was little scope for
making new ones. The political consensus on the need for commercial
forestry changed in the mid-1970s and many private foresters were increas-
ingly concerned about the implications of additional taxation proposed
by the Labour Party. At Thoresby there was a shift in management from
planting to consolidation and maintenance of the new plantations. The
permanent woodland staff, which in 1984 had consisted of a head forester
and nine woodmen, was much reduced by 2000, as with many landed
estates, and there was a greater use of contractors.56 This slackening in

80 Ancient oak
at Birklands,
Sherwood Forest,
2012.

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 Sherwood Forest

commercial forestry changed the fortunes of the ancient oaks outside

the country park.
Many individual ancient oaks were still to be found in the plantations
of conifers; they had survived simply because they had been too difficult
or expensive to remove. Moreover significant populations of ancient
oaks remained in the country park and other crucially important areas
within the old Thoresby Park near Buck Gates. There was growing
realization towards the end of the century of the enormous international
importance of these trees as habitat for beetles and other insects. The
great age of the trees and the quantities of dead wood they contained
became valued as an ecological resource. The whole area was designated
a Site of Special Scientific Interest and designated under the eu Habitats
Directive as a Special Area of Conservation. It was the ‘most northerly
site selected for old acidophilous oak woods’, ‘notable for its rich inverte-
brate fauna, particularly spiders, and for a diverse fungal assemblage’
and where there was ‘good potential for maintaining the structure and
function of the woodland system and a continuity of dead-wood habi-
tats’. Surveys identified the number, condition and distribution of the
trees and it was found that there were now about 1,000 veteran trees. A
sample of these was bored with holes, rather smaller than those employed
in the eighteenth century, to gain cores which could be dated using
dendrochronology, thus helping to establish the long-term viability of
the living and dead trees.57
After over 50 years of neglect, active management by the private
estates and the Forestry Commission had returned to the ancient oaks.
Conservation agencies provided funding to remove conifers from around
the surviving oaks and to fence areas so that traditional grazing could
be reintroduced. Cattle were first reintroduced in 1998 when twelve
cattle were allowed to graze in the Buck Gates area for six weeks. This
experiment indicated that grazing was inhibited by the heavy growth
of bracken and so various trials were then undertaken with mechanical
rolling and the application of chemical herbicides to reduce the mat
of bracken.58 These experiments proved successful and sheep were
introduced to start the conversion of the landscape back to wood pas-
ture. The ancient oakwoods and remnant heathland are now seen as
of European importance by ecologists and their future management a
matter of more than local interest. The reintroduction of grazing and
the removal of coniferous plantations is producing a new landscape, but
one very similar to that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Moreover, landowners, government agencies and charities such as the

Sherwood Forest Trust are working to conserve characteristic fragments
of heathland and woodland scattered throughout the ancient boundaries
of Sherwood Forest.

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 m
seven
Estate Forestry

T
he image of Birnam Wood in John Stoddart’s description of
the local scenery and manners of Scotland published at the start
of the nineteenth century shows a wild and ravaged scene (illus.
75).¹ In the foreground is a cut tree stump and beyond this a man is strug-
gling in the strong wind to make his way through a straggling wood;
his hat has blown away. The woodland is grazed, and many of the trees
have been pollarded; it is a good example of upland wood pasture. The
jagged lightning reinforces the Sublimity of the scene, which could be
appreciated as a literary and aesthetic landscape. But it would not be one
that would be valued by the burgeoning number of landowners whose
wealth was increasingly derived from international trade and home indus-
try and who through the nineteenth century strove to plant and manage
plantations and woods. The medium-term effect of the agricultural and
industrial revolutions was a massive concentration of wealth in the hands
of a relatively small number of landowners. Dr Johnson had famously
questioned whether ‘there was a tree between Edinburgh and the English
border older than himself’.² But this also implies that there could be, as
indeed there were, many young trees. The eighteenth-century spirit of
planting, associated with such Scottish aristocratic planters as the Dukes
of Atholl, was enthusiastically taken up by landowners throughout
Britain in the nineteenth century. Many of the most prominent forestry
authors and practitioners were Scottish. And they were largely successful
in transforming the pattern of woods on the ground and the distribu-
tion of trees within those woods: Shakespeare’s moving of Birnam Wood
in Macbeth prefigured the transformation of British estate woodlands in
the nineteenth century.
The tremendous and diverse enthusiasm for trees and woods in
the early years of the nineteenth century is captured by Jane Austen in

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

Mansfield Park (1814). One of the first things that Sir Thomas Bertram,
the estate owner, does after a return from his slave plantation in the West
Indies is to visit ‘his steward and his bailiff; to examine and compute,
and, in the intervals of business, to walk into his stables and his gardens,
and nearest plantations’. While Sir Thomas, the able businessman who
has established the financial basis of the estate, is keen to see the growth
of his young plantations, his son Thomas relishes the woods for the
game they hold. He tells his father of shooting early in October:

I went over Mansfield Wood, and Edmund took the copses

beyond Easton, and we brought home six brace between us,
and might each have killed six times as many, but we respect
your pheasants, sir, I assure you, as much as you could desire.
I do not think you will find your woods by any means worse
stocked than they were. I never saw Mansfield Wood so full
of pheasants in my life as this year.

Fanny Price, Sir Thomas’s niece, celebrates the beauty of trees and
their leaves, especially ‘The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how
wonderful the evergreen!’, as a shelter from autumnal winds and specu-
lates on the ‘astonishing variety of nature’ and that in ‘some countries
we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make
it less amazing that the same soil and the same sun should nurture
plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence’. When Fanny
Price was away from the park in March and April she was saddened
‘to lose all the pleasures of spring’ and had not ‘known before how
much the beginnings and progress of vegetation had delighted her’,
especially ‘the opening of leaves of her uncle’s plantations, and the
glory of his woods’. On her return she is ‘everywhere awake to the
difference of the country since February’. She saw ‘lawns and planta-
tions of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were
in that delightful state when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and
when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for
the imagination’.
In the summer a small plantation at another estate, Sotherton,
was enjoyed for its shade by most of the family: the wilderness, ‘which
was a planted wood of about two acres, and though chiefly of larch
and laurel, and beech cut down, and though laid out with too much
regularity, was darkness and shade, and natural beauty, compared with

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 Estate Forestry

the bowling-green and the terrace. They all felt the refreshment of
it, and for some time could only walk and admire.’ Fanny Price’s enthu-
siasm for this wood is tempered by her concern for its ‘regularity’
which did not fit in well with her Picturesque sensibility. She was more
concerned over the owner’s intention to remove an unfashionable
avenue of old oak trees. She lamented the loss: ‘Cut down an avenue!
What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues,
once more I mourn your fate unmerited”’ and hoped to visit it ‘before
it is cut down . . . to see the place as it is now, in its old state’.³ Styles
and types of tree planting and attitudes to old, young, indigenous
and exotic trees symbolized different fashions in landscaping. And
the wide variety of woods and plantations established were patterned
and shaped differently for game shooting, fox hunting and timber
production.

y Ancient and modern

By the end of the seventeenth century Britain was one of the least
wooded countries in Europe. In broad terms woodland had fallen to
less than 5 per cent of the land area compared to the 10 per cent esti-
mated to have existed at the time of Domesday. Moreover, compared to
many European countries, the number of trees which could be classed
as native to Britain was very low, with fewer than 30 broadleaved species
and as few as five evergreens. The geography of tree species resulted from
a complicated mixture of environmental conditions and past human
activities. Although of small acreage, the woods found in different parts
of the country varied considerably: intensively managed oak coppice
grown for tannin in Cornwall and Devon; strips of coppiced alder
along brooks and rivers in the Midlands; pollarded oaks and ashes and
stripped elms found in many hedgerows; while significant areas of native
Scots pine were only to be found in Scotland. Partly as a consequence
of the small area of woodland, Britain was largely dependent on imported
rather than home-produced timber and wood products. In addition
there was very little publicly owned forest apart from some small
remnants of Crown forests, such as parts of the Forest of Dean and the
New Forest. This lack of government-controlled forestry was impor-
tant, as it meant that throughout the nineteenth century enthusiasts for
continental ideas of scientific forestry had the difficult job of attempt-
ing to persuade many hundreds of private landowners of the value of

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

the new approach, rather than work with state forest officials, as in
parts of Germany.
Partly in response to the small area of woodland and the relative
dearth of native tree species, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
saw a dramatic increase in interest in the management of trees and
woods. Between 1750 and 1850 there was considerable anxiety concern-
ing the decline in British woodland, which had, of course, major
implications for national security, but also for emerging industry
and manufactures such as iron working which utilized charcoal.
Landowners were encouraged to plant trees as part of the improve-
ment of their estates by the Society of Arts, which offered an ‘honorary
premium’ of a gold or silver medal for those who had planted the
greatest number of trees or the greatest area of ground during a given
year. It was hoped that this would help to supply the Navy, cover
commons and waste ground, provide employment for the poor,
become a resource for industry and further ‘the ornamenting of the
nation’.4 All aspects of trees and woods were the subject of debate
and discussion, including whether the choice of trees should be
founded upon aesthetic, scientific or economic grounds and whether
existing woods should be managed profitably. Attempts were made to
define and categorize trees scientifically or as native and exotic and to
establish how trees outside woods in hedgerows, parks, gardens and
fields should be managed. These questions were enmeshed with social
and political considerations such as whether communities had access
to trees or could use wood.
This interest in trees was part of the enthusiasm for agricultural
and rural improvement intimately connected with the rise of British
imperial power, trade, industry and wealth. This enthusiasm was
equally manifest in diverse representations of trees and forests in paint-
ings, drawings, poetry and literature. Trees were valued as signifiers of
property and wealth, of nature and beauty, of age and senescence.
For Uvedale Price trees were essential for the Picturesque improved
landscape. Rising ‘boldly into the air’, in beauty they ‘not only far
excel everything of inanimate nature’, but are ‘complete and perfect’
in themselves. Trees offered ‘infinite variety’ in their ‘forms, tints . . .
light and shade’, and the ‘quality of intricacy’, composed of ‘millions of
boughs, sprays and leaves, intermixed . . . and crossing each other’ in
multiple directions. Through their many openings, the eye discovered
‘new and infinite combinations’, yet this ‘labyrinth of intricacy’ was no

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‘unpleasant confusion’, but a ‘grand whole . . . of innumerable minute

and distinct parts’.5
John Claudius Loudon was the most influential follower of Uvedale
Price. He was born in Lanarkshire in 1783 and educated under Andrew
Coventry at the University of Edinburgh while also working as a nursery-
man’s apprentice. His first landscape gardening commission was in
1803 for Lord Mansfield at Scone Palace, Perth, and the first of his many
books was Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and
Ornamental Plantations, published in 1804. He argued that trees were ‘the
most striking objects that adorn the face of inanimate nature’. An indi-
vidual tree was equally pleasing and fascinating through the ‘intricate
formation and disposition of its boughs, spray, and leaves, its varied
form, beautiful tints, and diversity of light and shade’. This made it ‘far
surpass every other object’ and produced a general effect that was
‘simple and grand’ despite the ‘multiplicity of separate parts’. Wood
was the ‘greatest ornament on the face of our globe’.6 Loudon was
one of the greatest of the early Victorian encyclopaedists and his eight-
volume Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum of 1838 is a vast digest of
data concerning trees. He was strongly influenced by the social reformer
Jeremy Bentham and one of the dominant themes of the book is the
utilitarian benefits of making plantations of trees: just as cereal crops and
edible roots supplied food, so trees were scarcely less essential for pro-
viding timber, without which there would be no ‘houses and furniture
of civilised life, nor the machines of commerce and refinement’.7
Trees were a crucial element of the network of hedgerows, shelter
belts, plantations and clumps that were employed to reconfigure the
British landscape practically and visually through the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It was in the long-term interest of landowners
to maintain control over the management of timber trees on their estates.
Indeed, the management of woodland and trees increasingly became
the domain of the landowner as opposed to the farmer through the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although this varied from place to
place depending on the exact form of land ownership and the nature
of rights over the use of trees. Tree and woodland management became
increasingly disassociated from other agricultural practices. Hedgerow
trees on farms were often maintained and controlled by the landlord.
The wholesale domination of woodlands by landed interests was not,
however, established without frequent social protest and theft of
wood.8 The taking of dead wood, particularly for firewood, remained

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commonplace in the nineteenth century and this may well have contained
an element of protest against the loss of earlier rights to such wood. The
number of thefts suggests that the ‘perpetrators may have enjoyed some
degree of community sanction’: in 1852 at Shelwick in Herefordshire
‘an effigy of a man who informed upon some persons for wood theft
. . . was erected in a cottage garden and ritually shot and then burnt’;
the informer was less popular than the thief.9

y Woods and coppices

Landed-estate forestry took two main forms in the nineteenth century:
traditional woodland management, principally of coppice or coppice with
standards, and plantations. The increasing number of plantations meant
that many older woods were enlarged and some were joined together by
plantations to create screens and to improve the ability of woods to hold
game. This often resulted in a patchwork pattern of old and new woods.
For much of the nineteenth century the established old coppice wood-
lands continued to be cut regularly, although their profitability depended
on trading conditions and the changing markets for wood products. The
replacement of firewood and charcoal by coal for domestic and indus-
trial energy production brought about massive reductions in two of the
principal markets for coppice. Yet the rapid rise in population caused
strong growth in markets for a wide variety of woodland products used
in industry, agriculture and the home. Many of these markets were
localized and there were considerable regional variations in the strength
of the different markets.¹0
Woodland managers recognized that many of the coppice wood-
lands were of ancient origin. James Main argued in 1839 that both
historical and geological evidence suggested that ‘the greater part of
the continent of Europe, as well as its islands, were at an early period
almost entirely covered with wood’ and that some tracts of forest had
been preserved within the royal forests and private parks, while other
tracts ‘of natural forest are also in existence, occupying broken or marshy
ground, or precipitous slopes inaccessible to the plough’. The land agent
J. West distinguished in 1843 between ancient woods, which were
mainly coppice or coppice with standards, and modern plantations. In
the nineteenth century the use of exotic trees was almost entirely restricted
to the making of new plantations: the replanting of ancient woodland
with such trees was generally uneconomic and such replacement was not

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 Estate Forestry

81 Hop Pickers, 1803, stipple engraving and etching by William Dickinson after
Henry William Bunbury.

likely to take place while coppicing remained profitable. J. Standish and

C. Noble, who ran a large nursery at Sunningdale, argued in 1852 that

It is often the object of proprietors to remove woods which

are composed of the ordinary indigenous trees of the country,
and to replace them with others of an exotic and more orna-
mental character. But the advantages of such existing woods
are generally too great to allow their removal.¹¹

William Ablett was able to emphasize the profitability of coppice as

late as 1880: ‘Where copse-wood is cultivated to any considerable extent,
it is advantageous so to arrange matters to come on in perpetual rotation,
which may be cleared and put to profitable use yearly.’¹² In some areas
with special local markets, such as that for hop poles in Kent, Hereford-
shire and Worcestershire, the demand for poles was so high that it was
worth planting up new coppices or restocking old ones. Tom Bright, a
Kentish agricultural valuer, noted in 1888 that ‘the improvements that have
been effected of late years in the management of underwoods in many
districts, are patent to the most casual observer.’ He emphasized that
‘there are some natural underwoods, that are capable of much improve-
ment . . . All vacancies in old woodlands [should be filled up] with

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chestnut or ash plants, according to the nature of the soil, at distances

of not less than 6 feet from each other, but at considerably less than that
from old and inferior stubs or stools.’¹³
In 1894 John Nisbet, who had experience in the Indian Forest
Service and taught at the West of Scotland Agricultural College, also
stressed the regional importance of coppice: ‘Oak coppice-woods are
often by far the most remunerative form of silvicultural crop, when
there is any favourable market near at hand for the disposal of the
bark to tanneries.’ Mixed coppices of ash, field maple, sycamore, sweet
chestnut and hazel were ‘also exceedingly remunerative through-out
southern England, when near to favourable markets for saplings and
poles, such as hop districts’. Alder coppice was similarly ‘often a more
remunerative form of crop than almost any other on land that is suited
for the Alder, but which cannot be conveniently drained to serve higher
purposes’.¹4 But the decline in coppice prices became marked towards
the end of the nineteenth century and only nine years later, in 1905,
Nisbet described a completely different and very bleak picture of the
state of coppice woodland. He called such woods ‘the national form
of arboriculture’ which ‘have for the most part become practically
transformed into game coverts . . . Yet the copse-woods and coppices
were at one time among the most profitable parts of large estates.’¹5
It was not until the turn of the century, by which time metal imple-
ments had almost totally replaced locally produced wooden ones, that
the market for coppice finally collapsed in most areas. Many of the
characters in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) gained their
living from coppice trades. In a new introduction to the novel composed
in 1912 Hardy wrote: ‘in respect of the occupations of the characters,
the adoption of iron utensils and implements in agriculture, and the
discontinuance of thatched roofs for cottages, have almost extinguished
the handicrafts classed formerly as “copsework” and the type of men who
engaged in them.’ The final collapse of coppicing in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was brought about by the further substitu-
tion of wood products by new metal and chemical products and changes
in agriculture. This is not to say that the coppice industries did not
manage to limp on well into the twentieth century in some localities. On
the Eastnor estate in Herefordshire, for example, it was not until the early
1930s that the demand for coppice wood reached such a low point
that auction lots did not attract any purchasers.¹6

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y Plantations
Plantation forestry had become a fashionable branch of British estate
management in the eighteenth century and developed its own traditions.
It was strongly associated with patriotism and improvement and con-
tinued to be a core aspect of rural estate management in the nineteenth
century. Its place was assured less by any inherent profitability, although
this was always stressed by forestry publicists and professionals, than by
a belief in the seemly nature of tree growing and the clear benefits for land-
scape, game and hunting. George Sinclair (1786–1834), a keen Scottish
horticulturalist who was for many years gardener to the Duke of Bedford
and later partner in a firm of seedsmen, was a keen exponent of planting
as part of the more general improvement of agriculture and the economy.
He argued in 1832 that

Numerous instances might be cited from different parts of the

kingdom where exposed and sterile lands have, by planting,
been made capable of producing valuable arable crops and
the best pasture grasses, and of rearing and fattening stock
of improved breeds. This, in effect, is adding to the territorial
extent of the country, to its wealth and strength, by conquest
over the natural defects of local climate, soil and exposure.

A great advantage, for Sinclair, was that

Judicious planting and the skilful culture of plantations combine

national and private interests in an eminent degree; for, besides
the real or intrinsic value of the timber . . . planting improves
the general climate of the neighbourhood, the staple of soil . . .,
affords shelter to livestock, promotes the growth of pasture and
of corn crops, beautifies the landscape, and thus greatly and
permanently increases the value of the fee simple of the estate
and adjoining lands.

So the making of plantations not only counter-intuitively enlarged the

amount of available agricultural land, but increased the capital value of
property and led to greater agricultural production.¹7
The enthusiasm for tree planting was closely linked with greater
power of landowners over large areas of land and their ability to fence,

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

enclose and control the way land was used and managed. It was strongly
associated with ideas of improvement and parliamentary enclosure
and in Scotland with the harsh removal of people and their traditional
farming practices known as the clearances.¹8 Planting was encouraged
by societies such as the Society of Improvers, founded in Edinburgh
in 1723, and the Highland Society of 1784. One of the largest tree
nurseries, the Perth Nurseries, was founded in 1767 and covered over
30 acres by 1796. The most prominent planters were the Dukes of
Atholl, who became particularly famous for their very extensive larch
plantations. A few larch plants were brought to Blair Atholl in the 1730s
and successive dukes increasingly recognized their potential for form-
ing plantations. The fourth duke is credited with planting 15,500 acres
of trees, and larch was one of his favourite species. He was concerned about
the supply of wood for the Navy and felt that larch was a good replace-
ment for oak. Indeed he ‘planted increasing amounts annually with pure
larch as the supplies from the nurseries became better and extended the
elevation of his plantations gradually higher, using Norway spruce . . .
in the wetter hollows and Scots pine sparingly.’¹9
Many other landowners were enthusiastic tree planters, but few were
so keen on planting pure larch. Most used larch as a nurse mixed with
hardwoods such as oak, beech, ash or elm. The intention was that the larch
trees would help the hardwoods to grow well and that they would be
removed to provide income while the hardwoods were left to grow on.
On the Earl of Mansfield’s estate at Scone, where Loudon had worked,
old arable land was ridged and planted up in alternate lines of hardwood
and larch at a distance of between 4 and 6 feet. Most of the larch was
removed after thirteen to fifteen years. For one such oak and larch
plantation made in 1804/5, the Earl of Mansfield received a gold medal
from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts.²0
The early Atholl plantations ‘were systematically carried out’ and
‘planting plans were made with roads and paths laid out, and the ground
divided into units of fifty acres’.²¹ This did not necessarily result in the
domination of the landscape by rigid, geometrically aligned hedges and
walls. The artist and diarist Joseph Farington, for example, was rather taken
with the plantations at Atholl on his visit to Scotland in October 1801:
‘The scenery as it appears from the road from Dunkeld to Blair is uncom-
monly fine. The Hills enriched with plantations not formally made but
mixing in a natural manner with the rocks, and the banks of the river
though artless yet have a sufficiently neat & finished appearance to be

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 Estate Forestry

a pattern for forming such Parks & what are called Landscape Garden
Grounds.’ He commented that ‘Mr Price & Mr Knight might describe
the Tay in this part as an example.’²² Another keen planter of larch was
Thomas Johnes of Hafod, Cardiganshire, who radically transformed the
farms and tenancies on his estate, made many new plantations with about
five million trees and was encouraged to ‘embellish his barren patrimony
according to “picturesque” principles’.²³
But what should be the shape and disposition of the thousands
of new plantations? And how should the multitude of new trees fit in
with the established woods and hedges? The boundaries and shapes of
most existing and ancient woods had not been consciously designed,
but by the turn of the nineteenth century the massive concentration of
land ownership and the enclosure of the remaining open fields gave the
opportunity for owners to reshape the countryside. By 1800 many of the
trees planted in the mid-eighteenth century were coming to maturity and
owners could make informed judgements about the types of plantation
that were most effective.
Uvedale Price argued that great care should be taken in the dispo-
sition of plantations and the way in which groups of different types of
trees fitted into the landscape. As a general rule he thought that ‘it is
not enough that trees should be naturalized to the climate, they must

82 Hafod House, Cardiganshire, engraving by John C. Varrall after Henry

Gastineau.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

also be naturalized to the landscape, and mixed and incorporated with

the natives.’ He was a keen supporter of mixed plantations and argued
that a ‘patch of foreign trees planted by themselves in the out-skirts of
a wood, or in some open corner of it, mix with the natives, much like a
group of young Englishmen at an Italian conversazione.’ He contrasted
this with the situation ‘when some plant of foreign growth appears to
spring up by accident, and shoots out its beautiful, but less familiar
foliage among our natural trees’ which ‘has the same pleasing effect, as
when a beautiful and amiable foreigner has acquired our language and
manners so as to converse with the freedom of a native, yet retains enough
of original accent and character, to give a peculiar grace and zest to all
her words and actions’.²4
In addition to mixing trees within woods, Price argued that new plan-
tations should be planned carefully so that they added to the ‘infinite
richness and variety’ of the landscape yet seemed ‘part of the original
design’. In practice, however, he found that many plantations appeared
to be planted so as to be ‘as distinct as possible from the woods of the
country’ so none could doubt ‘what are the parts which have been im-
proved’. He accused owners of wanting to make a spectacle of their
enthusiasm and commitment to planting new trees. Indeed he was
critical of those who ignored ‘the spontaneous trees of the country’
and ‘excluded’ them as ‘too common’, choosing instead exotic trees ‘of
peculiar form and colour’ which took the ‘place of oak and beech’. He
thought that ‘whatever trees the established woods of the country are
composed, the same, I think, should prevail in the new plantations,
or those two grand principles, harmony, and unity of character, will be
destroyed.’ He also deplored the common practice of filling ‘a vacant
space between two woods’ with firs and larches as instead of ‘connect-
ing those woods, which should be the object’; such ‘harsh and sudden
contrasts of form and colour, make these insertions for ever appear
like so many awkward pieces of patch-work’.²5
He noted that trees grown in plantations often had an inferior
appearance and compared the ‘tameness’ of ‘poor pinioned trees (what-
ever their age) of a gentleman’s plantation drawn up strait and even
together’ to the ‘animation’ of ‘old neglected pollards’.²6 Here he articu-
lates a clear conflict between the preference of timber merchants for
plantations and woods full of straight and even-aged stems and those
of the landscaper, who often preferred woods of mixed ages and species
of trees. He notes how ‘even large plantations of firs, when they are

186
 Estate Forestry

not the natural and the prevailing trees of the country, have a harsh and
heavy look, from their not harmonising with the rest of the landscape.’
This was especially true where ‘one side of a valley is planted solely with
firs, the other with deciduous trees.’ This situation was made worse by
the tendency to plant trees closely together ‘to produce some appearance
of wood as soon as possible’. Price noted that owners ‘seldom’ had ‘the
resolution to thin them sufficiently’ and hence they were ‘all drawn
up together nearly to the same height . . . no variety, no distinction of
form can exist, but the whole is one enormous, unbroken, unvaried mass
of black’, which he equates with Milton’s description of his blindness:
‘an universal blank of nature’s works’. Even worse was the interior of these
dense pine plantations: ‘a collection of tall naked poles . . . ; above – one
uniform rusty cope, seen through decaying sprays and branches; below
– the soil parched and blasted with baleful droppings; hardly a plant or
a blade of grass, nothing that can give an idea of life, or vegetation’. Price
thought that of ‘all dismal scenes’ this was the one ‘most likely for a man
to hang himself’, except, he helpfully pointed out, that there was ‘rarely
a single side branch to which a rope could be fastened’.²7
Two specialized forms of plantation popularized in the eighteenth
century were belts or screens of trees, often around parkland, and clumps
of trees within the park. The advantage of plantations of trees as screens
had long been recognized but by the early nineteenth century such belts
had come to be commonplace and Price complained that they blocked
views and impoverished the landscape. He criticized an estate owned
by Sir Charles Hastings between Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Measham,
which he spotted by its ‘long line of plantation’ which was along the
main road. This plantation was ‘an unfortunate one for the traveller,
as in a year or two it will completely hide the whole of the distance’.
Price thought ‘a few of the trees in particular parts’ should be removed
to allow distant views to ‘be shown to great advantage & be form’d into
many very pleasing compositions’.²8 Price reserved his most caustic
criticism for the parkland clump, which had ‘the same effect on the
great features of nature, as an excrescence on those of the human
face’ where ‘let there be a wart or a pimple on any prominent feature
– no dignity of beauty of countenance can detach the attention from
it.’ He disliked clumps planted with larch because ‘the multitude of
their sharp points . . . had much the same degree of resemblance to
natural scenery, as one of the old military plans with scattered platoons
of spearmen, has to a print after Claude or Poussin’, while the ‘dark

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

83 John Claudius Loudon, ‘Formation of Plantations’, from Loudon’s

Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1830).

tint of ’ those planted with ‘Scotch fir’ added the ‘last finish’ and made
them ‘horribly conspicuous’.²9
John Claudius Loudon set out his views on the planting and manage-
ment of trees in his Hints on the Formation of Gardens and Pleasure
Grounds (1812), which included plans for laying out gardens and pleasure
grounds for large villas and an analysis of plantation management.³0 In his
influential Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1830) Loudon enthused over the

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vast variety of types of tree available in his instructions for the formation
of plantations, which ‘may be as various as there are species; but for
general effect and designation, woody plants are classed as large or small,
trees or undergrowths, deciduous or evergreen, round-headed or spiry-
topped; and plantations of every form and disposition may be planted
with these, either separately or mixed.’ Avenues might be single or
double and might intersect ‘in the manner of a Greek cross’, ‘a martyr’s
cross’, ‘a star’ or ‘a cross patée, or duck’s foot’ while glades might be
regular, irregular, ‘as niches or cabinets’ or ‘en berceau’ or ‘en salons’.³¹
Many landowners built garden rooms, gazebos or kiosks in the new
plantations so that the growing trees could be enjoyed. William Sawrey
Gilpin, one of the most prolific landscape gardeners of the mid-century,
made plantations which were characterized by ‘irregularly shaped plan-
tations with bold projections and recesses’; these mimicked the intricacy
‘found in the architectural details of Gilpin’s terrace walls with over-
hanging copings, vases, and protruding buttresses’.³²
Although Price, Loudon and Gilpin had enormous influence on
the mode and form of tree planting in the nineteenth century, on many
estates it was the woodman – or, on the larger estate, the forester who had
been trained up on several estates – who would make practical decisions
about the management and layout of plantations. The planting practices
developed by professional foresters on Scottish estates in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries were often used on English ones, and by

84 Hayman Rooke, Turkish Kiosk in Plantation, Farnsfield,

1790s, watercolour.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

the mid-nineteenth century ‘it was as much the correct thing for an estate
to have a Scotch forester as it was for a nobleman’s establishment to
possess a French chef ’ and ‘the practice of early and heavy thinning,
which prevailed in England for fifty or more years, was introduced by
Scotch foresters.’³³ William Linnard has identified at least 21 Scottish
foresters who worked on the principal Welsh estates, such as Penrhyn
Castle, Hafod, Margam and Bodnant, in the nineteenth century.³4
There was no established school of forestry in Britain and most of
those responsible for managing woods and making plantations were
practical men who were trained on the estates themselves. Often the
long-term planning of forests was in the hands of land agents or own-
ers. The situation was criticized by many commentators and A. C. Forbes,
writing in 1904, thought that ‘until quite recently (and to some extent
even now) it was no uncommon thing to find all classes of men filling
the position of estate forester. Any man with a general knowledge of
estate work was considered qualified to manage the woods, more espe-
cially on those estates on which the area under wood consisted of coppice
with standards.’ Forbes argued that for such traditional woods ‘It required
no great ability to manage a squad of half a dozen woodmen, to mark
and measure the necessary number of trees for estate use or sale, and
to see that hedges and fences were more or less in good condition.’³5
Coppicing thus continued in the tried and trusted way throughout the
century.
Forbes argued, however, that the skills required for the successful
establishment of plantations were not available on most estates. Indeed,
when ‘planting was carried on, it was, and still is, usual to get a nursery-
man to do it by contract at so much per acre and leave the method of
planting and choice of species to him’. He was especially critical of the
many small estates where the ‘commercial details and higher branches
of the work’ were in the hands of land agents, who would have only a
broad training in forestry, and the ‘practical woodcraft’ was the responsi-
bility of a foreman woodman, who was ‘little more than a skilled workman
at the best, with a rule-of-thumb acquaintance with the elements of
planting, thinning, draining, and so forth’. The effects of employing
such poorly qualified staff were, in his opinion, ‘inevitably bad’.³6
Nurserymen not only provided the trees but wrote many of the
manuals for forestry. One of the most influential foresters was James
Brown, whose nursery at Craigmill House near Stirling specialized in ‘the
Coniferous kinds of trees only, all of which he rears from seeds brought

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 Estate Forestry

from their native localities’. His text The Forester (1847) went into many
editions and he strove to improve the quality of the timber produced from
plantations. He did not hold back from advertising his services:

James Brown (Author of ‘The Forester’) begs to inform Landed

Proprietors and their Agents, that from having for many
years past observed that a large proportion of Larch and
Scots Pine plants used in making plantations in Britain are
of a description unfit to insure their becoming valuable as
timber, he has established a Nursery on a suitable soil and
situation in the vicinity of Stirling, in which he rears, on a
sound natural principle, plants of the kinds named, and of
other Coniferae . . . all of which he rears from seed brought
from their native localities.³7

Brown became famous for continuing to encourage the mixed

plantations which were so popular in Scotland. A. C. Forbes, who wrote
several forestry texts and lectured on forestry at Durham College of
Science, Newcastle upon Tyne, later considered that

it is to Brown and his school that we owe the introduction

of the mixed plantation – a system of planting that has led
to some of the worst results that could possibly be attained
. . . Pure plantations, when such were planted, invariably
consisted of larch . . . The object in many cases was not
so much the ultimate production of first-class timber, as
the speedy growth of game cover or screens and belts for
landscape effect.³8

But this is unfair, as Brown did a lot to encourage large-scale forestry

and careful thinning and management and was at his most insistent
when arguing for the careful placement of trees to suit specific localities.
Brown provides a diagrammatic scheme for a mixed plantation
(illus. 85). Here hardwoods such as oak, ash, elm and sycamore are each
planted ‘exactly 20 feet from the next of its own species’ while the inter-
vening ‘larch nurses’ are planted 3½ feet from each hardwood and the
‘Scots pine nurses’ are 5 feet from the hardwoods. Brown argued that the
‘four larches, which are planted next each hardwood plant, can be all
taken away, in the way of thinning’ before the Scots pines, which need

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

85 James Brown, ‘Diagram showing the Manner of distributing Trees in a Mixed

Hardwood Plantation’ from Brown’s The Forester (1847).

longer to grow before they ‘become of some value’.³9 Brown stressed that
every effort had to be made to take into account soil type and altitude
when planting and thinning plantations and thought that

every forester ought to look upon the estate of woodlands

on which he may have the management, with the eye of a
geographer. He ought to consider it as a continent in itself;
each plantation may be looked upon as a separate kingdom
according to its altitude; and each, again, may, in the mind
of the forester, be divided into provinces according to aspect
and latitude, and planted with those trees which are known
from nature’s own rules to be best adapted for it.40

If Brown’s suggestions were followed closely, then the new plantation

landscapes could appear natural and at the same time allow a reserve
of timber to become established.

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 Estate Forestry

y Novel display
Trees were not only aesthetically pleasing, and intellectually inspiring,
but through the multiplicity of their agricultural, manufacturing, com-
mercial, building and naval applications they were, according to Loudon,
‘the most essential requisite for the accommodation of civilized society’.
The pleasure ‘attending the formation and management of plantations’
was a ‘considerable recommendation to every virtuous mind’ and young
trees could be regarded as akin to offspring; ‘nothing’ was more satisfy-
ing ‘than to see them grow and prosper under our care and attention’,
examine their progress and mark their peculiarities. As they ‘advance to
perfection’, their ‘ultimate beauty’ is foreseen and a ‘most agreeable train’
of ‘innocent and rational’ sensations are excited in the mind, so that they
‘might justly rank with the most exquisite of human gratifications’. At
the start of his career, in his Observations (1804) Loudon was already argu-
ing passionately for the planting, management and improvement of trees
as one of the major hallmarks of human civilization.4¹
The popularity and fashionableness of tree collecting made the
acquisition, planting and successful establishment of novel tree and
shrub specimens, like works of art or antiquities, highly desirable for their
own beauty and as a backdrop for parks or as potential timber trees.
Nineteenth-century tree enthusiasts were particularly susceptible to the
pleasures of evergreens and conifers. The British native flora was bereft
of significant evergreen trees other than the broadleaved holly (Ilex aqui-
folium), coniferous yew (Taxus baccata) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris).
The box (Buxus sempervirens) and juniper (Juniperus communis) were also
native but were usually grown as shrubs rather than substantial trees.
This paucity of evergreens meant that Victorian gardeners prized any
introduced trees that could provide varied foliage during the long
winter months. One of the greatest enthusiasts for evergreens was the
Derby nurseryman and horticulturalist William Barron (1805–1891),
who worked for the Earls of Harrington at Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire
in the 1830s and ’40s before setting up his own nursery business.
Barron’s book The British Winter Garden promoted the use of
evergreens in public and private spaces, helping to drive the new fash-
ion in British, European and American gardens. He was attracted to
conifers for their novelty and exotic associations and natural character-
istics, which he was able to exploit for economic purposes. Barron and
his company helped to foster the mid-Victorian fashion for evergreen

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

planting, promoting them for their economic value and as special and
ornamental specimens. Although he propagated and popularized a huge
variety of exotic conifers, the evergreen that became most closely associ-
ated with Barron was the yew. The ornamental value of the yew and the
relative ease with which it could be moved, led him to favour it for many
of his landscape gardening and transplanting commissions. He particu-
larly valued the contrasts and effects that could be achieved by placing
different forms or colours of yews against different backgrounds, such
as the combination of large and small yews behind golden yews, Irish
yews, variegated white cedars and different junipers.4²
For Barron conifers were superior to deciduous trees on the grounds
of health, practicality and neatness and provided enjoyment for an entire
year. He was critical of the types of deciduous trees that dominated
many parks and plantations, complaining how frequent it was to see
‘close to our mansions, such commonplace things as elms, ashes, syca-
mores, poplars, or any other rubbish that the nearest provincial nursery
may happen to be overstocked with: all stuck in to produce neither
immediate or lasting effect!’ Moreover, deciduous trees provided a ‘con-
tinued litter of decayed leaves’, which he thought of as ‘an unwholesome
effluvia’ during the winter, and ‘an assemblage of leafless stems’ with no

86 Illustration of the grounds of Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire, from E. Adveno

Brooke’s The Gardens of England (1857).

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 Estate Forestry

shelter or protection ‘from bleak winds for seven months in the year’.
In contrast coniferous trees ‘excited admiration by providing an infinite
variety of form, size, colour, texture and outlines ‘from the formal
Araucaria and fastigiate Junipers’, to the ‘wild grandeur of the pine, and
even to the delicate, graceful, and flowing habits of the Cryptomeria
Japonica… and Hemlock Spruce’. He enthused over gigantic ‘Lambert
and Bentham pines’, Sequoia sempervirens and Douglas fir, which tow-
ered ‘their lofty heads a hundred feet above the pride of British forests’.4³
Barron’s call for conifers did not fall on deaf ears, and he, together
with many other nurserymen and authors, helped feed a growing frenzy
of enthusiasm for new varieties and species of conifer, which showed itself
on the ground in the increasing number of arboreta and pinetums on
private estates. The enormous wealth of the Holford family, for example,
derived from shares in the New River Company which supplied fresh
water to London, allowed them to fulfil their passion for collecting both
trees and art. Robert Stayner Holford (1802–1892) displayed his art in
vast new houses in London (Dorchester House) and Gloucestershire
(Westonbirt), and his rapidly expanding collection of trees in an immense
arboretum at Westonbirt. Many of these tree collections were displayed
along avenues and rides so that visitors could take in the new varieties.
At Bicton, Devon, an avenue of Araucaria trees was planted in 1843 from
seed sown at the famous Veitch nurseries in Exeter (illus. 87), and one
of the surviving trees is now the largest monkey puzzle in the uk, 26
metres tall with a girth of 4 metres.44 At Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire
Earl Somers had a carriage ride 3 miles long ‘flanked by evergreen as well
as deciduous trees and shrubs’, including indigenous and exotic species
such as yews, the wild service tree and Arbutus.45

y Covert spectacle
The consolidation of land ownership in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries was strongly linked with the transformation of vast tracts of
land from relatively open areas to enclosed landscapes of largely geo-
metric fields. In very broad terms the former open field zones of the
English Midlands were enclosed with hedges, most frequently with haw-
thorn, and hedgerow trees such as elm and oak were also often planted.
In the hill lands of the north and west, the enclosures were more com-
monly of stone. Although these boundaries are now celebrated as
traditional features of importance for nature conservation, for many

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

87 ‘The Araucaria Avenue at Bicton’, from Veitch’s Manual

of Coniferae (1900).

contemporaries, such as John Clare, they were a potent reminder of

the loss of traditional forms of land ownership and farming practices.
William Gilpin, journeying towards the Picturesque beauty of the Wye
Valley across the Cotswolds in 1770, found that ‘About North-leach
the road grows very disagreeable. Nothing appears, but downs on each
side; and these often divided by stone walls, the most offensive separa-
tion of property.’46 But this new landscape provided great opportunities
for those interested in fox hunting and shooting. For fox hunting the
hedges provided the added excitement of many and various jumps for
the horses. The layout of the new fields, and the division of estates into
newly modelled tenant farms, also provided space for the planting of
small woods suitable for pheasant shooting. Landowners enjoyed their
ability to roam over the countryside in the hunting and shooting seasons
and to share this enjoyment with their wealthier friends and tenants.
Fox coverts were planted to ensure sufficient quantity of foxes in any
particular area. In the famous Quorn country of Leicestershire and south
Nottinghamshire, for example, ‘the making of an adequate number of
new covers . . ., appropriately sited and so managed that they would
always hold the “raw material” of a hunt’, solved the problem of too few
foxes.47 Examples of such coverts include Parson’s Thorns and Curate’s
Gorse, both in the parish of Hickling. Although ‘woods and plantations
‘afforded ‘the warmest shelter’ in a cold wind, artificial coverts made

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 Estate Forestry

‘expressly for the purpose of holding foxes’ could be particularly effective.

These should be ‘not less than five acres or more than twelve’ and a 10-
acre ‘thorn or gorse covert’ facing southwest with an edge of ‘a double
row of Austrian pines, as they grow very quickly and make a splendid
break for the wind’ would be excellent. Within that there should be
a belt of whitethorn and privet with ‘the remainder to be divided into
four parts . . . two quarters to be planted with blackthorn and the other
two sown with gorse.’ One of these quarters needed to be cut every three
years and allowed to regrow so that the covert did not become ‘hollow’.48
This careful management allowed the covert to provide continual shel-
ter for foxes over many years. And the requirements of the fox for
warmth and shelter helped to transform the appearance of formerly
open areas by the creation of a scatter of small plantations of gorse,
thorn and trees.
The growing enthusiasm for fox hunting in the nineteenth century
was more than matched by the increasing intensity of game shooting.
The management of woodlands to maximize the number of pheasants
available to be shot became of abiding interest to landowners. The pref-
erences of pheasants, which enjoy woodland-edge habitats, increasingly
informed the way that woods were managed and plantations laid out. Just
as the requirements of the fox led to a pattern of small coverts within
a hedged landscape, the needs of the pheasant encouraged the establish-
ment of woods with long woodland edges. The screens and belts around
parks were ideal for this purpose, as were clumps and plantations with
protuberances.
The demands of the gamekeeper became increasingly rapacious
and this sometimes led to conflicts between different departments within
the same estate. Tenant farmers were likely to be annoyed by the dam-
age pheasants caused to crops, while foresters often felt that pheasants
were more important to the owner than trees. Most importantly, how-
ever, the requirements of owners to preserve their game birds led to many
often violent conflicts between poachers and gamekeepers. The larger
estates had teams of keepers which acted as a local police force to restrict
and control all access to estates. The woods where game was reared and
fed had always been targets for poachers, and as the numbers of pheas-
ants increased through more intense management, owners became more
intolerant of public access to their land.
The types of pheasant shooting changed dramatically over the
century. In the early years of the century it was normal to go out, like

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

Tom and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, with a couple of dogs

and return happily with a dozen pheasants after a day’s shooting. But
by the end of the century this was seen as a completely antiquated and
outmoded approach:

in the old days, in big woods . . . the custom was to walk the
birds up in a line. But this sort of Early Victorian, pluffing in
the tail, jungle-hunting process belonged to a different age,
and . . . in a flint and matchlock, or muzzle-loading and
percussion-cap age, was governed by different circumstances
. . . Under present circumstances such a way of shooting can
only be looked upon as a desecration of civilisation, and
characterized as a German student’s duel, unspeakable and
past the pale.49

Changes in the design of the shotgun, including breech loading,

hammerless guns and cartridge ejectors, increased the accuracy and
speed of shooting. The spread of the railway, which made even distant
estates accessible, allowed the wealthy to travel to and from shooting
parties on a regular basis. The social cachet of the sport was sealed in
Britain by the enthusiastic support of the Prince of Wales.
Under the battue system, which was influenced by Continental styles
of shooting but reached its apogee in Britain at the end of the nineteenth
century, rather than walking after pheasants, the birds were driven by
teams of beaters over the shooters. Various points around the estate were
decided upon as the best places for the shooters to stand, and the woods
were designed and managed to maximize the number of birds that could
be shot at these sites. This change in style was commented on by Turgenev
when he stayed at his friend W. H. Hall’s estate, The Cottage at Six Mile
Bottom near Cambridge, in October 1878. He had visited the estate to
‘compare his experiences of Russian and English sport’ and told Tolstoy
a month later that he had ‘clobbered a fair number of pheasants and
partridges, and so on’ but complained ‘of the monotonous nature of
dogless English sport’. On an earlier visit to London in 1857, he visited
Joseph Lang’s gunsmiths shop in Cockspur Street to order new breech-
loading shotguns, and also obtained a pair of lemon-and-white pointer
bitches to be sent to Tolstoy.50
Sometimes the best design for game was not appreciated in landscape
terms and when Hall had inherited the estate he had ‘found it laid out

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 Estate Forestry

with symmetrical coverts and belts designed to create the best conditions
for sportsmen . . . he loved the English countryside too much to toler-
ate this mathematical arrangement. He consequently reshaped the gardens,
groves and thickets to be more attractive to his guests.’5¹ More usually
woods designed for game preservation could also be attractive additions
to the landscape. The woods and plantations of the Holkham estate in
Norfolk (illus. 88) had

immense advantages as a pheasant preserve. This is largely due

to the arrangement of the woods by the original designers of
this demesne. They had a ‘clean sheet’ to work upon . . . Its
fame rests on its good light soil . . . and the massing of the
woods round the park, the interior of which . . . forms a great
central attraction to game . . . Round this runs a great wood,
protected on the outer side by a wall, but having on the inner
side this picturesque feature – that in parts the park runs right
in among the tree trunks, and one sees hundreds of pheasants
feeding in the semi-open space.5²

The surrounding wall not only kept the pheasants in, but kept unwanted
visitors out. The shooting plan has affinities with a battle plan and shows
the complexity of arranging several days’ shooting and the advantages
of clumps, belts, walls and nets to allow pheasants to be held on an estate
and presented efficiently, before or after lunch, to the landowner and
his friends.
On many estates shooting became the dominant pursuit, even more
so with the great agricultural depression that developed from the 1870s
onwards, largely as a result of the rapid rise of cheap imports of food
from the Empire. For some estates shooting and hunting became their
sole raison d’être. John Simpson argued in 1907 that ‘It is better that every
wood and copse on the estate should be a covert, and detached coverts
should be as numerous and as widely distributed as extent and circum-
stances will permit, and should extend to the limits of the estate.’5³ One
problem, however, was what to do with large woods from which it was
difficult to extract pheasants. One way to deal with them was to cut
wide rides through them in which the guns could stand. At Stanage Park
in Radnorshire this was done by Lord Powis and ‘unwieldy tracts of
woodland’ which ‘used to be shot ineffectually on the sheer haphazard
system’ now formed ‘a most successful and scientific shoot, in which

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

88 ‘Shooting Plan at Holkham, Norfolk’, from Horace G. Hutchinson’s

Shooting (1903).

not only do the birds give the best of shots, but nearly all are shown’.
Another way to increase the power of woods to hold pheasants was to
‘make a few open spaces and plant the common rhododendron . . . the
rhododendron is about the only positively assured pheasant covert’, espe-
cially in areas where rabbits would eat everything else. This is one of the
main reasons why rhododendrons, now often seen as a notorious pest
species, were so frequently planted. Another way of improving old
large woods was to cut ‘your coppice in strips, so that you have your big
wood composed of coppice of various ages’. But the ‘halcyon days when
merchants competed to buy your timber and purchase your coppice at
£9 the acre (double the price of what it is now) – these days are fled’.54

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 Estate Forestry

Large-scale shooting was a most luxurious and expensive sport and

one which could only be provided by the very wealthiest landowners.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century Britain’s industrial power
and Empire, although increasingly threatened, provided enormous
wealth for a landowning class that enjoyed conspicuous consumption.
Landscapes of covert, clump and plantation were created and managed
to provide sport for aristocrats and monarchs. The spectacle of shoot-
ing included not only the sport itself but the associated luncheons,
dinners and parties. The keepers in special tweeds and the beaters, as
in the illustration here (illus. 90), crossing the bridge at Nuneham
near Oxford so that they could drive the pheasant and wild duck out
from the ‘curious horseshoe-shaped islet’ covert over the River Thames,
became part of an almost theatrical display of power and privilege.55
Several European monarchs were keen shots, in addition to being targets
themselves, including King Carlos of Portugal (assassinated in 1908),
who regularly shot at both Windsor and Elvedon; the Maharajah Duleep
Singh, with his famous estate in Suffolk; Alfonso xii of Spain; and
Kaiser Wilhelm ii. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was at a shooting
party at the Duke of Portland’s Welbeck estate in 1912 a loader slipped
in the snow and accidentally fired two barrels at him but missed by a
few feet.56 One of the effects of the war which followed his assassina-
tion soon afterwards was the collapse of the social system that supported
such luxurious nineteenth-century woodland sporting landscapes.

89 ‘Game Plan at Stanage Radnorshire’, from Hutchinson’s Shooting (1903).

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

90 ‘Beaters crossing the bridge’ at Nuneham, Oxford, from Hutchinson’s

Shooting (1903).

There were many reasons for the eagerness which many landed
estate owners showed towards their woods and plantations in the nine-
teenth century. For much of the century the woods remained important
for coppice and timber, but the commercial production of timber was
often not the main reason for establishing new plantations. For many
owners there was an enthusiasm for trees that was captured by John
Ruskin. He celebrated trees for their ‘unerring uprightness’, like temple
pillars, and ‘mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the storms of
ages’. Trees clothed ‘with variegated, everlasting films’ the summits of
‘trackless mountains’ and ministered ‘at cottage doors to every gentlest
passion and simplest joy of humanity’. Ruskin’s admiration for trees went
so far that he felt they deserved ‘boundless affection and admiration
from us’, serving as ‘a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of
mind and way of life’. No one, he said, ‘can be far wrong in either who
loves the trees enough and every one is assuredly wrong in both, who does
not love them’.57 And it was to Ruskin that the English Arboricultural
Society, founded in 1881 and later to become the Royal Forestry Society,
turned for ideas for a suitable motto in 1887. His two suggestions from
the Psalms: ‘Et folium ejus non defluet’ (His leaf also shall not wither) or
‘Saturabuntur ligna campi et cedri Libani quas plantavil’ (The trees of
the Lord are satisfied – the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted)
were not taken up, but Ruskin felt that the work of the Society was the
‘usefullest of all material work that can be’.58

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 Estate Forestry

While not everyone would have agreed with Ruskin that affection
for trees could be treated as a measure of morality, there was a dynamic
zest for planting trees in gardens, parks and plantations. The new
plantings, whether individual trees in gardens, parks and hedgerows;
fox coverts; small game and landscape plantations; or extensive larch
and pine plantations, when combined with existing old woods and
coppices, produced a diverse new landscape of trees, woods and plan-
tations. Fragments of ancient woodland jostled with modern mixed
plantations and were often amalgamated with them. But within this
diversity there were commonalities of estate landscapes. The home woods
and parkland near the mansion house would frequently have specimen
trees such as cedars of Lebanon and, later in the century, Wellingtonias.
The outer shooting coverts spread across tenanted farms had character-
istic exotic cover species, such as the Canadian snowberry (Symphoricarpos
albus), Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) and Rhododendron ponticum.
The larger plantations were most frequently of larch and Scots pine and
often mixed with broadleaved trees.
Estates became increasingly private: unwanted visitors were excluded
by gamekeepers and, as the screens of trees matured, mansions that had
formerly stood out and dominated local landscapes became hidden from
view and naturalized. The great wealth of many landowners, derived
from urban property, trade and industry, allowed them to treat their
estates as sites of conspicuous consumption rather than production.
They were usually less concerned with the potential long-term profit
from their woods and plantations than with the pleasures that could be
gained from their beauty and their crucial importance for delivering
exciting fox hunting and scientific pheasant shooting. But the exten-
sive experience of forestry gained by tree nurseries, land agents and
owners did provide empirical evidence for the success or otherwise of
a wide variety of species under different circumstances, plus a stock of
timber that was to be of enormous importance when its importation
became almost impossible during the First World War.

203
 m
eight
Scientific Forestry

I
n the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was increasing
concern in Europe about how to maintain the supply of wood and
timber for burgeoning industries. In Germany the sustainable use
of forests was encouraged by the publication in 1713 of Hannss Carl von
Carlowitz’s Sylvicultura Oeconomica, which is frequently identified as
the first book published on the economics of forestry. Carlowitz was
a mining administrator concerned with ensuring the supply of timber
for the mining industry of Freiburg near Dresden. His book was influ-
ential in popularizing the idea that carefully regulated management
of woodland on a rotation could produce a known amount of wood
and timber products into the future. The system depended on dili-
gently mapping woodland and controlling when different sections could
be felled, and was dependent on the ownership of a significant area of
land. Taking the production of firewood from a mixed coppice of ash
and maple as an example, this could be cut on a twenty-year rotation. If
you wanted to ensure a constant supply of firewood, you had to divide
your existing woodland into twenty compartments and one-twentieth
of the whole woodland could be cropped annually. At the end of twenty
years all the woodland would have been cut once, and the rotation could
be started again. Clearly this only worked well if the total area of
woodland was sufficient to fulfil your firewood requirements: if the
demand for wood was increasing you would need to increase the area
of woodland you controlled proportionately.¹

y Early ‘sustainable forestry’ in Europe

One way to increase the productivity and profitability of areas of
woodland was to control traditional uses such as grazing, which might

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adversely affect the regrowth of coppice. In much of Europe forests had

long been used to produce firewood and timber, but these uses were
somewhat secondary to the agricultural uses of the forest: namely the
grazing of wood pastures and the browsing of trees by stock, which
allowed large flocks and herds of animals to be maintained. These were
crucial for the agricultural economy in producing meat, milk, leather, wool
and fertilizers. As in many parts of the world, the form of woodland
management was strongly influenced by the balance between communal
rights over land and more centralized control by both private and state
landowners. Communal rights to grazing and pasture gradually began to
be seen by many landowners as a significant deterrent to the introduction
of more productive and sustainable forms of woodland management.
It is only with the removal of conflicts with game and agricultural
uses in the eighteenth century that the new forestry techniques asso-
ciated with forestry systems such as Schlagwaldwirtschaft could be
established. This system of growing and felling trees using some sort of
rotation, section by section, had as characteristic features ‘sustainability,
a scientific approach, central management and the primary orientation
towards wood production’. Research in the forests of Hunsrück and Eifel
demonstrates that some of the key characteristics of scientific forestry
were developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. When
individual landowners had gained full control over grazing, other agri-
cultural practices and hunting, they had the confidence to develop new
forms of woodland management. The obverse of new forms of wood-
land management was the removal and extinction of various common
rights. From ‘this time on “sustainability” was something like the
pivotal point of forestry’ and ‘the economist Pfeiffer in 1781 saw a
way to realize ‘the perpetual maximum utilization of the forests.’ But how
was this new programme of controlled forestry to be enforced? The
answer was to establish detailed and clear forest laws and an uncorrupted
forest administration of trained forest officers and staff to ensure they
were followed. This authoritarian approach was followed and existing
laws dating back to the medieval period were codified precisely. A new
forest administration with foresters trained in the science of forestry was
established. A key point was the need for this administration to separate
itself from the traditional worlds of hunting and agricultural exploita-
tion of the forests. The large herds of deer favoured by princely families
and their households had to be reduced as these hindered regrowth of
forests, and grazing by sheep and cattle began to be suppressed.²

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But there is also clear evidence that tracts of woodland were managed
in a consciously sustainable manner much earlier than the eighteenth
century. Richard Keyser’s analysis of monastic records in the Champagne
region of northern France provides an excellent insight into early devel-
opments in sustainable woodland management in Europe. He argues
that ‘high medieval demographic and economic growth in Champagne
and other parts of northern France encouraged a switch in the primary
focus of woodland management from grazing, hunting and other rela-
tively extensive methods of gathering naturally occurring products to
intensive small wood production’. This was stimulated by rising urban
demand traces of which can be seen in surviving monastic records which
have an increasing number of ‘commercial contracts based on coppicing’.
Before the twelfth century the evidence suggests that most woodlands
managed by great landlords were silva glandaria, which produced timber,
acorns and beech mast. Tenants paid these landlords ‘dues for wood
gathering and for pasturing pigs’; they also provided labour services by
‘cutting and hauling both small wood (lignum) and building lumber
(materiamen)’. Coppicing clearly took place, but there are only a few
explicit mentions in the documents, such as the reference to an estate
owned by the abbey of Saint-Remi of Reims near Châlons, where ‘a
tenant family held, along with six units of arable, three of silva minuta,
which produced small wood for fencing.’³
Monastic records indicate that there was considerable regulation
of the management of trees and woods after around 1170. As the
populations of towns such as Brie in southern Champagne reached
10,000 and that of Troyes around 20,000, the demand for firewood and
construction materials encouraged ‘intensive woodland management
in the thirteenth century’. Greater efforts were made to enforce long-
established rules to keep pigs from damaging coppice regrowth, and to
mark ownership boundaries more precisely. Regulations controlling the
extraction of wood began to appear near cities: in 1197 an early refer-
ence to the commercial supply of wood is shown by the villagers of Fays
being allowed to sell small wood in Troyes, 20 kilometres (12½ miles)
away. The growth of this trade is indicated by actions of the Benedictine
monks of Montier-la-Celle, just outside Troyes, who tried to control the
use of their woods at Jeugny, 18 kilometres (11¼ miles) to the south. An
accord of 1220 with the nuns of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains of Troyes
limited the amount of firewood they could collect from the Jeugny
woods: ‘The nuns will have a single wagonload [biga] of wood pulled

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by two horses per day through the year, . . . for all types of wood except
standing oak and beech, . . . they can have oak and beech that is lying
on the ground, as long as it is neither fit for lumber nor part of an
ongoing sale.’4
Specific contracts for wood cutting started to become common in
the early thirteenth century. One of the first to demonstrate the divi-
sion of woodland into sections is a sale by the Benedictines of Molesme,
approved by Countess Blanche of Champagne in 1219, of 1,000 arpents
(about 2,000 acres) of woodland near Jeugny, south of Troyes. The large-
scale nature of this contract is shown by the fact that the two purchasers,
Girard Judas and Guillaume de Vaudes, gained a ten-year lease and had
to cut 100 arpents of woodland a year. Other contracts approved by
Blanche include one of 1217 where ‘the countess sold cutting rights’ in
two small forests or ‘forestellas’ over a six-year period ‘on condition that
the merchants “cut each tree only once so that it grows back quickly”’.
In another contract it was specified that 400 arpents would be cut over
a ten-year period in the forest of Gault, and adjoining parcels had to
be felled in sequence. In addition the restriction on grazing became more
closely formalized and regulated. Restrictions on the grazing of freshly
coppiced areas for a period of between four and six years after cutting
were commonplace by the mid-thirteenth century. In 1271 the Grand
Jours of Troyes, the high court of Champagne, ‘upheld against the
community of Chaource a customary exclusion of pasturage (vaine-
paturage) for five years after cutting’ which allowed the woodland ‘to
defend itself ’. This exclusion period was extended to six or seven years
for woodland on poor soils where the coppice regrowth was likely to
be less rapid.5
In 1284 Philip iv acquired the province of Champagne by his
marriage to Joan of Navarre and Champagne. He kept on the existing
forest manager, Pierre de Chaource, whose Book of Sales of the Woods
of Champagne describes the extent and importance of commercial
coppicing in the thirteenth century. The book includes details of over
200 wood sales made between 1280 and 1300, mostly at Villemaur in
Othe forest, about 30 kilometres (181⁄2 miles) southwest of Troyes. The
book names the seller, the area of woodland (usually around 40 arpents)
and the price fetched (around £6 per arpent). The income from these
woods was enormously important, bringing in about £1,300 per year,
which was ‘an amount similar to that of the city of Troyes’s annual
tax’. The details of the contracts show that purchasers normally had six

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years to coppice their plots and could pay for this in annual instalments.
Payments were usually made on 30 November, St Andrew’s day, which
marked the start of the main coppicing season. The cutters were a mix-
ture of local people and merchants from Troyes who might make several
purchases. Local villagers had a keen interest in checking that the con-
tracts were scrupulously followed, and a range of officials was employed
that included forest managers (gruyers) such as Pierre de Chaource,
guards, sergeants and, perhaps most important, surveyors (arpenteurs)
who marked out the areas to be sold and coppiced (illus. 76).6
Although coppicing is an ancient practice of great significance and
importance in many parts of the world, it is in the later Middle Ages that
it can be documented as being of commercial importance. It was in
the thirteenth century that it began ‘to dominate sylviculture in parts
of northern France as a market-orientated system. At once commercial-
ized and sustainable over centuries, this system would persist into
the nineteenth century.’ Many French forest historians have remained
‘resolutely modern and statist’ and focussed on how later national gov-
ernments ‘gradually imposed order and a focus on timber production
on earlier, insufficiently regulated practices’. In so doing they have
missed the documented scale of the extent and commercial impor-
tance of coppicing in this earlier period, when the ‘coppicing cycle was
clearly the primary regulator’ of woodland management, with the pro-
duction of timber from standard trees (bailivaux) being of secondary
importance. The sustainable nature of ‘intensive sylviculture based on
coppicing’ was recognized: a royal decree of 1346 stated that masters
of forests where sales were to take place should visit them and ‘inform
themselves about all those forests and woods’ so that ‘the said forests and
woods can be perpetually sustained in good condition’.7
While hunting is often identified as a way of displaying power and
wealth, its role as a mode of surveillance is probably underestimated.
Hunting over their lands allowed the great landlords, princes and bish-
ops of the medieval period and later to ascertain the condition of their
woods and the quality of the work of their agents, foresters and wood-
wards. Christoph, Duke of Württemberg (fl. 1550–68), for example,
was an enthusiastic regulator and administrator who was keen to extend
control over his woods. Attempts ‘to improve the quality of the wood-
lands between Stuttgart and Boblingen’ followed ‘critical comments
made by Duke Christoph during a hunting trip in the area in 1564’.
Hunting also gave additional influence and authority to forest officials

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and administrations because they worked closely with the centres of

power. Joachim Radkau has noted that some ‘historians think it is
largely owing to princely big-game hunting during the early modern
era that many woodlands were saved from deforestation. At least it
was the deer-hunt which gave power and prestige to several forest
administrations’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8
The idea of sustainable woodland management systems has a
long history, stretching back to the medieval period and often involving
woodcutters and merchants, landowners and forest officials in compli-
cated legal agreements. Indeed, it is largely through these surviving legal
documents that the details of woodland management history can be
envisioned. Sustainable cutting of coppice undoubtedly has existed for
much longer than the surviving documents allow us to determine. How-
ever, there is little doubt that the rise of what can be described as modern
scientific sustainable forestry took place largely in German states. Radkau
points out that Nachhaltigkeit, or sustainability, has in recent years
‘become a magic word in German forestry’ and that the ‘establishment
of the principle of Nachhaltigkeit is usually claimed as the great histor-
ical achievement of Germany which spread from Germany all over the
world’. He argues that the word is often understood in a ‘merely quanti-
tative, mathematical manner’, showing that a forest policy can guarantee
the regeneration of a certain amount of wood in a certain time. But it is
the apparent certainty and security of future wood supplies provided
by the careful calculations and accounts which made this new scientific
forestry so attractive and beguiling.9

y Scientific forestry in Germany, India and America

A key difference between earlier concepts of sustainability, which were
usually concerned with the careful management of coppice woodland
under rotation, and the sustainability of the new scientific forestry was
that the latter is associated strongly with the afforestation of former
cleared land. From the sixteenth century onwards there had been con-
cerns over a timber famine in Germany, as in many European countries,
and this became a strong argument for the establishment of new areas
of woodland. It was this policy of reafforestation and the establishment
and management of high forest (Hochwald) that German foresters became
famous for in the early nineteenth century. One of the most influential
forest scientists was Heinrich Cotta (1763–1844), who founded the

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forest school at Tharandt, near Dresden, that became the Royal Saxon
Forest Academy and was enormously influential in training foresters; and
another was Georg Ludwig Hartig (1764–1837), who was chief inspec-
tor of forests at Stuttgart and later Berlin. There was a very strong demand
for timber of high quality grown over a long rotation, especially through
the Dutch timber trade. But there was another reason for the rapid devel-
opment of the new scientific forestry profession: ‘only a policy of high
forest with long cutting cycles was able to justify an independent and
well-established forest administration and to defend it against a rising tide
of liberalism, which originally was opposed to governmental forest
administration.’ Whatever the motives, the rise of scientific forestry trans-
formed the public image of foresters, who by the mid-nineteenth
century had become ‘one of the highest-esteemed German professions
and were regarded as defenders of nature, advocates of the common
wealth and the interest of future generations’. The German writer Friedrich
Schiller, who had at first thought of foresters merely as hunters, ‘devel-
oped a high respect for the profession when he heard that Hartig made
forest plans for more than 120 years ahead’.¹0
The influence of German scientific forestry began to be felt in the
English-speaking world from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The
ideas did not travel directly across the English Channel to Britain, but
went along an indirect route through British India, where the need for
specialized forestry personnel was recognized early in the century. While
the ‘first attempts at forestry conservancy’ began in Burma as early as
1826, and Mr Conolly the Collector of Malabar ‘commenced planting
teak on a large scale at Niambur’ in the 1840s, it is to a later generation
of foresters that the instigation of scientific forestry can be attributed.
The Earl of Dalhousie, Governor General of India from 1848 to 1856,
was a keen administrator and issued a Charter of Indian Forestry in
1855, which established that land not privately owned was state land
and ‘with the establishment of forest areas as absolute state property, the
Charter required proper management of the forest areas and this meant
scientific forestry.’¹¹
Two of the most important figures in the promotion of scientific
forestry were the German botanist Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907) and
the German forester William Schlich (1840–1925). Both men made their
careers in India and Britain and were eventually knighted for their
services to forestry. Brandis became interested in botany as a child in
Athens, where his father worked for King Otho, and gained a PhD at

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Bonn. The decisive link to Indian forestry came with his marriage to
Rachel Havelock, whose brother-in-law the Indian army officer General
Henry Havelock recommended Brandis to Lord Dalhousie. Brandis
was appointed in 1856 to put a stop to illegal fellings of valuable teak
trees in Pegu and his success in this task and his administrative skills
meant that he was appointed inspector-general of all Indian forests by
1864. He visited many Indian forests during the 1860s and his reports
showed ‘a keen interest in evaluating community forest management.
In the debate among officials prior to the second Forest Act of 1878
he steered a middle course between advocates of total state control of
forests and votaries of village control.’ William Schlich was trained as a
forester and after graduating worked for the Hesse state forestry service
but he lost his job following the Austro–Prussian War of 1866 and moved
to India in 1867. He first worked in Burma and later in the Punjab and
succeeded Dietrich Brandis as inspector-general in 1881. While in India
he established the ‘imperial working plans branch, which ensured the
preparation of forest working plans on approved lines and their scrutiny
by a central authority.’¹²
While both Brandis and Schlich made their careers and gained their
practical experience of implementing forest plans in India, it is through
their work in education and writing that they had their greatest influence
across the world. In order to gain well-trained forestry officers in India,
from 1866 onwards ‘a number of selected Englishmen were sent annually

91 The tropical forestry expert Dietrich Brandis with students at the University of
Giessen, Germany, in 1889.

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for a term of two years and eight months to the Continent to study
Forestry, half of them going to France, and the rest to Germany.’ Brandis
later urged that some form of British school of forestry education
should be established and in 1879 the Forestry School of Dehra Dun was
opened.¹³ This was later reorganized by Schlich, who then left India to
establish a forestry department at the Royal Indian Engineering College
at Coopers Hill, Englefield Green, Surrey. His former colleague Brandis,
back in Germany, ‘agreed to supervise the practical continental train-
ing’ of students who were mainly British, or from the Empire, but also
included several Americans. This college closed in 1905 and the training
of foresters was taken over by the University of Oxford. Schlich was
responsible in both institutions for ‘the training of no fewer than 272 out
of a total of 283 officers who joined the Indian forest service during that
period’.¹4
William Schlich’s massive A Manual of Forestry was published in
five volumes from 1889 to 1895. Its gestation and form demonstrate how
the ideas of scientific forestry which originated in Germany flourished
in India and then became distributed around the world. The production
of a series of handbooks on forestry was a key part of Schlich’s role at
Coopers Hill. Although he did draw on some books by British authors,
such as Brown’s The Forester, the main intellectual thrust is from German
authorities, including Schwappach and Baur on forest mensuration,
G. Heyer on forest valuation and Friedrich Judeich’s Die Foresteinrichtung
on forest working plans; the last’s ‘method of regulating the yield of
forest’ Schlich thought the best, though sometimes ‘too rigid’.¹5 In the
third volume of the Manual he made use of forest working plans pro-
vided by German colleagues for Krumbach Communal Forest and
the Herrenwies Range, the latter prepared for him when he toured the
forest with Coopers Hill students in 1893. The final two volumes are
not by Schlich but by his colleague at Coopers Hill W. R. Fisher: Forest
Protection was adapted from Richard Hess’s Forstsschutz, while the fifth
volume on Forest Utilisation is a translation of Die Forstbenutzung by
Karl Gayer, first published in 1863.¹6
Schlich’s Manual was only the largest of a number of important books
published in the late nineteenth century popularizing German forestry.
John Nisbet of the Indian Forest Service published Studies in Forestry in
1894, noting that they were based on his ‘Essays on Sylvicultural Subjects’,
which were ‘written by me in Bavaria during 1892’ and published by
the Government of India in 1893 ‘for distribution among their Forest

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Officers’. Nisbet noted that ‘it will be apparent throughout every chapter’
that ‘my convictions regarding economic Forestry . . . have been formed
in a Teutonic school.’ He implicitly identifies a tension in using German
models to further British forestry and argues somewhat defensively
that ‘in acquiring information with regard to the growth of Forest Trees
. . . it ought to be a matter of perfect indifference from what well this may
be drawn.’ He therefore ‘had no hesitation in boldly acknowledging the
German sources from which many of the lessons I am trying to teach
have been learned’.¹7
The methods and ideas of scientific, sustainable forestry spread
rapidly through the British Empire, especially in Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa and Canada, and this was furthered in the twentieth cen-
tury by the establishment of new forestry schools and colleges and the
holding of regular British Empire Forestry Conferences from 1920 through
to 1947.¹8 But the links with the usa were very strong and American
foresters were also strongly influenced by the work of Brandis and
Schlich. One of the leading proponents of working plans for American
forests was Charles Sprague Sargent (1841–1927). Sargent was a botanist
who directed the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard for 54 years and pub-
lished many works, including The Silva of North America (1891–1902)
in fourteen volumes and the Forest Flora of Japan (1894). He was also
chairman of the National Forestry Commission, which surveyed the
nation’s timber reserves. In his popular magazine Garden and Forest,
published 1888–94, he argued that ‘India has given to the world the
most conscious example of a national forest policy adopted over a vast
area’ and recommended the adoption of ‘empire forestry-style working
plans adapted to the American market’.¹9 Sargent was delighted when
Dietrich Brandis was asked by the National Academy of Sciences to
produce a ‘plan of action for the protection of American forests’. Sargent
thought that ‘it ought not to be impracticable to frame a system of
forest management’ for America ‘which would contain all the essential
features of the plan which has proved such a conspicuous success in
India’.²0
Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) was the most important figure in the
development of forestry in America. He was appointed first chief of the
Forest Service (1905–10) and before that had been chief of the Division
of Forestry from 1898 to 1905. There was no university training for
foresters in the States and after Yale he ‘went to Europe to study under
French and German trained foresters, who in turn had served much of

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their career in British India’. When in England Pinchot was advised by

William Schlich to ‘strike for the creation of National Forests’ back home
and, with ‘a copy of Schlich’s first volume of Manual of Forestry under his
arm’, travelled to Nancy, where many Indian foresters had been trained.
He then studied in Germany with Brandis, who was a strong and contin-
uing influence. Pinchot was impressed by the ‘“multi-use” model of
forest management’ that Brandis had devised for British India, which
‘reconciled the needs of peasants, businessmen and environmentally
prone administrators’. When Pinchot returned home he worked on the
Biltmore Forest Estate near Asheville, North Carolina, owned by the
enormously wealthy George W. Vanderbilt, for three years and later
worked with the National Forest Commission of the National Academy
of Sciences and travelled extensively to identify possible forest reserves.
His appointment as chief forester allowed him to increase the area of
national forests from 56 million acres in 1905 to 172 million acres in 1910
and in this he was helped by the support of his friend President Theodore
Roosevelt. Pinchot noted that when he ‘came home not a single acre of
Government, state, or private timberland was under systematic forest
management anywhere on the most richly timbered of all continents’.
He argued that ‘the common word for our forests was “inexhaustible”’
and that lumbermen ‘regarded forest devastation as normal and second
growth as a delusion of fools . . . And as for sustained yield, no such
idea had ever entered their heads . . . What talk there was about forest
protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a
mosquito, and just about as irritating.’²¹
One of the most colourful German foresters working in America
in the early twentieth century was Carl Alwin Schenck (1865–1955), who
gained his PhD in forestry at Giessen. He knew Brandis in Germany
and served as William Schlich’s assistant on European tours by English
and Indian forest students from 1892 to 1894. In 1895 he moved to
become forester at Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate after he and Pinchot
remembered that it was Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed
the landscapes at Biltmore, who had persuaded Vanderbilt to take an
interest in forestry and invite Pinchot and Schenck to develop forestry
there. He worked as forester to Vanderbilt until 1909, introduced forest-
management plans and founded the Biltmore Forest School, which
laid claim to be the first forest school in the States, in 1898. Before it
closed in 1913 around 400 students graduated in forestry, many going
on to establish modern forestry practice in America. Schenck served

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92 Forestry educators William Schlich (front, centre) and Carl Schenck (front,
right) with students in Saxony, 1892.

with the German army on the Russian front during the First World
War and lived in Germany afterwards, leading many forestry tours in
Germany and Switzerland in the 1920s and ’30s.²² Once forestry train-
ing started to become established in America, young American foresters
went to Germany to learn European forest-management methods. An
important example is provided by Arthur Recknagel (1883–1962),
who had worked in the forestry service from 1906 to 1912, when he went
to Germany to study forest management for a year. He was Professor
of Forest Management and Utilization at Cornell from 1913 to 1943;
Cornell had been established in 1898, the same year as Biltmore Forest
School. He wrote in the preface to his book The Theory and Practice of
Working Plans (1913, second edition 1917) that he presented ‘the best
European efforts’ on forest organization and planning ‘adapted to the
present needs of American forestry’. Prominence is given to examples of
working plans from Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, Baden and
Alsace-Lorraine, with some examples also from Austria and France.²³

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y The new forestry in Britain

The practices of forestry and woodland management were transformed
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. On the one hand,
there was a long, quiet decline in traditional woodland-management
techniques, such as coppicing, which went largely unnoticed by contem-
poraries. On the other, there was an orchestrated campaign to form what
was termed a ‘new forestry’ based on scientific principles developed on
the Continent. While British forestry policy in India was central to the
spread of scientific forestry in the second half of the nineteenth century,
there was little evidence of the successful introduction of these new
approaches in Britain itself, where the interests of landowners tended
more to hunting, shooting and the appearance of the landscape than
the efficient production of timber. Many in Britain argued that one
reason for the lack of a sustained and economic forestry was the lack
of state forestry. Some foresters looked with envy at European state and
communal forests, where long-term experiments and schemes for im-
proved forestry could be instituted.²4 Schlich had great influence on
the orientation and development of forestry education in Britain in the
Edwardian period, especially through his Manual of Forestry. Lectureships
in forestry were established at the University College of North Wales at
Bangor and at the Armstrong College at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1903.
A School of Forestry for Woodmen at Parkend in the Forest of Dean
was opened in 1905, and the following year Schlich transferred the
forestry section of the Royal Engineering College to the University
of Oxford. A new generation of trained foresters was produced whose
knowledge had been imported from Germany and France and who
were essentially concerned with plantations rather than with coppice
with standards.
This circulation of ideas, formal and informal, and its implications
for British forestry was recognized by A. C. Forbes, lecturer in forestry
at Newcastle in 1910, who pointed out that ‘since about 1860’, with the
establishment of the Indian Forest service, ‘a small stream of continen-
tal trained youths has been going out to India, an equally small stream
of retired Indian foresters . . . has been returning from it.’ He argued
that ‘Whatever the exact practical results of this inter-mixture of British
and Anglo-Indian ideas may have been, there is little doubt that fresh
ideas were instilled into British foresters and proprietors, and a wider
knowledge of forestry as an industry instead of a hobby resulted.’ Formal

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education was not, however, the only way in which Continental scientific
modes of forestry were popularized in England: ‘the constant visits made
by the British landowning class to the Continent in search of pleasure,
sport or health’, although not directly connected with forestry, ‘can
scarcely have failed to open the eyes of landowners to the possibilities
of scientific forestry’.²5 These novel modes of scientific forestry had to
compete with the powerful interests of estate owners in shooting and
hunting, which had for many years co-existed with traditional coppice
woods and woods consisting of coppice with standards.
A good indication of the increasing interest in scientific forestry was
the establishment in 1882 and increasing popularity of the English
Arboricultural Society (later the Royal Forestry Society). There was consid-
erable interest in making plantations on agricultural land of poor quality,
including heaths, moors and sand dunes. The first direct impetus for
state forestry in the Edwardian period came from an unexpected source.
In 1909 the Royal Commission on Coastal Erosion reported. One of
its conclusions was that ‘whether in connection with reclaimed lands
or otherwise, it is desirable to make an experiment in afforestation as
a means of increasing employment.’ In the same year, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, announced in his budget speech
that money was to be made available for schools of forestry, the acqui-
sition of land for planting and the creation of experimental forests. An
advisory committee on forestry was appointed in 1912 by the Board of
Agriculture and its report, published in the same year, recommended
that a forest survey should be carried out and that 5,000 acres of land
should be acquired for such an experimental forest.²6
Many British foresters, however, remained uncertain of some of
the benefits of scientific forestry and a debate in the Quarterly Journal
of Forestry of 1914 highlights this conflict. The forester Thomas Bewick,
writing on a successful visit of British foresters to Germany in 1913, noted
that ‘we cannot under present conditions adopt the German system of
forest management in extenso, but I am sure that some thing could be
done in a modified way.’ William Schlich, at the age of 74 the doyen of
the British forestry establishment, did not allow Bewick to get away with
this rather lukewarm appreciation of the merits of scientific forestry. In
the following issue of the journal he argued that

it has often been said that the continental systems of forest

management are not much use in these islands, because here

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entirely different conditions have to be dealt with. I do not

think any sensible person has ever suggested that we should
adopt the continental systems en bloc, but [we should] . . .
profit by experience in other countries.

Schlich’s main argument was that British foresters must stop their trad-
ition of ‘haphazard procedure’ and start making use of long-term working
plans. From such plans, he noted, ‘no deviation’ is allowed ‘except with
the sanction of higher authorities’. Moreover, ‘in every case it is strictly
laid down what is to be done during the next ten, or in some cases
twenty, years.’ His conclusion was that the ‘preparation of well con-
sidered working plans is a crying necessity in all British forests, even
if they be of moderate size’.²7
It is difficult to identify the precise impact of these Continental
ideas on English forestry in the early twentieth century. Many of the
larger estates employed forestry specialists to assess their woodlands
and possibly draw up plans. In practice, however, the foresters and
woodmen employed by estates were still untrained in the new methods
and ideas of forestry. When Sir William Schlich ‘visited private estates in
England in order to provide working plans for them, he tried to encour-
age the idea of systematic forest management which he had been taught
in Germany’. Later, however, he regarded this work ‘as some of the least
successful of his career and he attributed this to the frequent changes in
the ownership of private estates and to the absence of any tradition of
forestry’ in England. He made more direct impact through his teaching
at Oxford, and Roy Robinson (1883–1952), an Australian Rhodes Scholar
with ‘athletic prowess’ whom Schlich considered his ‘most brilliant stu-
dent’, later became a key figure in the development of British forestry. After
gaining his Diploma in Forestry at Oxford he became an inspector in the
Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1909, with responsibility as a
forestry advisor. He carried out ‘intensive surveys in Wales and the north
of England’ which, together with ‘several extensive motorcycle tours of
Scotland’, gave him a ‘wide knowledge of the growth of trees in Britain’.
This was the first appointment of a trained forester by the Commissioners
of His Majesty’s Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, and gave him over-
sight of the management of the remaining Royal Forests, including the
New Forest, the Forest of Dean and other smaller but still significant
Crown holdings. These estates were ‘administered by several firms of
land agents while the woods were locally supervised by Crown Foresters’,

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a mode of control later described by the forester George Ryle as ‘a

combination of entrenched conservatism that was to take a great deal
of breaking down’.²8
Roy Robinson was identified as the right man to make sweeping
changes: he was ‘severely practical’ and ‘tried most operations himself and
abandoned anything not strictly necessary’. Moreover one of his ‘chief
attributes was tenacity of purpose’ and his ‘approach to forestry was
mathematical and detailed’. But his scope of action with the Crown
Forests was relatively limited. The lack of any significant ‘higher autho-
rities’ who could lay down rules that private landowners would have to
follow was, perhaps, the main reason why modern forestry did not
gain a significant foothold in Britain before the First World War. The
tremendous social and political changes associated with the onset of
that war, however, allowed the idea of a state forest service to become
credible, if not welcomed by all. A debate held by the Royal English
Arboricultural Society in September 1916 demonstrated the divisions
between those members who saw a state forest service as essential to the
development of British forestry and those who saw it as an attack on
the freedom of private estate owners. By the end of the war, however,
the establishment of a state forestry service was generally welcomed as
a necessity. The luxurious forestry traditionally practised by the landed
estates was recognized as anachronistic, and the need for a strong state
forest organization to produce large quantities of timber and a modern
forest landscape was seen as essential.²9

y The First World War and British forestry

The First World War shattered the confidence of the landowning classes
in Britain. In the Edwardian period private landed estates and the rural
way of life associated with them had symbolized the power of private
property and aristocratic values. For many people the country-house
weekend, shooting parties, hunting and fishing epitomized social success.
In practice, however, the power of the landowning classes had started
to diminish in the late nineteenth century. The agricultural depression,
whose most intense period lasted from the late 1870s to the late 1890s,
led to a dramatic fall in estate rentals and, correspondingly, land values.
Landed wealth could no longer compete with industrial wealth, and the
introduction of estate taxation reduced what wealth remained. Increas-
ingly landowners began to sell off their land. This loss of income was

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accompanied by a decline in the political power of the aristocracy

brought about by major changes to the electoral system. The number of
men who could vote increased from around three million men in 1883
to nearly six million in 1888, and in 1918 universal adult suffrage for men
was introduced. The final blow for many landed estates was brought
about directly by the war as hundreds of heirs to estates were killed.
Many landed estates were put on the market, and in 1919 there were
some half a million acres of English land up for sale, with twice as
much actually being sold.³0
Landowners, estate staff and farm workers were all directly affected
by the horrific levels of death and injury in the war. The destruction of
large tracts of countryside along the Western Front in Europe became
for many potent symbols of the destruction of life and civilization.
Paul Nash’s haunting images of shattered trees, such as his We Are Making
a New World (illus. 78), are ‘terrible images’ because of ‘their com-
bination of detached, almost abstract, appreciation and their truth
to appearance’. Nash had been at the Ypres salient in 1917, and after
being invalided out returned to the front as an official war artist. The
drawings he made in the field of ‘shorn trees in ruined and flooded
landscapes’ struck a chord with the public and made his reputation.³¹
The oil painting We Are Making a New World is based on his water-
colour Sunrise: Inverness Copse, a battlefield drawing made at the scene
in 1917.³²
The war not only destroyed trees and woodland in France, but
consumed huge quantities of timber for the construction of trenches,
walkways and roads. Vast quantities of timber were felled in the imme-
diate countryside, but also shipped and moved by rail across the
Continent. Soldiers would not only have been aware of the dramatic
destruction of woodland on the battlefields, but also in the woodlands
of France, Belgium and Germany. When they returned home on leave,
they would also have seen the vast acreages of devastated woodland
that were felled for the war effort. Enormous pressures were placed on
existing woodlands and plantations and approximately 450,000 acres
of woodland across Britain were felled. At the outbreak of war in 1914
there was ‘no immediate anxiety’ about the supply of timber and ‘it was
not until 1916 that vigorous and near-panic action had to be taken’ to
maximize the home production of timber as a replacement for the
increasingly perilous supply of timber from overseas. One of the most
important requirements was timber to be used as pit props in the coal

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mines which were so crucial for the British Navy. Eventually the urgency
of the timber requirements resulted in the imposition of state control
over timber felling and supply.
A Home-grown Timber Committee, chaired by Liberal mp Francis
Dyke Acland, was established in November 1915 and this worked until
March 1917, when its duties were transferred to the Directorate of
Timber Supplies set up by the War Office.³³ This had the enormous
job of selecting, felling and controlling the supply of timber from
across Britain. Many of the key posts in the department were ‘filled
by university-trained foresters’. By the end of 1917 the Department ‘was
already running 182 sawmills’ supplemented by an additional 40 mills
run by ‘a Canadian Forestry Corps, a New England Sawmill Unit and
a Newfoundland Forestry Corps’. Much work was also done by the
Women’s Forestry Corps, and by 1918 around 15,000 staff were employed
in timber supply.
The necessary frenzy of timber production brought to everyone’s
attention the need to consider forestry policy after the end of the war.
How should the felled woodlands be replenished? Should vast new areas
of land be afforested to ensure future timber supplies in case of nation-
al emergency? How could landowners be encouraged to manage their
woodlands effectively? The Reconstruction Committee set up a sub-
committee on forestry in 1916, also chaired by Francis Dyke Acland,
and the secretary to this committee was the dynamic Australian forester
Roy Robinson. The remit of the committee was ‘to consider and report
upon the best means of conserving and developing the woodland and
forestry resources of the United Kingdom, having regard to the experi-
ence gained during the war’. The membership of this committee included
a mix of landowners with forestry interests, government officials and
the omnipresent Sir William Schlich. The report made a strong case
for the establishment of a national forestry policy. The main argu-
ments put forward were that the ‘dependence on imported timber was
a grave source of weakness in time of war’ and that it was precarious
‘even in peace conditions’ to rely on securing softwood requirements
from overseas’, particularly from what were termed ‘extra-Imperial
countries’. A third argument was that there were large areas of moorland
and heathland that were no more than ‘waste’, and that if these were
afforested it would help to stem rural depopulation and increase the
general productiveness of the land, since forest establishment and
management employed more people than hill sheep farming.

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The Acland Committee recommended the establishment of a

centralized Forestry Commission, which should be responsible for
afforesting and encouraging others to afforest 1,770,000 acres of land
over an 80-year period, leading roughly to a doubling of the area of
woodland in the uk. It was envisaged that 200,000 acres would be
afforested within ten years, ‘150,000 acres by direct State action’ and the
remainder largely by private enterprise. The report did not flinch from
pondering the difficult problem of the profitability of afforestation. It
argued that ‘from a national point of view’ direct profitability was not
the most important aspect and ‘although much discussed in this country’
it had never ‘been so regarded in the countries where silviculture has been
longest practised and is most valued’. It considered that ‘direct gain or
loss is relatively a small matter compared with the new values created’,
which were expressed ‘partly in population and partly in terms of wealth’.
The committee concluded triumphantly that ‘It is on such values that
the strength of nations depends.’ But the Treasury representative on the
committee, Mr L. C. Bromley, had some strong reservations. He agreed
that the proposed commission ‘would provide the best means of secur-
ing the conservation and development of the woodland and forestry
resources’ of the country, particularly ‘as a safeguard in the event of a
possible future war on a similar scale to the present’. But he noted that
the ‘expenditure proposed is very considerable and that the financial
results are likely to be unfavourable to the Exchequer’.³4
After the publication of the report, things moved very fast, with
an Interim Forest Authority established under Acland in 1918. Following
the Forestry Act of 1919, the Forestry Commission was established
on 1 September 1919. Although severely threatened by the Geddes
Axe of 1922, which ‘argued that the afforestation policy adopted by
Parliament should be completely scrapped’, the Commission survived,
and in its first ten years very nearly achieved the target of 200,000 acres
of woodland establishment. Most of the land purchased or leased by
the Forestry Commission was marginal land of relatively little impor-
tance for agriculture, such as low-grade grazing land. Land not under
economic production was considered ‘waste’. George Ryle noted that
land chosen for afforestation included ‘heathlands and other really
unused wastelands such as those in Hampshire, Dorset and more par-
ticularly the Brecklands of East Anglia. There were sand-dunes on the
coasts at Culbin, Pembrey and Newborough. There were the bracken
and heath wastes of the Sherwood Forest.’ In addition there were the

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huge areas of recently felled and unmanaged ‘derelict or nearly derelict

woodlands’.³5
About 162,000 ha (400,300 acres) of new forests had been planted
and purchased by the Forestry Commission in Britain in the interwar
period and over 4,000 people were employed by the Commission. The
new plantations were celebrated by many as the efficient conversion of
wasteland into modern forests which would provide rural employment
and a strategic reserve of timber. The enthusiasm and experience of the
nineteenth-century tree enthusiasts and arboretums in testing introduced
trees became of vital importance. Sitka spruce was seen, for example, as
an ideal tree for upland areas, being ‘a substitute for Norway spruce at
high altitudes or wherever volume production is more important than
quality of timber’. It was favoured as it produced ‘timber much more
rapidly than Norway spruce and under a wider range of conditions’.
Experiments were made to establish the best species to use on a variety
of soils and sites. In southern and eastern England the chalk downs
and wolds were identified as ‘well suited to afforestation’ and from
1927 the Commission carried out experiments to discover ‘the most
suitable kinds of trees to plant’ on these chalky soils. A variety of pio-
neer trees such as Scots and Austrian pine, European larch and Italian
alder (Alnus incana) were tested, as were different mixes of beech
with conifer nurses such as Thuya plicata and Lawson cypress, with the
general aim of achieving a final crop of beech. These experiments drew
on historical knowledge of similar plantings made by private estates.³6
The effect of the war on British forestry was transformative. The
irreversible decline in the power of the large landowners was hastened;
many large landed estates were sold and traditional forms of wood-
land management began to disintegrate. The state Forestry Commission
acquired huge tracts of land, planted them uniformly with conifers
and introduced grant aid for the management of private woodlands.
The concept of scientific forestry finally gained a foothold on British
soil. The thousands of acres of coniferous trees that were planted not
only formed the kernel of a strategic reserve of timber but challenged
traditional landscape values. The geometric form of the new, extensive
plantations marched starkly across the semi-natural moors and heaths.
The rise of modern forestry obscured the decline and finally the collapse
of traditional woodland practices, which would not be revived until
interest in conservation management gathered momentum at the end
of the twentieth century.

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 m
nine
Recreation and
Conservation

I
n Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) the character played by
Kim Novak visits a grove of coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens).
Novak plays the role of Madeleine, a character apparently besotted
with Carlotta, a woman who is long dead. She is struck in the film by
the cross-section of a redwood which had been felled in the 1930s and
displayed marked up with key dates in history. The tree is dated back
to ad 909 and the associated dates appear to the modern eye remark-
ably Anglocentric: 1066, Battle of Hastings; 1215, Magna Carta Signed;
1776, Declaration of Independence (illus. 94). But the character, who is
trying to impress James Stewart’s ‘Scottie’ of the veracity of her infatu-
ation, appears more interested in the way she can place Carlotta’s life in
a specific historical context. In 2003 Kim Novak talked about the scene
and enthused about the trees:

I’ve always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees
have witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil
War, yet they still survive. I’ve always felt that part of why they
survive is because they don’t try to intercede, to advise ‘No,
that’s the wrong way,’ or to try and wipe out an army. They
stood and observed.

She then explained that when she first read through the film script
and reached ‘that part of the Hitchcock script where Madeleine and
Scottie are among the redwoods, she touches the tree rings and says,
“Here I was born and here I died. It was only a moment. You took no
notice,” I got goose-bumps. When it came to shoot that scene, I had
goose-bumps.’ Kim Novak found that ‘Just touching that old tree was
truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such

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 Recreation and Conservation

93 Kim Novak and James Stewart look up at the sequoias in Muir Woods,
California, in a still from Vertigo (1958).

a sense of the passage of time, of history. It’s like you’re touching the
essence, the very substance of life.’ She remembered taking her father
to see the redwoods: ‘He wept and so did I. He “got” it in the same way
as I do. We never talked about it.’¹
The scene is set in Muir Woods, named after the well-known
naturalist and conservationist John Muir (1838–1914), but it was largely
filmed in the Big Basin Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz, which had
been protected through the energetic activities of a much less famous
conservationist. Andrew Hill (1853–1922) was a painter and photog-
rapher living in San Jose who was also a redwood enthusiast. He was
instrumental in saving the large grove of redwoods at Big Basin and
getting them taken into public ownership. The Big Basin Redwoods
State Park was established in 1902 after a short but intense campaign.
The story goes that in 1899 Hill was commissioned by the English Wide
World Magazine to provide some images of redwoods after a forest fire.
He ‘photographed the coast redwood trees in Felton Grove’ but the
owner of the forest ‘accused Hill of trespassing and demanded his nega-
tives. Hill refused and left, vowing to himself to save the trees for future
generations’ and to establish a public park. In 1900 he and a group of
friends formed a pressure group named the Sempervirens Club, which
held regular visits to the trees and which ‘pushed the state legislature to
approve a bill for purchase of the land’ (illus. 95). This bill also established

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94 This annotated cross-section of a redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), felled in

1930, near the entrance to Muir Woods, photographed in around 1948, appeared
in Vertigo (1958).

the California Redwood Park Commission, which was able to purchase

and receive gifts of land from private individuals and companies. The San
Jose Mercury celebrated the success of the park and emphasized the
threat of total destruction that had been averted:

Giant redwoods. Mighty with the strength which had

withstood the ravages of centuries, quivered at the menacing
snarl of the saw mill; trembled with the throb of its engines;
moaned with the scream of the ripping, tearing steel teeth,
cutting through the heart of the forest, nearer and even
nearer and from their towering height beckoned across
the mountains for rescue.²

The Commission’s major acquisitions included almost 4,000 acres from

the Big Basin Lumber Company in 1906 and the state park currently
covers over 18,000 acres.³
John Muir (1838–1914) was born in Dunbar, Scotland, and moved
to Wisconsin with his family in 1849. He was strongly influenced by
the ‘value-centred views of nature’ in the works of Wordsworth, Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and by the writings of
Alexander von Humboldt. He first visited the Yosemite Valley, about 200
miles east of San Francisco, and the Mariposa Grove of giant redwoods

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 Recreation and Conservation

(S. giganteum) in 1868 and lived there from 1869 to 1871; it became his
spiritual home.4 The grove had been first reported at a meeting of the
California Academy of Science by Augustus Dowd, a hunter, in 1852.
The English plant collector William Lobb attended the meeting and
was so excited by what he heard that he ‘raced back to find the trees’
where he was ‘stunned by their size’. He recorded 80 to 90 trees that
were 250 to 320 feet high and between 10 and 20 feet in diameter. He
‘collected all the seeds, botanical specimens, vegetative shoots, and
seedlings he could carry back to San Francisco’ and immediately booked
the first passage home to London. Within six months the nurseryman
Veitch was offering young trees for sale at £3 2s each and they immedi-
ately became an enormously fashionable tree species for garden, park
and arboretum.5 The naming of the tree was problematic. S. sempervirens
was called Wellingtonia after the Duke of Wellington, who had died
in September 1852, by John Lindley in Britain, but the botanist Albert
Kellogg in California called it Washingtonia on the basis that a Californian
tree should not bear the name of a British soldier and prime minister.
This created an international botanical controversy and causes confusion
to this day.6
While young sequoias were beginning to become established in
British gardens and parks, they were photographed at Yosemite in the
summer of 1861 by the young American photographer Carleton Watkins
(1829–1916), who had established a studio in San Francisco in the 1850s.

95 The
Sempervirens Club
at the Father of the
Forest tree, 1901.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

96 Carleton Watkins, Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove, Yosemite, 1861, photograph.

97 Albert Bierstadt, Grizzly Giant Sequoia, Mariposa Grove, c. 1872, oil on paper
mounted on board.

He frequently made use of a stereo camera, which allowed people to

visualize scenes in three dimensions with the use of a stereoscope, and
also developed a very large camera that allowed him to capture images
on mammoth plates and produce photographs of great detail and
depth. His Yosemite photographs were exhibited in New York in 1862
and people ‘around the country were entranced’ by them, while ‘Ralph
Waldo Emerson declared that his images of the massive sequoia, Grizzly
Giant, “made the tree possible” for these photographs provided evi-
dence of its existence’. The photographs encouraged the artist Albert
Bierstadt to travel to Yosemite and paint the trees and landscapes, and
most importantly a set of the prints was owned by Senator John Conness
of California, who ‘laid the foundations for the Yosemite Bill of 1864
to protect the area from development and commercial exploitation’.7
Although Watkins’s later life from the 1890s was clouded by vertigo and
partial blindness and his studio was destroyed in the San Francisco
earthquake of 1906, his photographs were much celebrated during his
lifetime and were enormously influential in forming knowledge and
understanding of the ancient trees and in their protection from logging
and development.

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 Recreation and Conservation

Yosemite was made a state park through a federal grant by Abraham

Lincoln in 1864 and then a National Park in 1890. Frederick Law Olmsted
visited Yosemite and wrote a report to the park commissioners in the mid-
1860s emphasizing ‘the powerful effect of its picturesque scenery, with
its beautiful fields and groves on the valley floor, giant redwoods, and
sublime granite precipices’.8 Donald Worster argues that ‘The purpose
of parks was to stimulate both the mind and emotions in a positive way,
invigorating the whole person.’ They were ‘to advance the cause of demo-
cratic civilization, and in that movement Yosemite became, after Central
Park, the next step forward’.9 While John Muir was living in Yosemite,
Ralph Waldo Emerson visited and agreed to view the sequoias with him.
Muir later recollected that as they ‘rode through the magnificent forests’
he kept calling Emerson’s attention to the sugar pines, quoting his ‘Wood-
notes’ poems, ‘“Come listen what the pine tree saith,” etc.’ Muir tried
to persuade Emerson to camp under the sequoias overnight, but Emerson’s
party felt that ‘he might take cold’ and preferred to stay in the small hotel
with its ‘carpet dust and unknowable reeks’, which Muir felt to be a ‘sad
commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism’.
The following morning they rode to the sequoia grove ‘and stayed
an hour or two, mostly in ordinary tourist fashion’, looked ‘at the biggest
giants, measuring them with a tape line’ and rode ‘through prostrate fire-
bored trunks’. Emerson ‘was alone occasionally, sauntering about as if
under a spell. As we walked through a fine group, he quoted, “There were
giants in those days,” recognizing the antiquity of the race.’¹0 Emerson
was asked to name a tree and ‘I selected a Sequoia Gigantea . . . & named
it Samoset, in memory of the first Indian ally of the Plymouth Colony.’
He gave instructions for Galen Clark, the forest guardian, ‘to procure a
tin plate, & have the inscription painted thereon in the usual form of
the named trees; Samoset 12 May 1871 & paid him its cost. The tree was
a strong healthy one, girth at 2.5 feet from the ground, 50 feet.’¹¹ When
Emerson and his party left the Grove, Muir was left by himself and he
‘sauntered back into the heart of the grove, made a bed of sequoia plumes
and ferns by the side of a stream, gathered a store of firewood, and then
walked about until sundown’. He then ‘built a great fire’ and was ‘lone-
some for the first time in these forests’.¹² Muir left the Yosemite Valley
that year and his later writings, such as God’s First Temples: How Shall
We Preserve Our Forests? (1876), and many others on the formation and
extension of national parks were enormously influential. He became first
president of the Sierra Club, which was established in 1892 to preserve

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forests and other natural features of the Sierra and make them more
accessible to the public.
Muir Woods are on the northern side of Golden Gate Bridge
northwest of San Francisco near Mount Tamalpais and were designated
America’s tenth National Monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
They contain one of the most famous and well-visited groves of old-
growth Sequoia sempervirens and their popularity is enhanced by being
only 8 miles to the north of the city. The area had become increasingly
popular with hunters and hikers from the 1880s and associations such
as the Tamalpais Club were established. Some were ‘organized by Austrian
and German residents who sought to continue a favorite pastime from
their native countries, and who likened the scenery of Mount Tamalpais
to the Alps’. Trails which took in the redwood groves were built and a
scenic railway took tourists to the summit of the mountain. The Tavern
of Tamalpais was at the railway terminus; it has ‘a long porch facing
south, overlooking the Redwood Canyon and the Pacific Coast, with San
Francisco in the distance’. Trails led from the tavern down through the
Sequoia or Redwood Canyon.¹³
The area became increasingly popular for camping holidays, while
hunting continued in the winter months. Many different groups pitched
summer camps, including a Presbyterian Church Sunday School Athletic
League and the San Francisco Bohemian Club. This had been established
in 1872 as an elite social club for gentlemen interested professionally in
art, music and drama and by the 1880s was ‘one of the most prominent
social organizations for wealthy businessmen’ in the city. The club held
an annual summer camp, usually in redwood groves. By the 1890s this
lasted a week and ‘regular entertainment involved games and theatrical
events, often in an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue.’ In 1892 they
camped at the foot of Mount Tamalpais and their theatrical high jinks
included the construction of a full-scale replica of the Great Buddha
of Kamakra for their play ‘Bohemia’s Redwood Temple’ and the hold-
ing of a ‘Ceremony of the Cremation of Care’. The plaster Buddha
collapsed after a year or so, but the road they built to their redwood
camp improved access dramatically and allowed many additional tourists
to visit the trees, picnic and camp overnight. Perhaps influenced by the
Bohemian Club, ‘a group of prominent writers from San Francisco’,
including Jack London, ‘chose Redwood Canyon as the spot to dedicate
a memorial to the one-hundredth anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
birth’. A small bronze plaque with Emerson’s date of birth was attached

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to what was thought to be the largest tree and during the ceremony a
message from John Muir was read.¹4 But while tourism increased public
awareness and enjoyment of the redwoods, there was at the same time an
increasing threat of housing development and logging.
As at Big Basin, it took a committed local man to ensure the preser-
vation of the woodland. William Kent was the son of a wealthy Chicago
meatpacker who had established Kentfield, a house and farm of 850 acres,
in 1871 for use in the summer. The family gradually bought more and
more land and after his father’s death in 1901 William Kent became one
of the largest landowners in the area and made Kentfield his main home.
In 1901 he helped to set up the Tamalpais Forestry Association, which
was mainly concerned with protecting the area from fire. He chaired a
meeting of the association in 1903 which made a formal proposal for the
establishment of a 12,000-acre public park on the mountain, but the
Tamalpais National Park Association established at this meeting was not
able to gain sufficient funds to be effective. Various key conservationists
such as John Muir and Charles Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum
at Boston, visited the Redwood Canyon in 1904, but it was William Kent,
making use of his local business connections, who eventually purchased
the Redwood Grove in 1905 with the intention of opening it as a public
park free of charge. He improved the trails and introduced rustic-style seats,
tables and log cabins derived from the Picturesque style popularized in
America by Andrew Jackson Downing and developed by Olmsted and
Calvert Vaux. An extension of the scenic railway ‘descended into the
woods through a narrow clearing carefully cut through the forest’ but was
kept well away from the big trees. The Redwood Canyon had by 1907
in effect become a public park, which together with the scenic railway to
Mount Tamalpais was one of the most popular tourist sites in the region
(illus. 98, 99)
But a new threat to the redwoods very soon emerged. The earth-
quake of April 1906 caused a great demand for timber and water, and in
1907 the North Coast Water Company, which had the water rights to
Kent’s property, planned to make a reservoir which would flood 47 acres
of the Redwood Canyon floor and destroy many of the biggest trees.
Kent sprang into action and cabled Gifford Pinochet, head of the Forest
Service, asking for the woodland to be accepted as a National Forest.
If the area was made federal land, it would be protected from the activ-
ities of the water company. Kent also contacted the forester Frederick E.
Olmsted, who advised him, however, that National Forest designation

231
98 Redwoods in Muir
Woods, California,
c. 1930.

99 Redwoods
at Killerton,
Devon, 2013.
 Recreation and Conservation

might not preserve the trees, since ‘the Forest Reserves policy of 1905
stressed the importance of “use” in National Forests, which was typically
understood at the time to mean sustainable timber production.’ Olmsted
recommended instead that the redwoods could be identified as of scien-
tific interest and hence could be made a National Monument under the
Antiquities Act of 1906. This Act gave the president power to designate
federal lands National Monuments to preserve resources of prehistoric,
historic or scientific interest. It was decided to name the redwoods the
‘Muir National Monument’, and Olmsted wrote that it was ‘of extraor-
dinary scientific interest because of the primeval and virgin character of
the forest and the age and size of its trees’. He thought that it ‘may some
day be one of the very few vestiges of an ancient giant forest’ and empha-
sized that it was ‘a living National Monument, than which nothing could
be more typically American’.¹5
Very rapidly this plan was put into action. Kent gave the land and
trees to the federal government and in January 1908 Theodore Roosevelt
signed the proclamation making the woods the seventh National
Monument and the first given by a private individual. Roosevelt had
suggested that the woods be called the Kent Woods, but Kent preferred
to celebrate the conservationist John Muir, who was delighted by the
accolade. He wrote to Kent that ‘This is the best tree-lover’s monument
that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world’ and joked:
‘That so fine and divine a thing should have come out of money made
in Chicago! Who wad’a thocht it! Immortal Sequoia life to you.’ Kent
celebrated the redwoods in an article in the Sierra Club Bulletin of June
1908. He admired how from the hillside ‘the forest shows a rich and
varied coloring. The ruddy tinge of the redwood foliage makes sharp
the brighter green of Douglas fir, while softening all is the silver gray of
mountain oak.’ Within the grove the redwoods have ‘thick soft warm
tinted bark’ with ‘delicate foliage’ which ‘sifts the sunlight, not precluded,
but made gentle’. Kent moralizes that the redwoods are ‘brave’ and
‘Burned of all their leaves, they fight for life and bourgeon [sic] out
again. Around the fallen parent grows up a stately group of children.’
He concludes by predicting that an ‘American Wordsworth will one day
sing these noble trees as teaching the ideal of the social and individual
life of the Americans.’¹6

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y National Forest Parks in Britain

The concept of national parks spread widely in the late nineteenth
century and they were designated in Australia (1879), Canada (1885) and
New Zealand (1887), but in a densely settled, intensively cultivated
and heavily industrialized country like Britain it took a long time for
the idea to take hold. There were no large areas of what could be seen
as pristine landscapes that needed to be preserved, and anyway all
the land was owned by someone, and private owners were not at all
keen to see their development rights restricted by conservation desig-
nations. But by 1929 the pressure to improve access to the countryside
was mounting and the Addison Committee was set up to examine the
feasibility of national parks and of improving public recreation in the
countryside.¹7 Many landowners, including the Forestry Commission,
which had been established ten years before in 1919, were worried about
the effects of untrammelled public access. The Forestry Commission
noted the potential conflict between increased public access and the
preservation of flora and fauna. It was felt, for example, that ‘the erec-
tion of Hutment camps around the Forest of Dean might tend to
destroy the amenities of the neighbourhood and the process might
be completed by ill-disciplined visitors, charabanc parties etc.’ while ‘the
institution of a camp for children might imperil a Bird Sanctuary, and
so on.’¹8 This internal Forestry Commission mimeograph went on to
report Lord Bledisloe’s ideas for national parks, ‘where people of all
walks of life can enjoy under proper protection and with reasonable
comfort attractive natural surroundings’. Bledisloe, an influential
landowner and agricultural reformer who became Governor General
of New Zealand in 1935, also proposed that the parks should include
‘permanent camps provided with water and sanitation, refreshment and
entertainment, bungalows, car parks, and, if possible, open air swim-
ming baths, bowling greens, tennis courts etc.’ This seems very distant
indeed from the idea of national parks espoused by John Muir at
Yosemite.
The National Parks Committee reported in 1931 and supported the
idea of national parks, but no mechanism for their establishment was
introduced. The idea continued to be debated, however, and in 1934
Peter Thomsen, in a paper to the British Association for the Advancement
of Science at Aberdeen, suggested that there should be a threefold
approach to establishing national parks. First, areas that were to become

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national parks should be scheduled and in those areas ‘development’

should be ‘vetoed’. This was to include the prohibition of ‘the cutting
of timber, especially old timber’. Second, limited access in the form
of ‘rest houses’ and ‘camp sites’ should be established; and finally, the
government would arrange ‘full possession upon purchase’ of the
national parks. Thomsen’s ideas were similar to those put in practice at
Yosemite and other American national parks. A copy of Thomsen’s paper
was read by Sir George Courthope, who sent a copy to Sir Roy Robinson,
chairman (1932–52) of the Forestry Commission, in October 1934,
noting ‘Have you seen the enclosed effusion about National Parks? I
am sure that you agree that wild schemes of this kind must be nipped
in the bud. With this end in view, do you think it would be a good thing
to push forward your proposals for recreational facilities in connexion
with our forests?¹9 George Loyd Courthope (1877–1955) was an influ-
ential landowner and spoke for the Forestry Commissioners in Parliament.
His comments demonstrate the close organizational links between
private landowners and the Commission, and also show the extent to
which both the state-run Commission and private landowners felt
threatened by the possible establishment of national parks, which could
limit large-scale afforestation and inhibit the management of estab-
lished woodland for commercial purposes. The Forestry Commissioners
were not opposed to the idea of public access, but they and the land-
owners who supported them were very much opposed to the formation
of national parks run by bodies that would interfere with traditional land
management and imperil large-scale afforestation of moorland.²0
Almost immediately after Sir George Courthope’s suggestion about
‘pushing forward’ with ‘recreational facilities’, the Forestry Commissioners
established a National Forest Park Committee ‘to advise how the surplus
and unplantable land’ on Forestry Commission property in Argyll might
be ‘put to a use of a public character’. Their 1935 report described how
discussions had been held with youth hostelling and other associations
and societies and they felt that the hundred square miles of largely
unplantable moorland in Argyll was ideal for ‘the rambler, whose main
object is to get into the country and away from motor traffic’. Respon-
sible organizations such as the Scottish Association of Boys’ Clubs
and the Camping Club of Great Britain would enforce by-laws so that
‘decent behaviour’ could be encouraged and it was noted that the risk
of damage could be reduced by the careful design of paths, which should
‘pass to the uplands through the afforested lands by easy gradients.

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This would have the effect of keeping people from trespassing on or

causing damage to plantations.’ The report cautiously recommended
the establishment of a National Forest Park and that the government
should provide £5,000 for this purpose, although ‘campers should in
every case be charged a fee to cover the expenses of the services provided.’
The wilderness quality of the Argyll Forest Park was stressed and the
designation was certainly seen as experimental. It was ‘difficult to esti-
mate how many people could make use of the area . . . for recreation,
without destroying the sense of remoteness and solitude which is its
chief attraction’ and the committee rather nervously recommended that
‘the Commissioners should proceed cautiously and refrain from draw-
ing undue public attention to what they are doing’ but it did hope that
‘experience gained here should be of use in other areas belonging to
the Commission.’ The Committee was keen to establish that the term
National Forest Park was ‘deliberately intended to denote something
different from a National Park as described in the Report of the National
Park Committee’ of 1931.²¹
Sir Roy Robinson argued in 1936 that although the Forestry
Commissioners were ‘thoroughly sympathetic to the idea underlying
National Parks in general’ they considered that ‘proposals to sterilise
large tracts of country and especially . . . to ban plantations on suit-
able ground in National Parks should be scrutinised very carefully.’ He
thought that Britain was too small for the large national parks found in
‘America and the newer countries generally’ and defended afforesta-
tion by asserting that plantations might well be an asset in ‘wild country’,
providing ‘shelter for the wayfarer’ as well as ‘constituting in times of
emergency an essential raw material’. He described the Argyll National
Forest Park as a potential forerunner of a different model of public access
and as ‘something of an experiment’. The Commissioners knew from
‘their management of the New Forest, which is the nearest approach to
a National Park that we have, what are the difficulties in reconciling the
protection of forests with access for the public’, but they believed that
‘with care the two can be reconciled.’ Robinson saw forest parks as a
‘by-product’ of the Forestry Commission’s primary function of tim-
ber production, but a by-product ‘which it may well pay the country
to develop’. The Commission already held 333,000 acres of unplantable
land and was ‘constantly acquiring land in various parts of Great Britain’,
and if Parliament thought it desirable it could focus more on purchasing
land suitable for national forest park purposes.²²

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The national park movement was gaining strength in the late 1930s.
A Joint Standing Committee for National Parks was established in 1936
and soon became a very effective organization with broad-based sup-
port from the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Friends
of the Lake District and the Ramblers’ Association. But the Forestry
Commission was cleverly positioning itself to scupper the threat posed
by the proposed national parks to its freedom to afforest moorlands. In
the debate on national parks in the House of Commons of December
1936, the main government speaker, R. S. Hudson, parliamentary sec-
retary to the Ministry of Health, saw the Forestry Commission’s Argyll
National Forest Park as ‘a useful way out’ of the problem of establishing
‘national reserves’. Moreover he used the existence of the Argyll National
Forest Park as a means of side-stepping the issue of establishing a new
authority to oversee the formation of national parks. The government’s
view continued to be that national parks or reserves should be the res-
ponsibility of local authorities and not central government. Sir George
Courthope’s scheme to nip the idea of national parks in the bud had
succeeded, at least in the short term.²³ Of course, national parks did
eventually come into existence after the war with the National Parks
and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, but a positive outcome of
the Forestry Commission’s 1930s skirmish with the idea was that it
was decided in 1937 to establish a Snowdonia National Forest Park,
and the next year (1938) a national forest park was proposed for the
Forest of Dean.

y National Forest Park Guides

A series of seven substantial illustrated national forest park guidebooks
was produced by the Forestry Commission. The first was published in
1938 for the Argyll National Forest Park and after the war came one for
the Forest of Dean (1947) closely followed by that for Snowdonia (1948).
They continued to be published until the 1970s. The idea of the book-
lets was raised at the second meeting of the National Forest Parks Advisory
Committee (England and Wales) on 17 July 1939, and although there
was little discussion concerning the level of popularity of the guides,
there was general agreement that the booklets should be informative and
educational. Each had a similar format, with cultural chapters on the
history and antiquities of the area and on literary associations; topog-
raphical chapters on geology, mountains and rivers; naturalist chapters

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on plant life, mammals, birds and insects; and a chapter dealing with
forestry and woodland management. Finally there are maps showing the
extent of the park and the footpaths and information about camping
facilities. Most of the guides, other than the first, were edited by Herbert
Edlin, who was Publications Officer for the Forestry Commission from
1947 and a prolific author. His British Woodland Trees of 1944, published
by Batsford, was enormously successful and was soon followed by Forestry
and Woodland Life (1947), Woodland Crafts in Britain (1948) and many
other books.²4 Edlin argued that the forest parks had an advantage over
national parks in that they were wholly owned by the state, whereas
national parks were privately owned.²5
The forest parks and the guides that were produced so carefully
to inform and educate the public were an attempt by the Forestry
Commission to interest the public in a reformed and modernized forestry
that was to transform the uplands of Britain. In 1950 the Commissioners
worried that while they had ‘consistently striven to keep the public in-
formed of their objectives and of the progress of their forest operations,
they have found it no easy matter to get the facts across to the man in the
street’.²6 The guides were part of a strategy that also included special
forestry broadcasts on the bbc, the development of educational material
for schools and the display of scale models of the Snowdonia National
Forest Park alongside scale models of modern forestry practice at the
Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951.²7
How was recreation to be encouraged and managed in these new
forest parks? The guides celebrate the parks as places for the efficient
production of timber using the most modern methods, yet also as
containing large remnants of wilderness for the hiker. The parks are
represented as habitats for flora and fauna for the serious naturalist
and delightful and diverse landscapes for the casual visitor. In some
ways the guides fell between two stools: they were too dry or scholarly
for the casual visitor and not detailed enough for the serious walker.
There was a tension between the need for the Forestry Commission to
retain very close control of the public on Commission land and yet at
the same time promote the idea of the forest as a wilderness to be freely
explored by a public who understood the workings of the countryside.
There was concern that access was not easily reconcilable with the
establishment and maintenance of young plantations of trees: fences
could be damaged, trees stolen or uprooted and the risk of fire increased.
But it was also agreed that the public should be allowed to roam fairly

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freely and not cajoled into following prescribed routes and paths. The
Commissioners proposed at Argyll Forest Park in 1935 that feasible
routes should be marked ‘by occasional cairns or whitened stones, or
distinctive waysigns or symbols’.²8
People were to be enticed to the new forest parks by the provision of
bureaucratically delineated types of camping facility. At the Forest of
Dean in 1938 it was envisaged that the park would provide three types
for visitors: ‘Huts and chalets, with dining and recreation hut and the pro-
vision of meals’; ‘Tents to be supplied at a reasonable charge, campers to
provide their own meals’ and ‘Sites for visitors carrying their own equip-
ment and providing their own meals’. But the Commission was reluctant
to provide any accommodation in the forest parks if, as in the case of
Snowdonia, it was felt that there was enough private accommodation
available already in the form of youth hostels, hotels and bed and break-
fast facilities. Different parks had rather different priorities. In contrast to
the Argyll Forest Park, day trippers were encouraged at the Forest of Dean
by providing ‘pull-ins’ for motorists, and people were to be encouraged
away from the beaten track and out into the woods by the construction
of footpaths. It was recognized that the woods along the Wye Valley

are on hilly land and the paths are rough and, generally
speaking, the public do not wander far into them . . . These
valleys, beautiful in themselves, lead to high ground with an
elevation of as much as 1,000 feet and we think that the public
will, in the course of time, wish to explore these places and
that consequently improved access will be necessary.

Yet in spite of the fine words, it is clear that the Forestry Commission was
very reluctant to commit itself to any but the most minimal of facilities.
This approach could be justified both on the grounds of cost, because of
the stringencies of post-war austerity, and as a way of limiting the environ-
mental intrusion of tourist facilities.²9
By the early 1960s the Forestry Commission’s access policy and
particularly its guidebook literature were to come in for severe criticism.
A mismatch was identified between ‘the interests of the forest manager,
which commonly may lean towards natural history’ and that of the
general public, and it was noted that the ‘lengthy and descriptive’
guides with their ‘botanical, zoological and archaeological’ content
were only ‘absorbingly interesting’ for ‘the fairly small proportion of

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walking-holiday visitors’, while for the majority of visitors who were ‘car
driving, day-visiting family parties’ they ‘make an insignificant impact’.³0
The guides did have a role, however, in popularizing coniferous aesthet-
ics and public access to the Forestry Commission’s estate. One of the
difficulties Edlin had in publicizing forest parks was that the name con-
jured up so many contrasting meanings: hunting forests; commercial
timber production; freedom to roam; and controlled access. Moreover
although some of the forest parks, especially the Forest of Dean, had
well-established areas of broadleaved woodland, the majority consisted
largely of thousands of acres of young conifers, which most people did
not find immediately attractive. In his review of 50 years of national
forest parks, Edlin wrote of Kielder Forest in Northumberland that
‘Spruce woods on soggy peat, stretching over rounded hills that are often
misty or cloud-capped, are not ideal for outdoor enjoyment; and the
fact that they go on for further than anyone can walk is more daunting
than encouraging.’³¹
The massive use of coniferous trees by the Forestry Commission
resulted in new large-scale landscapes for which there was little prece-
dent. William Wordsworth in 1835 was famously critical of the effect
of larch plantations on the landscape of the Lake District:

a moment’s thought will show that, if ten thousand of this

spiky tree, the larch, are stuck in at once upon the side of a
hill, they can grow up into nothing but deformity; that, while
they are suffered to stand, we shall look in vain for any of
those appearances which are the chief sources of beauty in
a natural wood.³²

Between 1920 and 1938 the area of land under forest crops held by the
Forestry Commission increased from 1,393,000 to 400,712,000 acres.
The great bulk of this afforestation was coniferous and Miles Hadfield
notes that during the interwar period ‘a sense of urgency and enthu-
siasm unusual in any government-controlled body inevitably led to
many mistakes and plantings that were both unsightly and unsatisfac-
tory, both by the Commission and the landowners it assisted.’³³ The
Forestry Commission’s interwar afforestation of open moorland and
heath resulted in industrial, modern, regular, efficient and utilitarian
landscapes that soon began to be widely criticized. The two main argu-
ments against these industrial-scale landscapes were that there was a

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loss of public access over open moorland which had been afforested and
that there was a change from a ‘wilderness’ landscape to one that was
obviously managed and productive. The pre-war controversy over
afforestation reached a peak with proposals to afforest parts of the
Lake District. It was claimed that ‘public access to the open fells is en-
dangered’ and that the proposals valued ‘the profits of commercial
timber more than health and beauty’. The Forestry Commissioners
eventually reached a compromise with the Council for the Preservation
of Rural England (cpre) and undertook not to plant up the central
section of the Lake District.³4
The visual intrusion of coniferous plantations was never far from the
thoughts of Forestry Commission publicity. As late as 1969, well over 30
years after the Lake District controversy, Edlin was pleased to observe that
many visitors enjoyed walking in the plantations of Snowdonia, whose

forests are surrounded by the grandest mountains of England

and Wales, and stand close to long sandy beaches, yet on
every fine summer’s day they are filled with visitors who
could go elsewhere, but prefer to seek the peaceful fascinations
of growing timber crops. The prophesies of critics who declared
that people would shun the ‘dark, dreary, dismal conifers’ have
been confounded.

The national forest park guides, therefore, had the difficult job of
encouraging public appreciation of huge new afforestation schemes.
This was particularly difficult where there were few older plantations.
At Gwydyr Forest in Snowdonia the woods ‘clothe the side of steep
valleys and extend over rugged foothills studded with still lakes. The
whole has been steadily afforested, during the ensuing half century, with
plantations of larch, pine, spruce and Douglas fir that now look entirely
natural’. But this was not a common state of affairs in the 1950s, when
most Forestry Commission plantations remained young and often
monotonously featureless.³5
One of the ways Edlin dealt with this in the guides was in the very
careful choice of illustrations. These included photographs but also line
drawings and most characteristically a series of woodcuts and wood
engravings. By the mid-1950s all the guides had cover illustrations by
George Mackley, who had been taught by Noel Rooke, one of the ‘chief
originators of the modern movement of wood-engraving’, who helped to

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

‘reinstate the “white line” technique that Thomas Bewick and William
Blake had developed some hundred years earlier’.³6 Given the hostility
experienced by the Forestry Commission over the visual qualities of its
young plantations and the absence of mature plantations to photograph,
it is perhaps not surprising that it should resort to ‘artistic impressions’
of mature forested land in order to sell the forest parks to visitors. But
this was an attempt not only to ameliorate the landscape of commercial
forestry, but to popularize an alternative large-scale coniferous aesthetic,
as in the Argyll Forest Park, where a sense of ‘forest’ was created by
‘thousands of acres of timber crops’.
‘In the Sprucewoods’ is the frontispiece to the forest guide to the
Border Park, the seventh forest park, which had been opened in 1955 and
included the vast Kielder Forest. This guide was edited by the botanist
Professor John Walton, who emphasized that the Border Park was
notable for containing ‘the largest planted forest in Britain’, which would
‘supply the nation with a substantial source of timber’ and was planted
on ‘hill land of low agricultural value which supported but few grazing
animals’. The afforestation had led ‘to an increase in the population of
the district, an increase which will be progressive as the forests mature
and local crafts and industries relating to forestry develop’. He foresaw
this ‘sparsely populated land developing into an active and prosperous
rural area’.³7 Only a few years were to pass before this engaging and
convincing argument for afforestation was shown to be spurious, as
the employment generated by forestry started to fall dramatically. The
predominant tree species planted in these forests was the Sitka spruce
(Picea sitchensis), which grows naturally in the coastal regions from
Alaska down to northern California. It was first recorded by Archibald
Menzies at Pujet Sound in 1787 and seed was sent to the Horticultural
Society of London by David Douglas in 1831. In Britain it was recog-
nized that it had the advantage of growing well on poor upland soils
and a ‘period of major afforestation occurred from 1950 until the late
1980s’, which resulted in the area of Sitka spruce increasing from
67,000 ha (165,560 acres) in 1947 to 692,000 ha (1,710,000 acres) in
2007.³8 One of the jobs of the Border Park guide was to accommodate
this massive change in the eyes of the general public.
George Mackley’s In the Sprucewoods is a celebration of coniferous
forestry. The woodcut is a particularly appropriate means of represent-
ing living timber and this is emphasized by the specification in this guide
that this was a ‘boxwood engraving’. The adoption of woodcuts in

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100 George Mackley, In the Sprucewoods, 1958, wood engraving.

these guides helped to naturalize the ‘exotic’ and ‘alien’ forests of Sitka
spruce. The picture shows a range of different aged stands surrounding
a stone farmstead and mill besides a rustic arched bridge. The detail of
the woodcut emphasizes the textural variety of the scene in a conven-
tionally Picturesque formulation. There are a few broadleaved trees

243
101 George Mackley, cover for Border National Forest Park Guide (1958)
wood engraving.
 Recreation and Conservation

growing behind the buildings, but the image is dominated by vigorous

and rapidly growing conifers whose darkness threatens to overpower the
lightly coloured buildings. The young plantation on the hill indicates
a landscape newly transformed by afforestation, with a small patch of
walled pasture remaining. Mackley’s wood engraving for the cover is of
a view through a working forest across to afforested hills and moorland.
Some Sitka spruce have already been felled and are being moved by
horses and stacked for removal. The representation of the horses and
the forester with an axe portray methods of working that were very
rapidly to disappear with mechanization. The image became anachro-
nistic within five to ten years, but we can see it as a brave attempt to
show in a most advantageous light a landscape which Edlin in his more
reflective moments could only see as less than attractive for the visitor.
But the guides were also a way of envisaging the future and Edlin thought
that it was ‘fair to ask the acutely aesthetic minded not to take the short
view, but to look ahead to the mature forests of future years, to a forest
industry and the busy and increasing community of forest workers who
have already begun to find a home and livelihood within afforested area’.
This, he argued, could be combined with the benefits to the ‘welfare of
the generality of the people of Britain’, who would be able to ‘find healthy
recreation in and about the forest and in the National Forest Parks on
which a start has been made, as the peoples of other nations are finding
it in theirs’.³9
The guides fit into a broader tradition of the development of
educated access to the countryside. In the twentieth century there was
a growing interest among many adults in the study of botany, orni-
thology and general natural history, but there was concern about the
behaviour of those people visiting the countryside and how they could
learn about nature and understand how to comport themselves in a
‘proper’ manner. The forest guides combined frequent calls to avoid
damage to fences and farm crops, and to guard against accidentally
causing fires, which could destroy young plantations, with specialist
chapters on botany, ornithology and local antiquities and history.
They exemplify the trend towards educated access which was to be
strengthened in the 1960s with the spread in Britain of the idea of
the nature trail.
The idea of a trail along which individuals could walk and learn
about nature from labels, either by themselves or with a guide, was
developed in the 1920s by the entomologist Frank Lutz, who worked

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at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.40 Forty acres

of woodland and meadow in the Ramapo Mountains near Tuxedo, New
York, had been granted to the Entomological Department of the
Museum of Natural History by the Interstate Palisades Park and W. A.
Harriman. This was an area where ‘excursion steamers brought thousands
of New Yorkers up the Hudson River’, many of which were ‘children and
young people who lived and worked in the city’.4¹ A station for the study
of insects was established in 1925 and in the first season an ‘experiment
in teaching about nature in general’ was undertaken.4² Two nature trails
were set out, a training trail and a testing trail: plants were labelled and
stories told. The experiment was written up and published the follow-
ing year and was seen as very successful; concerns over damage from
visitors were unfounded. Lutz argued that ‘National and State parks
are particularly good fields for Nature Trails’ and that the ‘the very best
way for making a Nature Trail is . . . to have as many as possible of those
whom you wish to teach help you to make it.’4³ It was best to ‘teach
about nature where nature is’ rather than in museums. The publication
of the experiment popularized the idea of nature trails; many were estab-
lished in national parks and in 1930 ‘much interest’ was ‘shown in the
new nature trails at Yosemite National Park’.44 The nature trail, like
the national park, was an idea that soon spread to Britain and wood-
land nature trails became commonplace from the 1960s onwards.45 By
the end of the twentieth century many woods and forests in Britain were
celebrated and valued more as sites of recreation and conservation
than as places for timber production.

246
 m
ten
Ligurian Semi-natural
Woodland

T
here has been a remarkable increase in woodland in many
parts of the Italian Apennines since the end of the nineteenth
century. If one climbs to one of the many viewpoints, as at Costa
dei Ghiffi (illus. 102), one looks over a lush, arboreal landscape only
occasionally interrupted by an outcrop of rock, church tower or patch
of farmed land. Only 100 years ago such a scene would have been
characterized by many extensive, open, grazed areas and heavily culti-
vated agricultural terraces producing crops of potatoes, maize and
vegetables.¹ This dramatic change has been brought about by a number
of factors, amongst the most important of which is very extensive rural
depopulation, which has left small towns and villages partially mori-
bund and resulted in the abandonment of many hamlets and isolated
farms. Linked to this has been the collapse of the traditional trans-
humance systems used to facilitate the grazing of most upland areas. The
massive reduction in agricultural and pastoral pressures has allowed
very significant areas of naturally regenerated woodland to develop.
Detailed case studies from the upper Val di Vara in eastern Liguria
show the complicated relationship between the decline of traditional
practices and techniques and the new woodland. Four important issues
are the decline of traditional shredding of trees for the production of
leaf fodder; the regeneration of trees within former wood pastures;
the growth of secondary woodland on abandoned agricultural terraces;
and the loss of traditional chestnut cultivation and the neglect of chest-
nut groves and orchards. The vast new areas of Ligurian semi-natural
woodland form a sort of unplanned experiment in which the advantages
and disadvantages of allowing the rewilding of landscapes can be
considered.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

102 Costa dei Ghiffi, 2014.

y Leaf fodder in the Val di Vara

In the crypt of the abbey church at Bobbio there is a fascinating mosaic
calendar showing the different months of the year dated to the second
half of the twelfth century. The image for November shows a man
beating an oak tree to knock down acorns for two pigs that are rooting
around the base of the tree. The form of the tree, in this area most likely
the Turkey oak (Quercus cerris), indicates that it has been pollarded
several times in the past. Moreover, the stubs around the trunk indi-
cate that the tree has had lateral branches cut off, as in the process of
shredding. This is the earliest representation we have of a shredded and
pollarded oak tree in the Ligurian Apennines and the fact that this
practice was chosen to symbolize farming activity for November is an
indication of its prevalence and importance. Bobbio Abbey was founded
in 614 by the Irish monk St Columbanus and eventually became one of
the most important landowners in northern Italy. A map of 1564 that
was used as evidence in a border dispute between Bobbio Abbey and the
village of Coli in the Trebbia Valley provides another indication of the
importance of trees as sources of fodder.² This shows oak trees which have
been shredded; they are drawn on the map as individual trees rather
than as woodland. Here we have an example of what Diego Moreno and
Roberta Cevasco have identified as an agro-sylvo-pastoral system for

248
 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

leaf-fodder production. Sometimes small patches of earth were cultivated

and cereals sown between the trees in an intensive system called terre
alberate. Today there is still evidence of these practices on a small scale
in remote and isolated Apennine valleys.
There was a strong link between different types of sheep keeping
and different types of leaf fodder production. Large flocks of sheep and
goats that were kept in olive grove areas around Levanto and Chiavari
on the coast in the winter were moved to high Apennine pastures in
the summer. But flocks of sheep were also kept by local people in the
Apennines all year round, in buildings, and a distinction was made
between these local flocks (pecore terriere) and the transhumant flocks
(pecore forestiere) in the taxation records. The ‘peasant-shepherds’ in the
hamlets and villages around Varese paid the landowners cash or shared
the cheese produced.³
Since at least the mid-sixteenth century it was common for trans-
humant shepherds to feed their flocks with leaves directly from branches

103 Mosaic
depicting
November in
the crypt of the
Abbey of San
Colombano,
Bobbio,
12th century.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

cut from trees growing in areas of common woodland during the

summer. Leaves were also cut in the summer and dried to make fodder
that was used as a supplement for other fodder for sheep that were
housed in buildings in mountain villages over the winter. Each of the
parishes in Varese had two woodwards (campari) who controlled the
activities of the peasants and shepherds, and legal records show that there
were disputes between private landowners and their neighbours and
commoners over the effects of cutting fresh branches and the damage
caused by browsing sheep and goats. In the parish of Caranza precise
laws over leaf fodder production in common woodland were made to
control the pressure of both transhumant flocks and stabled animals.
Leaf fodder was reserved specifically for the stabled flocks kept by local
villagers and its use by transhumant flocks was expressly forbidden.
In the nineteenth century Turkey oak woodlands were normally
‘trimmed for browse in summer on a three- or four-year cycle’, and trees
in woodland, woodland pastures and isolated trees were regularly
managed in this way. A forest inventory of 1820 identified 21 local types
of managed woodland or lands bearing trees, all of which were grazed,
and sixteen types were managed for the production of leaf fodder. Even
in their winter quarters on the Riviera ‘an arboreous culture provided
leaves for sheep’: in the autumn fresh leaves from vines and fig orchards
were collected by hand and sold for cash as fodder for sheep well into
the nineteenth century. At Moneglia, for example, plantations of fig
trees on the slopes facing the sea still existed in 1820 and provided a
source of food for around 3,000 sheep. Moreover in the winter, the
prunings of leaves from olive trees ‘provided a considerable amount of
green fodder’.4
The transhumance system broke down in the late nineteenth century,
but some of the traditional practices were kept up by local farmers who
had their own flocks, the successors to those who had held pecore terriere
in the Middle Ages. A photograph from the late nineteenth century of
the small town of Varese Ligure captures in the background some stripped
oak trees which grow along an ancient pathway leading from the church
through the hillside terraces. These trees were stripped until the early
1990s and even today the trees show evidence of pollarding in the
form of the multiple branches growing from the trunk. A photograph
taken in 1997 shows an oak tree where the lower branches have been cut
and the branches have regrown and nearby one of the characteristic
willow pollards that are regularly cut to provide ties for vines. It is clear

250
104 Panorama of Varese Ligure, a photograph of c. 1890.

105 Shredded oak

tree, Varese Ligure,
2008.
 Trees, Woods and Forests

106 Shredded oak and pollarded willow, Varese Ligure, 1997.

that the terraces had been fairly recently abandoned, and indeed in 2010
both these trees were cleared away with the surrounding terraces to make
a new large field for growing sainfoin for cattle fodder.
In 2008 we interviewed two farmers in the village of Teviggio, Val
di Vara, where some recently shredded trees had been spotted to try
and find out why trees were still shredded and to document the history
of the methods used. Both farmers were able to point to particular tree
species and give a detailed account of changes in the way they were
utilized over the last 50 years or so. Marco had been born in 1940 and
had inherited his farm and farmed it all his life. He described how the
different tree species could be used for different, sometimes very specific
purposes. Alder trees (Alnus glutinosa), for example, were shredded
until about twenty years ago and the leaves were used to fertilize the
soil. He recognized that manna ash trees (Fraxinus ornus) produced the
best leaves for fodder but noted that there were very few growing on
his farm. Another commonly shredded tree for fodder was the hop
hornbeam (Ostrya carpinifolia) and this had been used frequently in
the past.
However, the main species used at Teviggio were Turkey oak and
Sessile oak (Quercus petraea), because they were very common in the
area, much more so than ash or hop hornbeam. The two species of
oak were intermixed in the woodland and were treated in the same

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

way. The leaves were cut in August, when it was felt that the leaves were
in the best condition, and always at the full moon. This was thought
to prevent the rotting of the fodder leaves. Short branches were cut
with fresh leaves that were dried for two or three days. The trees were
shredded when their branches were longer than 1 metre (31⁄4 feet). Marco
remembered that he shredded trees in group of about twenty trees as
it was ‘harder to shred scattered trees’. Generally this farmer shredded
trees on a two-year cycle: ‘I cut different trees in different years. In the
third year I went back to the trees which were shredded in the first
year.’ The advantage of cutting every two years was that if you left it
any longer the ‘branch was too hard to cut’. The tool used to cut the
branches was a little axe called a piccozzo; this had ‘always been used’.
The leaves were stored in fuggia, that is, a pile of between 150 and
200 branches with dried leaves that were placed on a platform raised
above the ground so that the leaves did not get damp. On this farm two
fuggia were needed to store all the bundles. The dried leaves were moved
from fuggia in outlying woods to the cattle stores by mule, and this
farmer was considered lucky by his neighbours to have a mule to under-
take this work. The leaves were fed to the stock by tying a bundle of dried
leaves to the wall of the stall and the animals used the leaves to supple-
ment their feed from grass hay. Any remaining twigs and branches in the
bundle, which by winter had dried out entirely, were used to heat bread
ovens, representing a very efficient dual use of the collected branches.
The only green tree in the winter was Erica arborea, and this was used as
winter feed for cattle.
The tops of pollarded trees were also used for fodder, and pollard-
ing produced a lot of useful sprouts. The Forestry Authority did not
allow Marco to cut the tops of trees, but, even so, he still cut the tops
of some, leaving a few branches to avoid getting into trouble, although
he had ‘been fined several times which is why he left a few of the top
branches’. He admitted that farmers and foresters have different ideas
about trees, the farmers being interested in the production of fodder
and the authority wanting trees to be tall and beautiful. He noted, ‘I
understand why the law is in place to produce good timber but I needed
to shred the trees to feed my animals.’ A local forestry official pointed
out that shredding of trees has been illegal since the early nineteenth
century. However, shredding was common until 40 or 50 years ago,
and he knew that a few farmers still shredded trees occasionally, but
‘ignored it’.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

The second farmer, Enrico, came from a farming family and had
inherited his farm, although for many years he had worked away from
the farm. He had been born in 1944 and remembered that until the
1950s shredding was commonplace. His uncle cultivated the farm for
maize, potatoes and hay until 1962, when the land was abandoned. This
farmer moved back to the farm in 1994, after it had been abandoned
for 30 years. He remembered that the leaves of ash, oaks and chestnut
were used for fodder. His testimony agreed largely with Marco in that
the leaves were always cut with the old moon, otherwise they would rot,
and that leaves were cut on a two-year cycle. He also stated that both
Turkey and sessile oaks were used for fodder, but thought that cattle
preferred the leaves of sessile oak, which is why they are the largest
surviving shredded trees in the area. He provided more information on
the technique of shredding. You would climb to the top of the tree and
start there, cutting off branches as you came down. One or two branches
were left uncut at the top ‘to keep the tree alive’. The branches were cut
a few inches away from the trunk to ensure that there was future growth
and prevent the branch from becoming dormant. The two main tools
used were the piccozzo (as with Marco) and the roncola, which he pre-
ferred as ‘it had a short handle which made it easier to cut quickly.’
The branches were left on the ground near the tree to dry and
divided into those suitable for fodder and firewood. It took three or
four days for the leaves to dry, ready to be stored, and the branches were
turned twice a day as for hay. Enrico thought that the best-quality leaves
were those that had dried in the shade rather than in full sun. There was
a gender division in the work here, with the men cutting the branches
off the trees and sorting the larger branches for firewood, whereas the
women dealt with the leaves for fodder and turned them to dry. When
dried, the fodder branches were tied together with supple stems of chest-
nut called struppelli, which were twisted apart from one end and wrapped
around the bundle to hold it together. The bundles were then stored
either in a barn near where the animals were kept or in a fuggia made
in the woodland. Bundles were taken to feed the animals as and when
needed. The last time he remembered shredding a tree in the traditional
way was in 1975. He no longer shreds because he is now ‘richer and the
practice was too much hard work’. Nowadays he prefers to buy in feed
for his cattle.
Changes in the farming economy, the introduction of new breeds
of cattle with higher milk yields and different feeding requirements and

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

the lack of local labour mean that shredding is now a very rare survival.
In Teviggio in 1950 there were seven farms that had 100 cows altogether;
now the same amount of land has 25 cattle. The old cows produced 5 litres
of milk per day; the current cows produce 30 litres of milk. The new cows
only eat hay fodder, in addition to some grazing and concentrates. Com-
prehensive shredding stopped in about 1960 and nowadays, the principal
use of wood is firewood. Marco coppices quite a lot of this, both for the
wood produced and to increase the amount of land useful for grazing.
In the past the woodland areas were grazed by domestic animals and
patches of land were cultivated for potatoes, maize and wheat. In addi-
tion some patches of rye were sown until around 1950. Branches of
Castanea sativa were used as brooms to sweep aside unwanted branches
and leaves of Turkey oak; this allowed the ground area to be more easily
grazed. Another reason for managing the woodland today is to improve
the quality and quantity of the porcini and other mushrooms that grow
in the Turkey-oak woodland. The idea is to manage the oak to promote
its growth and increase the amount of funghi di cerro. The lower branches
are cut to allow more sunlight to reach the herb layer. The value of the
mushrooms is indicated by the need now to fence these woodlands
against the roads so that people are discouraged from stealing them. They
have a high value and some eventually reach the American market.

y Woodland succession in oak-wood pastures

Canavadigiolo is the name of a farm in the parish of Teviggio which,
like most parishes within the Alta Val di Vara, has experienced very
considerable population loss over the last 100 years. Archival evidence
from the Archivio de Paoli held by the Museo Contadino at Cassego
indicates that Canavadigiolo, like several of the adjoining farms, had
once been part of the Porciorasco estate. Records from the 1820s and
’30s indicate that the main products of the farm included wheat, beans,
chestnuts, grapes and cheese.5 Oral history and observation indicates
that there had been considerable investment in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in the construction of farm houses, buildings and
water-supply channels. The terraces at Canavadigiolo were used to grow
vines in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The archives list
the weight of grapes owed by tenants of Canavadigiolo to the estate
from 1798 to 1863.6 After that date there are no records, but in 2003
there was clear field evidence of remnant old vines surviving, so it is

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probable that vine production continued on the farm at a small scale

through most of the twentieth century. The owner informed us that the
farm had been gradually abandoned from the 1960s onwards. Until
1952 the chestnut woodland had been partially irrigated from water
channels. The land had been worked and cultivated until 1962 and the
oak trees continued to be shredded through the 1960s, with the last trees
shredded in 1972. Some minor management may have taken place in the
1970s, but by the late 1970s the land was completely abandoned until
the owner started working the farm again in 1997.
The area is generally heavily wooded with some abandoned terraces
and several completely abandoned farms. I had examined with Diego
Moreno in March 2002 an area of what appeared to be abandoned wood
pasture, and in particular a stand of Turkey oak that had been shredded
at some time in the past. The owner told us that many of the trees had
been cut for fodder on a regular basis. A preliminary examination showed
that many of the trees were hollow and probably rather older than
their appearance suggested. We cored ten trees and the number of rings
counted varied from 32 to 220+ years. Two of the trees had high ring
counts, indicating that they were much older than had been estimated
by evidence from oral history. One tree showed several periods of very
narrow ring growth over 20- to 25-year periods, which could be associ-
ated with regular pollarding or lopping over a 200-year period. Following
the success of this trial 50 trees were cored in the summer of 2002.7 The
number of rings varied from 20 to 240. Many of these trees were hollow
and so these are minimum ages for the trees. These results indicate that
shredded Turkey oaks have been an important part of the vegetation of
the site for over 200 years and probably much longer.
Since the area was abandoned in the 1970s many young saplings and
shrubs had spread into the formerly open areas between the trees. We
surveyed this vegetation in 2008 and found that overall, hop hornbeam
and Turkey oak were ubiquitous while juniper, manna ash and hawthorn
had a more localized distribution. The average age of the trees and
shrubs sampled was seventeen years, the hop hornbeam averaged 23 years
and the Turkey oak nineteen years. Overall the survey showed that
there was fairly rapid regeneration of trees and shrubs following the
abandonment of the farm in the 1970s. The oral history evidence and
vegetation evidence fit together well, and suggest that until the 1950s
this area consisted of an area of standard Turkey oak and chestnut trees
that were cropped for leaves, nuts and possibly acorns. The details of

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

the management of the pasture under the trees remain unclear. There
was some fragmentary evidence of small pocket terraces around some
of the older trees, which will have helped to maintain the productivity
for chestnuts. It is possible that some areas may have been cultivated on
a temporary basis for grain in the nineteenth century and earlier.
With the gradual reduction in management in the 1960s and almost
complete cessation of grazing in the 1970s, the natural regeneration of
species such as tree heather, juniper, hop hornbeam and manna ash was
able to take place. This meant that the gaps between the old pollarded
and shredded trees were infilled with secondary growth. Interestingly,
some of the tree heather had multiple stems, indicating that although the
age of individual stems might be twenty or thirty years old, the age of
the stool might be much greater. Oral evidence suggested that the wood
was valued as firewood and possibly the making of pipes, and so it is

107 Recently
shredded oak,
Varese Ligure,
2002.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

possible that the species was fairly common during the period of wood
pasture. In areas where the growth of the incoming hop hornbeam
was producing greater shade, species such as juniper were becoming
suppressed. The recent history of the farm shows how vegetation, follow-
ing a long period of intense management at least from the mid-eighteenth
century through to the mid-nineteenth, responded to a period of almost
complete abandonment in the last third of the twentieth century and
emphasizes how rapidly the managed landscape can be replaced by
dense shrubs and trees.

y Terrace abandonment and tree growth

The Lagorara Valley is a small valley near Maissana in the Val di Vara.
Much of the valley has step terraces with stone walls and the cadastral
map indicates that the ownership is extremely fragmented, with hundreds
of small plots of less than 500 sq metres (5,382 sq miles). An old mule
track runs up the valley and there are many small wooden and stone
barns, a few of which even today are used for sheep. But the mule track,
like most in the Val di Vara, is now largely overgrown and access to the
valley is provided by a track for wheeled vehicles built in the 1970s. A
local farmer explained how until the 1960s the terraces were used to grow
potatoes, maize, wheat and barley, but after that time this became uneco-
nomic. By the late 1990s many of the plots were abandoned but most
were freely grazed by sheep between April and September. Some terraces
were burned every two years to improve the quality of the grazing; the
burning stops the spread of coarse grasses such as Brachypodium rupestre
and shrubs such the tree heather. The slopes became steeper close to the
river and these largely abandoned areas had many naturally regenerating
trees such as hop hornbeam and manna ash.
The survival of a photograph taken in about 1955 allows us to see
very distinctly some of the terraces around a small group of buildings
at Casoni on the slopes of M. Porcile in the Lagorara Valley. The photo-
graph shows well-maintained buildings and clearly defined terraces that
are neatly kept. Many of the trees have been shredded and a few only have
spindly branches growing at their tops. A local resident stated that the
terraces had been cultivated for wheat, maize and potatoes at this period.
The last 50 years have seen the complete abandonment of this part of
the valley. The buildings themselves have almost disappeared and most
of the walls have collapsed. Almost all the terraces so clearly depicted

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in the photograph have been abandoned for at least 30 years and are now
overgrown by dense vegetation. Species such as blackthorn, tree heather
and hop hornbeam have rapidly encroached, and trees now dominate
the landscape.
We studied two sets of terraces in the parish of Valletti on the
other side of M. Porcile in 2002 at Bonello and La Vignola to see how
rapid the spread of trees onto cultivated terraces could be. These terraces
probably date from at least the eighteenth century and their extent is
shown relatively clearly on a postcard dating from c. 1965 where Valletti
is photographed from the other side of the Val di Vara. The flight of
terraces follows the spur on the north-facing slopes of the valley. The
two sets of terraces are set in a matrix of old chestnut woodland charac-
terized by pocket terraces; some of the chestnut trees growing in the stone
walls are probably 300 years old.
The abandonment of the terraces can be documented through oral
history and the use of field survey. Maria has lived in Valletti since 1931
and she and her husband used the terraces at Bonello In Fundo a e Tere
for growing potatoes, maize, fruit trees, beans and winter cabbage. The
terraces were also used to grow hay, but cultivation ceased and the
terraces were abandoned around 1992. This oral history was backed up
by the field evidence. Many of the terraces were covered by dense areas
of Brachypodium rupestre with other species including Festuca rubra,
Dactylis glomerata and St John’s wort. The shrub and tree species varied
depending on the length of abandonment and the location of seed trees.

108 Lagorara valley, near Maissana, Liguria, in a photograph of c. 1955.

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

109 Willow pollards at Valletti, Liguria, 1997.

The main shrub species were roses, old man’s beard and brambles. The
higher terraces had many seedlings of sycamore derived from a tree in
the village. The lower terraces were dominated by extensive, dense patches
of suckers from clones of cherry and aspen which were dated at between
twelve and fourteen years old by counting the tree rings. Further below
these terraces was woodland with many old chestnut stools and a herb
layer including wood anemone and bilberry.
At Vignola Davide told us that his terraces were cultivated and used
to grow grain, maize and potatoes on a rotational basis until the 1960s.
Since then the terraces had been used to grow hay. Some fruit trees and
vines remained and there are characteristic small willow pollards that are
still cropped annually to produce willow ties for the vines. Davide left
the village in 1964, but returned when he retired and tries to ‘keep his
terraces tidy’. The higher terraces near the house are cut for hay and the
species include sorrel, buttercup, white clover and ground elder. The
middle terraces were unmanaged and had tall overgrown grass with a
considerable build-up of dead grass and stems. Some were dominated
with rose species, blackthorn and brambles, but most were dominated
by very dense Brachypodium rupestre. There was considerable growth
of suckers from domestic plum and cherry trees. The lowest terraces had
been abandoned for up to 40 years; they still appear open on the post-
card view of c. 1965 but in 2002 consisted of fairly dense woodland
made up of young chestnut, hazel and hop hornbeam. The herb layer

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

had wood anemone and ivy. These two examples at Valletti demonstrate
the remarkable speed with which trees can colonize abandoned formerly
cultivated terraces. The first stage is often for suckers from cultivated fruit
trees, such as plum and cherry, that are frequently grown on the edges
of terraces, which spread rapidly through the untilled soil. The ground
vegetation very soon becomes dominated by a thick and coarse sward of
Brachypodium. This is soon overcome by dense thickets of rose and black-
thorn and by seedlings from trees such as the hop hornbeam. Within
fifteen years dense, impenetrable woodland has appeared, camouflaging
the remnants of terrace walls, paths and sheds, which are all that remains
to show the former intensive agricultural activity.

y Abandoned chestnut woodland

If one had to choose one tree that symbolized Liguria it would have to
be the chestnut. Not only are vast areas of the mountainsides covered
with chestnut woodland, but there are many ancient chestnut trees and
everyone knows that the cultivation of the chestnut was once so impor-
tant that it was the staple crop in the hills, with chestnut flour, bread and
pasta being of crucial importance in sustaining the population up until
the middle years of the twentieth century. The importance of chestnuts
in the cultural and social history of Liguria and the many notable ancient
trees suggest that chestnuts have been present from time immemorial,
and research suggests that this may indeed be the case. A recent analysis
of pollen evidence concluded that there were six main regions that acted
as glacial refuges where the tree could survive the last ice ages. One of these
was in ‘central and southern Italy extending along a constricted hilly belt
between the Tyrrhenian coast and the Apennine ridge with a possible
extension towards the north’, including the ‘Ligurian Apennine, Cuneo
region’.8 However, a detailed investigation of pollen evidence at four sites
in the upper Trebbia and Aveto valleys (between 812 metres and 1,331
metres) suggests that chestnuts were not present until the Roman period,
‘when the general reduction in woodland cover led to the formation of
a new and distinctive vegetation community dominated by non-arboreal
pollen’ and trees such as olives, walnuts, chestnuts and pines, indicating
cultivation.9 Whether classed as native or not, the evidence suggests that
‘the greatest interest in the management of chestnut for fruit produc-
tion developed after the Roman period and can be associated with the
socio-economic structures of medieval times.’¹0

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Monastic land charters of the eleventh century and archaeolog-

ical reports indicate that chestnuts were of great importance in the
Middle Ages. In charters they were described as castanea, meaning a tree,
and sometimes a named individual tree, or as castanetum, a chestnut
woodland or plantation. A contract drawn up in November 1006 between
Martin, who lived at Gallaneto in the Polcevera Valley, and the monastery
of Santo Stefano in Genoa, specified that he had to ‘prepare the ground
for chestnut trees and improve [them] and to put domestic chestnut
trees where appropriate’ so that after ten years had passed he could pass
half the crop to the monastery and keep the remainder himself. This
shows how areas of chestnuts might be ‘improved’, probably through
grafting, to increase the quality and quantity of the crop. The central
place of chestnuts to medieval communities is indicated by recent exca-
vations in the lower Vara valley at the old hillside village of Corvara.
Here the ‘finds in the eleventh-century phase all pointed to a mixed
economy, largely self-sufficient, based on the chestnut’. These included
two grinding stones for chestnut flour and many fragments of pottery
testi, a characteristic, locally made small baking pot of a type used to
make chestnut-flour bread until at least the 1950s.¹¹
The chestnut groves and orchards were celebrated by visitors and
travellers to Liguria in the nineteenth century, none more so than Alice
Comyns Carr, who in her travel book North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town
and Country Life (1878) provided rich descriptions of the chestnut har-
vest. She gives a full and realistic account of the process of harvesting
chestnuts, the tools used and the sounds of the nuts falling to ground
and of the harvesters talking and singing. This section is illustrated by
a drawing made by Randolph Caldecott of women gathering chest-
nuts with the use of pincers. Caldecott (1846–1886) was an enormously
successful artist and book illustrator who specialized in rural scenes and
activities and travelled extensively in Italy. He carefully depicts the floor
of the chestnut grove as characteristically kept clear of shrubby vege-
tation by grazing, supplemented by careful sweeping and brushing,
which assisted with gathering the nuts.
From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century chestnuts were also
pollarded to allow the production of charcoal for the Genoese iron
industries. This could be combined with nut production by the selec-
tive felling of those branches which had reached about 7 centimetres
(23⁄4 inches) in diameter, known as rami da carbone, leaving behind the
branches that produced fruit. Some workers thought that this practice

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

encouraged the ‘precocious production of fruit crops’, but it died out in

the late nineteenth century.¹² Chestnut flour began to become unfashion-
able in the early twentieth century with the spread of wheat flour and
commercially produced dried pasta. This coincided with a rapid rate of
rural depopulation and crucially, for the chestnut, the arrival from America
of Cryphonectria parasitica (formerly known as Endothia parasitica), the
chestnut blight. The disease first appeared in Europe in 1938 at Genoa,
and it spread rapidly through the chestnut-growing parts of Italy and
soon reached Spain and France. Now it is common throughout Europe,
the only exceptions being the Netherlands and Britain. Unlike in America,
where the blight kills the trees, in Italy and Europe more widely individ-
ual trees have recovered from the disease due to the ‘natural occurrence
of hypovirulence’ indicated by the presence of healing cankers and scars,
which are clearly visible on many chestnut trees throughout Liguria.¹³
Many chestnuts were grafted so as to improve the quality of the
fruit produced, and they were carefully grown on terraces even on very
steep slopes. In a few places in the Val di Vara, examples of traditional,

110 Randolph Caldecott, ‘Gathering the Chestnuts’, from Mrs Comyns Carr,
North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town and Country Life (1878).

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carefully pruned trees associated with small-scale cultivation can still

be seen. In most of the valley the combination of chestnut blight and
the collapse of the market for chestnuts and flour has led to the aban-
donment of many chestnut orchards. Some have been converted into
commercially viable areas of dense chestnut coppice, but large areas
of neglected chestnut groves survive that contain important evidence
of the past modes of culture which had been important for hundreds
of years. The chestnuts needed to be dried, and often small buildings
called alberghi or casun were built for this purpose. These had a drying
floor made of slats of alder wood on which the nuts were piled. Below
this a fire would be lit, and the hot air would filter out of small holes left
in the wall above the chestnut loft. These small buildings can be found
as isolated structures near to chestnut woods, but were also constructed
adjoining or as part of rural houses. They can usually be easily identified
today by the wooden slats.
We investigated in March 2003 one site at Palarino, Teviggio, which
had a derelict chestnut-drying building or casun and nearby some com-
pletely abandoned chestnut woodland where the local geology is mainly
Monte Zatta sandstone. Although marked on modern maps as Palarino,
local people do not call it by this name but refer to the unenclosed parts
simply as communeglia, or common land. On the vegetation map the
area is on the border of two zones, one characterized by vegetazione
arbustiva, with species such as Calluna vulgaris, Erica carnea and Genista
salzmannii; the other vegetazione arborea, characterized by chestnut and
Turkey oak.¹4 Neighbouring farmers told us about the local history of
the site and about the disused water channel that had previously been
used to transport water to a neighbouring farm. There were several
such water channels in the district, called surku in local dialect. The surku
stopped being used in the 1970s when the open channel was replaced
by a black plastic water pipe.
The chestnut woodland was on acid sandy soil and was mainly
composed of abandoned chestnut coppice. The form of the coppice
stools indicated that the original main stem had been cut many years
ago. The age of these original standard trees was estimated from the size
of the stumps to be over 100 years. This ties in with the historical map
evidence, which indicates that the site was wooded in both 1853 and
1936. The most recent small-scale coppicing had taken place about
twelve years before 2003. In general, however, the younger stems
growing around the old main stem were estimated to be around 30–40

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years old. Many of the chestnut stems were clearly infected with chest-
nut blight. The other tree species found at the site included manna ash,
juniper and Turkey oak. These were mainly young saplings of between
twelve and nineteen years of age. The shrub species included Calluna
vulgaris, Erica arborea, Erica carnea and Cytisus scoparius. Several of
these shrubs had reached a height of about 2 metres (612⁄ feet). The ground
layer was sparse, with some grasses such as Brachypodium pinnatum and
Thymus spp.
The casun on the edge of the chestnut area was built at the bottom
of a small series of south-facing abandoned terraces.¹5 The landowner
indicated that the terraces had been used for the cultivation of potatoes
and other crops until the 1960s; after that they have been used for
grazing. The area was fenced and sheep grazed the area until recently;
most of the young trees growing on the abandoned terraces were three
years old. Searches for pottery fragments on the terraces, especially
on the edges of terraces that were eroded, provided several shards of
taches-noir decorated terracotta, which was produced at Albisola near
Genoa. At the end of the eighteenth century it was characteristically a
brown-orange colour while in the early nineteenth century black pottery
became more common. The shards will have derived from broken pot-
tery carried to the terraces with domestic waste used as manure. Shards
of both orange-brown and black pottery were found, indicating that
the terraces were likely to have been constructed by at least the turn
of the eighteenth century. The casun was shown on both the 1978 and
1936 maps. Inside there was evidence of a former loft and a ladder. The
stonework of the building was similar in style to that of other buildings,
such as the farm at Cunie, which had been built in the late eighteenth
century. Although the casun had recently been used for storing hay
and animals, the evidence of the slatted wood in the loft and the burn
marks on the old beams indicated that it had also been used for drying
chestnuts.
This chestnut stand was used for the production of chestnuts until
the end of the nineteenth century. The chestnuts are likely to have been
dried in the eighteenth-century casun. With the rapid decline in popu-
lation in the twentieth century and the arrival of chestnut blight, the
economic production of chestnuts was not possible. Most of the stan-
dard chestnut trees were felled, especially during and immediately after
the Second World War, and coppice regrowth developed. Coppicing
continued until the 1960s. There may have been sporadic grazing of

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the area, but this stopped about twenty years ago, allowing natural
regeneration of shrubs and trees. The abandonment of the surku in the
1970s and the bulldozing of a new road adjoining the site reduced the
water supply to the site. The terraces had been constructed by the late
eighteenth century and were cropped until the 1960s. Individual trees
on the terrace were cultivated for chestnuts and oak leaf fodder. After a
period of about 40 years when the terraces were used for grazing, this use
has now ceased, and natural regeneration of shrubs and trees is occur-
ring. Since 2003 the complete abandonment has continued: the casun
largely collapsed in 2007 and the dense natural regeneration of shrubs
and trees increasingly conceals the evidence of chestnut culture.
This type of abandoned and derelict chestnut landscape is highly
characteristic of Liguria, but the specialist growing of chestnuts does
survive in some parts. In the upper Bormida valley in Savona, for exam-
ple, commercial chestnut orchards were established in the medieval
period and some farmers still grow the local variety of chestnut known
as the gabbiana. This variety was chosen by the Slow Food Association as
one of its quality products in 2002. The chestnuts are dried in stone or
brick buildings known locally as tecci, which can stand alone or form part
of a house. They consist of a single room with a central open chimney
and a loft made of wooden slats called graia about 2–3 metres (61⁄2–93⁄4
feet) from the ground. A cooperative group of local growers called Il
Teccio are promoting the ancient techniques of growing and gathering
chestnuts and have obtained Protected Geographical Indicator status
for Castagna essiccata nei tecci di Calizzano e Murialdo. But some of the
traditional practices, such as the grazing of sheep within the orchards to
keep the ground clear, are no longer practised, which ‘not only dimin-
ishes the beauty of the orchards and makes chestnut gathering more
difficult’ but is seen as increasing ‘the risks of parasites and diseases’ and
allowing the conversion of orchards into woods. In the upper Sturla Valley
at Borzonasca there is a good example of well-maintained terraced chest-
nut groves. These are irrigated by a complicated system of aqueducts,
which are documented from at least the end of the seventeenth century.
Some local growers have set up a cooperative, Il Castagno, which pro-
motes the commercial growth of the chestnut of Borzonasca, but even
here the traditional management of terraces is threatened by an ageing
population and by the abandonment of the chestnut groves, leading to
their conversion into mixed woods and the loss of their historical and
cultural characteristics.¹6

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 Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

Rural depopulation and land abandonment can lead remarkably

rapidly to dramatic changes in the woodland cover of a region. In many
parts of Liguria an unintentional consequence of abandonment has been
the natural regeneration of dense areas of woodland which forms an
example of unplanned rewilding. A small area of woodland can contain
trees with very different management histories: old trees that are marked
by ancient management practices such as shredding, which have been
carried out for many hundreds of years, are frequently surrounded by
burgeoning regrowth of young trees and shrubs. This unplanned semi-
natural vegetation blankets the landscape rather more effectively than
the plantations of trees that were made in several parts of the area
during the twentieth century.
The rapid spread of new semi-natural woodland is not restricted to
Liguria. The same is happening in many of the more mountainous parts
of Italy and other Mediterranean countries and is beginning to happen
in those East European countries where agriculture is currently being
modernized. This unplanned and unprecedented rapid woodland expan-
sion is seen by some as a welcome return to some sort of idealized past,
before the agricultural and pastoral activities of humans started to
manage and mould trees and woods thousands of years ago. The idea
of rewilding former agricultural and pastoral areas is becoming increas-
ingly popular. In Britain the three bodies which own Ennerdale in the
Lake District (the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and United
Utilities) have set up the Wild Ennerdale Project and a management
plan was established in 2006 ‘to allow the evolution of Ennerdale as a
wild valley for the benefit of people’. The idea is not to recreate ‘some
past state’ but to use natural processes to allow changes in the 4,300 ha
(10,625 acres) of upland grazing, broadleaved and coniferous woodland.
In 2011 Rewilding Europe, a Dutch foundation, was established; it aims
to rewild a million ha (2,471,000 acres) in Europe by 2020.¹7
In Liguria the consequences of decades of unplanned and unman-
aged rewilding are readily apparent. The new woodland that now clothes
the hills has allowed the successful spread of large numbers of wild
boar and smaller numbers of deer and wolves, which had been erased
from the landscape by intense cultivation, trapping and shooting in
the nineteenth century. This new natural woodland is therefore thought
by some conservationists to be a major success story, allowing the re-
introduction of rare mammals and birds and the production of some
valuable timber and possibly even making a small contribution towards

267
 Trees, Woods and Forests

carbon sequestration. But others recognize that the new woodland

disguises the loss of traditional woodland knowledge, the disappear-
ance of thousands of small agricultural terraces and the reduction of
biodiversity associated with the pastures and meadows of the cultural
landscape it replaces.

268
 m Afterword

T
he example of Ligurian woodlands shows how, through inac-
tion, humans have allowed the silent and stealthy spread of
trees over thousands of acres of the Italian Apennines. The
same process is going on in many parts of the developed world where the
pressure of grazing and cultivation is reduced. Vast tracts of Europe and
America which were once agriculturally productive are now covered in
semi-natural woodland. This localized relaxation of agricultural pressure
is taking place in a broader context of agricultural intensification. Rural
landscapes are bifurcating into areas dominated by modern agriculture
producing heavy yields of rice, barley and wheat, such as the Po Valley
of northern Italy and the arable landscapes of eastern England, and
the largely abandoned mountain slopes of the Apennines and the Alps,
which are rapidly being covered with trees. On a smaller scale many areas
of English common land which were grazed by geese, sheep, cattle and
horses until the mid-twentieth century soon became overspread with
shrubs and trees within a few years of the grazing ceasing and are now
dense woodland. Formerly grazed Surrey heathlands have become
dominated by birches and pines. Abandoned riverside meadows once
cut annually for hay are very soon overgrown by willows and alders.
Wherever grazing, cultivation or the cutting of hay cease, trees colonize
the land and vigorously dominate the landscape.¹
Trees have life histories of their own and within woods and forests
they coexist with other species and influence each other. But the
dominance of human activity means that their form and extent are
largely contained by human activities. As soon as trees become a threat,
for example when they grow near houses or transport routes, they are
controlled through pruning and pollarding. One of the most common
reasons for coppicing trees today is to stop trees overgrowing power lines

269
 Trees, Woods and Forests

and causing electricity cuts during storms. The paths of power lines
can easily be traced in wooded mountain scenery by the narrow belts
of coppiced woodland that lies under the pylon and cables. The rela-
tionship between trees and people is thousands of years old and human
knowledge of trees is extensive. Trees and forests as oxygen producers
enable life on earth as we know it to continue. They were crucial to the
development of human civilization. Our knowledge of techniques of
reproducing, cultivating and growing different species of trees in dif-
ferent places is now vast, as is the ability to select, breed, hybridize and
genetically manipulate trees for particular characteristics. But as soon
as trees are released into the landscape the consequences are uncertain.²
We can take Robinia pseudoacacia, known as the false acacia or
black locust tree, as an example. This tree is native to the eastern usa
and has been widely planted around the world. It was introduced into
Britain in the seventeenth century and soon attracted considerable atten-
tion. Its cause was taken up with tremendous enthusiasm by William
Cobbett (1763–1835), the writer and farmer from Farnham most famous
as editor of the Political Register and author of Rural Rides. It was for him
‘the tree of trees’ and should be planted by everyone who had land. But
a contemporary marginal note written in pencil in my first edition of
Cobbett’s The Woodlands (1825) shows how this optimism was mis-
placed: ‘N. B. Notwithstanding all that has been said by Cobbett in
favour of the Locust, it is certain that the wood of this tree is next to
worthless. His account of it is much exaggerated. In England it is only
suitable for ornament in sheltered places.’ Indeed, it was never planted
widely as a woodland tree in Britain but is now, especially in the golden-
leaved form ‘Frisia’, a very popular garden tree. It has several very bad
characteristics, one of which is unexpectedly dropping its brittle branches.
Another is its very spiny branches which make cutting and felling danger-
ous. The main problem, however, is its very vigorous suckering habitat,
which is difficult to keep in check. The tree has been widely planted in
Europe, South Africa and Japan, and has been particularly favoured as a
tree to help consolidate road and railway embankments and cuttings. But
it vigorous vegetative spread means that it is now identified as a serious and
invasive pest tree which is very costly if not impossible to eradicate
(illus. 77).³
The demands we place on trees change over time and the potential
benefits of encouraging a particular species foreseen by one generation
are commonly no longer relevant or apparent when the trees have

270
 Afterword

become established. New values are assigned to trees. Ancient trees are
increasingly being valued as repositories of environmental knowledge and
tree rings are examined to gain knowledge of fluctuations in tempera-
ture and likely regional histories of climate change. Dendrochronological
studies also allow the peopling of past landscapes. At Loch Katrine,
Forestry Commission Scotland has cored ancient ash trees in the wood
pastures on the southeastern shores of the lake. No one now lives in the
area, which was once so important for cattle and sheep farming and whose
importance for hunting was captured in Walter Scott’s poem ‘The Lady
of the Lake’ (1810). The detailed analysis of the cores for two ash trees
showed that both were of late seventeenth-century origin and that one
had been regularly pollarded in the eighteenth century. Several of the
alder and oak trees cored revealed that trees of nineteenth-century origin had
originally been coppiced, but the coppice regrowth had fused together
to form what appeared to be a single stem. This dendrochronological
work is uncovering unknown tree and woodland histories.4 Genetic
analysis of trees is one of the areas that has most potential for our under-
standing of long-term woodland history. One of the most striking
examples is the genetic history of the English elm (Ulmus procera) and
the wych elm (U. glabra). Analysis of samples taken from elms in Spain,
France, Greece, Italy and Britain established the variability of chloroplast
dna and likely genetic lineages. A clone of U. procera common to Italy,
Spain and Britain has been identified. This elm only rarely produces
seed, but spreads by suckers very well and was once one of the com-
monest hedgerow trees in England. It had long been thought that the
tree had been introduced by the Romans or even earlier during the
Bronze Age, but the genetic research suggests that the clone is the same
as the Atinian elm from Latium recommended by Columella as vine
supports in De Re Rusticus around ad 50.5
Woods do not have to be exciting or contain rare species to be
interesting and all have distinct histories and unknowable futures. Dukes
Wood, found on the clay soils of central Nottinghamshire, is a small and
insignificant ancient wood managed as a nature reserve by Notting-
hamshire Wildlife Trust. It is only 8 hectares (19 acres) in area and
many people would deem it nondescript. The wood is on the borders
of the parishes of Eakring and Winkburn and ash, elm, oak, hazel and
birch are the main trees, with a rich ground flora of bluebells, primroses,
wood anemone and yellow archangel. It has like most of the surrounding
small woods been managed for centuries largely under the system known

271
 Trees, Woods and Forests

111 Overgrown
ash coppice,
Dukes Wood,
Nottinghamshire,
2013.

as coppice with standards. These coppice woods were known in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as spring woods, and George
Sanderson’s Map of the Country Twenty Miles Round Mansfield of 1835,
shows names such as ‘Redgate Spring’ and ‘Orchard Wood and Nut
Wood Spring.’ In the 1790s the Winkburn Woods were coppiced every
twenty years and were being replanted with ash trees for this purpose.6
Many of the poles cut were used as hop poles and this was a lucrative
market as hop growing was one of the leading agricultural activities
in east Nottinghamshire in that period. Dukes Wood is too small to be
named on the map but is shown just to the west of Dilliner Wood. The
continuity implied by the old map and the current woodland disguises
a remarkable episode of its history. Between 1939 and 1966 Dukes
Wood and the area around it was an important onshore oilfield. The trees
helped to camouflage, perhaps more theoretically than in practice, the
oil workings from wartime German aerial photography. Almost all the
roadways, storage tanks and concrete surrounding the wells have now
been removed but a few of the pumps known as nodding donkeys have
been restored and there is a small Dukes Wood Oil Museum. But these

272
 Afterword

are the only reminders of the localized oil boom; a walk through the wood
today provides hardly any clues to this 30-year period of intense industrial
exploitation.
What do the trees of Dukes Wood tell us of its history and future?
Many of the older trees were once coppiced and this large ash tree has
six main stems and was probably last coppiced in the 1960s. In Robert
Monteath’s book The Forester’s Guide and Profitable Planter of 1824 there
is an engraving which shows the growth of ash coppice at 15, 20, 25 and
30 years following coppicing. Coppicing also produced firewood and
many useful wooden products, but as we have seen by the beginning
of the twentieth century the markets for most of these products had
disappeared. Many woods became uneconomic and tended to be more
important for preserving game than producing income from coppicing.
Once abandoned the growth of large stems from old coppice stools often
makes them unstable, and eventually some or all of the stems are likely
to collapse. One way to encourage the longevity of such stools is to re-
coppice them, and this has become a standard nature conservation practice.
Moreover the market for ash firewood has recently become more buoy-
ant than for many years and there is some hope that the popularity of
wood-burning stoves will restore dynamic management to such woods
and help pay for conservation management.

112 ‘Coppice Trees at 15 . . . 20 . . . 25 [and] 30 years old’, engraving from Robert

Monteath, The Forester’s Guide and Profitable Planter (1824).

273
 Trees, Woods and Forests

There are enormous numbers of young ash trees naturally regener-

ating throughout Dukes Wood. Ash trees are prolific seed bearers and
these germinate and grow easily in the clay soils. The ability of ash trees
to regenerate freely, the increase in the demand for firewood and the
potential for growing high-quality ash timber meant that the future for
ash silviculture was very optimistic until very recently. However, with
the identification of ash die back disease (Chalara fraxinea) for the first
time in the uk in the summer of 2012 the future of the tree is a matter
of great uncertainty. The disease was first noticed in Poland in 1992 and
it spread rapidly. The Forestry Commission initially thought that it had
arrived in Britain on young trees ‘imported from nurseries in Continental
Europe’ but the infection was soon found in older trees in East Anglia
and Kent and it may have been ‘carried on the wind or on birds coming
across the North Sea and English Channel’ or by people or machinery
who had visited infected Continental sites. No one knows how the
spread of the disease will develop over the next few years but, taking into
account what has happened in other countries, it is likely that the
spread of C. fraxinea will be rapid and it will affect many trees.7
Elm trees are frequent in Dukes Wood today; most are fairly young,
around 20–30 years of age, and many appear in rude health. But these
trees are also subject to a virulent disease. Those growing today have
sprung up since the arrival of Dutch Elm Disease in Nottinghamshire
in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s almost all elm trees, whether in
hedgerows or woods, or whether the English elm (Ulmus procera) or the
Wych elm (U. glabra), were dead or dying. But since that time many
elm trees have regrown. The disease has by no means disappeared
however: it tends to reappear once the new generation of elm trees has
become large enough to support the breeding of the beetles which
carry the disease. This is what is now happening at Dukes Wood. A fair
number of the new generation of elm trees are dead or dying and there
is clear evidence of the tunnels bored by elm beetles in bark which has
fallen away from the trees. The leading plant pathologist Clive Brasier
has pointed out that ‘woodlands and landscapes in the uk and across
the world are suffering from pathogens introduced by human activities’,
and there is little that can be done to stop this spread. The death of most
ash trees in Dukes Wood, as with the elms 40 years ago, would bring
about significant changes in the short term, but in the longer term it
would provide space for other species such as alder, birch, field maple
and oak to regenerate.

274
 Afterword

The particular history and uncertain future of Dukes Wood display

on a small scale the complex relationship between people, trees and
woods. The diverse episodes and themes of this book show how we
have always relied on trees for sustenance and pleasure and how the fate
of many trees and woods is very much dependent on human activities.
People select certain trees for particular purposes and markets and shape
the form of individual trees through management, but they also help
spread virulent tree diseases. To understand individual woods and trees
it is necessary to have knowledge of their precise history and geography.
But a grasp of the implications of global movements and processes is also
essential. Trees, woods and forests appear on the surface to be stable and
unchanging features against which we can match our individual lives and
the lives of nations and civilizations. But the history of trees is constantly
being rewritten and the future of trees is uncertain.

275
 m References

y Introduction
1 P. Jones, ‘The Geography of Dutch Elm Disease in Britain’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers New Series, 6 (1981), pp. 324–36; Isobel
Tomlinson and Clive Potter, ‘“Too Little, Too Late”? Science, Policy and
Dutch Elm Disease in the uk’, Journal of Historical Geography, 36 (2010),
pp. 121–31.
2 D. A. Stroud et al., Birds, Bogs and Forestry (Peterborough, 1987).
3 P. Schutt and E. P. Cowling, ‘Waldsterben, a General Decline of Forests
in Central Europe: Symptoms, Development, and Possible Causes’, Plant
Disease, 69 (1985), pp. 548–58; J. M. Skelly and J. L. Innes, ‘Waldsterben
in the Forests of Central Europe and Eastern North America: Fantasy or
Reality?’, Plant Disease, 78 (1994), pp. 1021–32.
4 Oliver Rackham, Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape
(London, 1976); Rackham, Ancient Woodland (London, 1980);
George Peterken, Woodland Conservation and Management (London,
1981); Charles Watkins, Woodland Management and Conservation
(Newton Abbot, 1990).
5 Robert Mendick, ‘How England’s Forests Were Saved for the Nation’,
Daily Telegraph (19 February 2011); Forestry Commission, Independent
Panel on Forestry: Final Report (London, 2012).

y One: Ancient Practices

1 Konrad Spindler, The Man in the Ice (London, 1994); Klaus Oeggl, ‘The
Significance of the Tyrolean Iceman for the Archaeobotany of Central
Europe’, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 18 (2009), pp. 1–11.
2 Oeggl, ‘The Significance of the Tyrolean Iceman’, p. 3.
3 Spindler, Man in the Ice, pp. 87–8, 218.
4 Oeggl, ‘The Significance of the Tyrolean Iceman’, p. 3.
5 Ibid., p. 5.
6 Bryony Coles and John Coles, Sweet Track to Glastonbury: The Somerset
Levels in Prehistory (London, 1986); C. W. Dymond, ‘The Abbot’s Way’,
Somerset Archaeology and Natural History, 26 (1880), pp. 107–16.
7 Coles, Sweet Track, p. 31.

277
 Trees, Woods and Forests

8 Ibid., p. 44.
9 Ibid., pp. 45, 50.
10 Ibid., pp. 51, 55.
11 Maisie Taylor, ‘A Summary of Previous Work on Wood and Wood-
Working’, in Flag Fen: Peterborough Excavation and Research, 1995–2007,
ed. Francis Pryor and Michael Bamforth (Oxford, 2010), p. 69; Michael
Bamforth, ‘Aspects of Wood, Timber and Woodworking at Flag Fen,
1995–2005’, in Flag Fen, ed. Pryor and Bamforth, p. 72; Francis Pryor,
Flag Fen (Stroud, 2005), p. 132.
12 Maisie Taylor, ‘Big Trees and Monumental Timbers’, in Flag Fen, ed.
Pryor and Bamforth, p. 90; Russell Meiggs, Trees and Timber in the Ancient
Mediterranean World (Oxford, 1982), pp. 346–7; Pliny the Elder, Natural
History, vols xii–xvi, trans. H. Rackham (Harvard, 1956), vol. xvi, pp. 83, 227.
13 Taylor, ‘Big Trees’, p. 92.
14 Ibid., p. 94.
15 Pliny the Younger, ‘Letter 6 to Domitius Apollinaris’, in Complete Letters,
trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2006), Book v.
16 Meiggs, Trees, pp. 269–70 and translations of Pliny the Younger, v, 6; iii;
iii, 19.
17 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, xiv, 1, p. 187.
18 Ibid., xii, 1, pp. 3–5.
19 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
20 Ibid., xv, 20, p. 341.
21 Ibid., xvi, 2, pp. 389–91.
22 Meiggs, Trees, p. 270.
23 Ibid., p. 262.
24 Ibid., pp. 265–6.
25 A jugerum = 0.25 hectare/5⁄8 acre.
26 Meiggs, Trees, pp. 18–19.
27 Ibid., pp. 118–19.
28 Edward Forster, ‘Trees and Plants in Homer’, Classical Review, 50 (1936),
pp. 97–104; Meiggs, Trees, pp. 106–10.
29 Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray and revd William F. Wyatt (London and
Cambridge, ma, 1999), xiii, 389; the same simile is used when Patroclus
kills Sarpedon, ibid., xvi, 482.
30 Ibid., iv, 480.
31 Ibid., xiii, 178.
32 Ibid., xvi, 113, 141.
33 Ibid., xiv, 395.
34 Ibid., xvi, 767.
35 Ibid., xii, 31.
36 Ibid., xi, 86.
37 Ibid., xxiii, 315.
38 Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray and George E. Dimock (London and
Cambridge, ma, 1919), x, 210, 241–4.
39 Iliad, xii, 141.
40 Odyssey, v, ii, 106.
41 Iliad, ii, 306.

278
 References

42 Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley (London and Cambridge, ma, 1922), vii,

p. 31.
43 Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones, (London and
Cambridge, ma, 1933), xi, Elis ii, xxiii, 1; Meiggs, Trees, p. 273;
Pausanias’s Description of Greece, trans. J. G. Frazier (London, 1898), iii,
xiv, 8.
44 Pliny the Younger, ‘Letter 6 to Domitius Apollinaris’ (Oxford, 2006),
Book v.
45 Pliny, Natural History, xixix, pp. 91–102.
46 Ibid., and Strabo, Geography, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (London and
Cambridge, ma, 1923), Books 4, 6, 2; 17, 3, 33–4; Lucan, The Civil War,
trans. J. D. Duff (London and Cambridge, ma, 1928) ix, 426–30.

y Two: Forests and Spectacle

1 Russell Meiggs, Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World
(Oxford, 1982), p. 82.
2 Manolis Andronicos, Vergina: The Royal Tombs and Ancient City (Athens,
1984), pp. 106–19; Konstantinos Faridis, Vergina (Thessaloniki, n.d.),
pp. 37–8; James Davidson, ‘Crowning Controversies’, Times Literary
Supplement (20 May 2011), pp. 17–18.
3 Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander, trans. John C. Rolf (London
and Cambridge, ma, 1946), 8, i, 11–16; Meiggs, Trees, p. 272.
4 Anthony Birley, Hadrian: The Restless Emperor (London, 1997) pp. 25,
137, 164; Thorsten Opper, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict (London, 2008)
p. 242, fn 19.
5 Birley, Hadrian, pp. 240–41.
6 Opper, Hadrian, pp. 171–2; bm gr 1805.0703.121.
7 See Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter (salon),
www.sal.org.uk/salon.
8 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(London, 1922), pp. 1–2, 701.
9 Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance (Woodbridge, 1993),
pp. 24, 21, quoting Servius’ commentary of the Aeneid.
10 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London and Cambridge, ma,
1935), vi, 175–90, 205–11.
11 Ibid., i, 162–6.
12 Ibid., ix, 375–92.
13 Saunders, Forest, p. 26.
14 Virgil, Eclogues, i, 1–25.
15 Ibid., vii, 53–67.
16 ‘Terrestrial Paradise’, Catholic Encyclopaedia.
17 R. I. Page, Norse Myths (London, 1990), p. 59.
18 Jonas Kristjansson, Eddas and Sagas (Reykjavik, 1997), p. 41.
19 E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (London, 1964),
p. 277.
20 Page, Norse Myths, p. 59.
21 Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, pp. 42–3.

279
 Trees, Woods and Forests

22 Ibid., pp. 48–50.

23 Ibid., pp. 182–3, 244–6.
24 Saunders, Forest, pp. 10–11.
25 Ibid., pp. 11, 17–18.
26 James Holt, ‘The Origins of Robin Hood’, Past and Present (November 1958),
p. 37.
27 Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Comfort
(London, 1975), pp. 216–17.
28 Saunders, Forest, p. 10.
29 Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape
(Woodbridge, 2010), p. 142.
30 David Bates, ‘William i (1027/8–1087)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
31 Frank Barlow, ‘William ii (c. 1060–1100)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
32 Frank Barlow, ‘Henry i (1068/9–1135)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
33 Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Pennsylvania,
1979), pp. 17, 19.
34 Thomas K. Keefe, ‘Henry ii (1133–1189)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
35 Young, Royal Forests, pp. 68–9.
36 Jean Birrell, ‘Records of Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, c. 1236–1377’,
Worcestershire Historical Society New Series, 21 (2006), p. xiv.
37 Birrell, ‘Records’.
38 Ibid., p. 159.
39 Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland (London, 1980), p. 177.
40 Stephen A. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009), p. 30.
41 Robert Hearn, ‘Grey Wolves and Wild Boar: Comparative Species History
in Liguria, 1500 to 2012’, PhD thesis (University of Nottingham, 2013).
42 Birrell, ‘Records’, p. xiv; Roger Lovegrove, Silent Fields (London, 2007),
p. 22; Birrell, ‘Records’, p. 67; Oliver Rackham, History of the Countryside
(London, 1986), p. 36.
43 Birrell, ‘Records’, p. xv.
44 Ibid., p. xvii.
45 Ibid., p. xvi.
46 Ibid., pp. 138–9.
47 Ibid., p. 45.
48 Ibid., p. 66.
49 Ibid., pp. 100, 103.
50 Ibid., pp. 112, 115.
51 Ibid., p. 165.
52 Mileson, Parks, p. 22.
53 Saunders, Forest, p. 9.
54 Mileson, Parks, pp. 99–100.
55 Ibid., p. 181.
56 Birrell, ‘Records’, p. 173.
57 Mileson, Parks, p. 24.

280
 References

58 Ibid., p. 25.
59 Chris Wickham, ‘European Forests in the Early Middle Ages: Landscape
and Land Clearance’, in Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European
Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994), p. 160.

y Three: Tree Movements

1 Andrew Coleby, ‘Compton, Henry (1631/2–1713)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford, 2004); Sandra Morris, ‘Legacy of a Bishop:
The Trees and Shrubs of Fulham Palace Gardens Introduced 1675–1713’,
Garden History, 19 (1991), pp. 47–59, 49.
2 James Britten, ‘Banister, John (1650–1692)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography; Coleby, ‘Compton’; Morris, ‘Legacy’, p. 49.
3 P. J. Jarvis, ‘Plant Introductions to England and their Role in Horticultural
and Silvicultural Innovation, 1500–1900’, in Change in the Countryside:
Essays on Rural England, 1500–1900, ed. H.S.A. Fox and R. A. Butlin
(London, 1979), pp. 145–164, 153.
4 Mark Catesby, Hortus Britanno-Americanus (London, 1763).
5 John Claudius Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (London,
1838), vol. i, pp. 41, 45; John Ray, Historia Plantarum (London, 1686), ii,
pp. 1798–9; Britten, ‘Banister’.
6 Douglas Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany,
Trees and the Georgics (New Haven, ct, 1993), p. 3.
7 Loudon, Arboretum, p. 41; Chambers, Planters, pp. 36, 45; see Beryl
Hartley, ‘Exploring and Communicating Knowledge of Trees in the
Early Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 64 (2010),
pp. 229–50.
8 Loudon, Arboretum, p. 61.
9 Chambers, Planters, p. 111, quoting S. Switzer, The Practical Husbandman
(London, 1733), vol. i, part i, p. liv.
10 H. Le Rougetel, ‘Miller, Philip (1691–1771)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
11 Loudon, Arboretum, vol. i, p. 54.
12 A. Murdoch, ‘Campbell, Archibald, third duke of Argyll (1682–1761)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
13 See M. Symes, A. Hodges and J. Harvey, ‘The Plantings at Whitton’,
Garden History, 14 (1986), pp. 138–72.
14 Chambers, Planters, p. 92, quoting bl Add. ms 28727, fol. 5, 16 February
1747/48.
15 J. J. Cartwright (ed.), ‘The Travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke
Successively Bishop of Meath and of Ossory, during 1750, 1751, and Later
Years’, Camden New Series, 94 (1889), vol. ii, pp. 260–61.
16 Chambers, Planters, p. 112, quoting a letter of 1 September 1741 from
P. Collinson (1694–1768) to the American botanist and explorer J. Bartram
(1699–1777). See also Douglas Chambers, ‘Collinson, Peter (1694–1768)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
17 M. Symes and J. H. Harvey, ‘Lord Petre’s Legacy: The Nurseries at
Thorndon’, Garden History, 24 (1996), pp. 272–82.

281
 Trees, Woods and Forests

18 Nuala C. Johnson, ‘Names, Labels and Planting Regimes: Regulating Trees

at Glasnevin Botanic Gardens, Dublin, 1795–1850’, in Garden History, 35
(2007), pp. 53–70.
19 See Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels, The British
Arboretum: Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London,
2011).
20 George Sinclair, Useful and Ornamental Planting (London, 1832), p. 129.
21 George Nicholson, The Illustrated Dictionary of Gardening: A Practical and
Scientific Encyclopaedia of Horticulture (London, 1889), vol. iv, pp. 450–57;
Charles Sargent, A Manual of the Trees of North America (New York, 1905),
preface.
22 William J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, 7th edn
(London, 1951) vol. i, preface, p. vii; Richard Drayton, Nature’s
Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World
(New Haven, ct, 2001), pp. 221–68.
23 George Gordon, The Pinetum, 2nd edn (London, 1875), pp. 414–16; Bean,
Trees, vol. iii, pp. 303–5.
24 Elliott, Watkins and Daniels, Arboretum, pp. 172–3.
25 Ibid., pp. 69–70.
26 Printed Reports of the Garden Committee, numbers 1–5 (1823–7);
Manuscript Minutes of the Gardening Committee (1818–1830), Lindley
Library of the Royal Horticultural Society, London, m12/01; John Claudius
Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Gardening, 5th edn (London 1830), pp.
1059–1060; Brent Elliott, The History of the Royal Horticultural Society:
1804–2004 (London, 2004).
27 Loudon, Arboretum, vol. i, pp. 129–30; Gardeners’ Magazine, 5 (1830),
p. 346, fig. 79; 6 (1830), p. 250, fig. 44.
28 Loudon, Encyclopaedia, pp. 1059–60.
29 Elliott et al., Arboretum, p. 90.
30 Ibid., pp. 135–54; N. Jones, Life and Death: Discourse on Occasion of the
Lamented Death of Joseph Strutt (London, 1844), p. 16.
31 J. R. Martin, ‘Report on the State of Nottingham, Coventry, Leicester,
Derby, Norwich and Portsmouth’, in Second Report of the Commissioners for
Inquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts (London, 1845),
vol. ii.
32 Derby Mercury, 20 August 1851.
33 C. M. Hovey, Magazine of Horticulture, 11 (1845), pp. 122–8.
34 Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays (New York, 1856), pp. 497–557;
Tom Schlereth, ‘Early North-American Arboreta’, Garden History, 35
(2007), pp. 196–216.
35 Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender (London, 1971), p. 91.
36 A. Jackson, ‘Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception of Japanese
Culture’, Journal of Design History, 5 (1996), pp. 245–56. See also Setsu
Tachibana and Charles Watkins, ‘Botanical Transculturation: Japanese
and British Knowledge and Understanding of Aucuba Japonica and Larix
Leptolepis, 1700–1920’, Environment and History, 16 (2010), pp. 43–71.
37 Setsu Tachibana et al., ‘Japanese Gardens in Edwardian Britain: Landscape
and Transculturation’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30 (2004), pp. 364–94.

282
 References

38 E. Kaempfer (1651–1716), German traveller and naturalist; Carl Peter

Thunberg (1743–1828), Swedish botanist; P. F. von Siebold (1796–1866),
German doctor and botanist.
39 N. Kato, Makino Hyohonkan shozou no Siebold Collection (Siebold
Collection at Makino Herbarium) (Kyoto, 2003); N. Kato, H. Kato,
A. Kihara and M. Wakabayashi, Makino Hyohonkan shozou no Siebold
Collection, cd Database (Tokyo, 2005).
40 Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan
(Berkeley, ca, 1989), p. 261.
41 R. Ono and Y. Shimada, Kai (1763). Siebold used this book as a reliable
and practical encyclopaedia and he collated and referenced his newly
collected Japanese plants against the descriptions given in Kai.
42 B. Lindquist, ‘Provenances and Type Variation in Natural Stands of
Japanese Larch’, Acta Horti Gotoburgensis, 20 (1955), pp. 1–34, 5.
43 H. J. Elwes and A. Henry, The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland
(Edinburgh, 1907), vol. ii, p. 384.
44 The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 15 December 1860, p. 1103.
45 Rutherford Alcock, ‘Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of Japan, Ascent
of Fusiyama, and Visit to the Hot Sulphur Baths of Atami in 1860’, read
13 May 1861, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 31 (1861), pp.
321–55; Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon (London, 1863),
p. 483.
46 Elwes and Henry, Trees, vol. ii, p. 385.
47 Larix leptolepis, Endlicher (1847); Larix japonica, Carrière (1855); Larix
kaempferi, Sargent (1898); Pinus larix, Thunberg (1784); Pinus kaempferi,
Lambert (1824); Abies kaempferi, Lindley (1833); Abies leptolepis, Siebold
et Zuccarini (1842); Pinus leptolepis, Endlicher (1847).
48 Elwes and Henry, Trees, vol. ii, p. 384.
49 Ibid., pp. 385–6.
50 Messrs. Dickson of Chester were said to have sold 750,000 trees in 1905.
Elwes and Henry, Trees, vol. ii, pp. 386–7.
51 J. MacDonald et al., ‘Exotic Forest Trees in Great Britain: Paper Prepared
for the Seventh British Commonwealth Forestry Conference, Australia and
New Zealand’, Forestry Commission Bulletin, 30 (London, 1957), p. 69.
52 Steve Lee, Breeding Hybrid Larch in Britain, Forestry Commission
Information Note (2003); C. R. Lane, P. A. Beales, K.J.D. Hughes,
R. L. Griffin, D. Munro, C. M. Brasier and J. F. Webber, ‘First Outbreak
of Phytophthora ramorum in England, on Viburnum tinus’, New Disease
Reports, 6 (2002), p.13; Forestry Commission, ‘Phytophthora ramorum
in Larch Trees’, www.forestry.gov.uk, 30 July 2012.
53 Forestry Commission, ‘Phytophthora’.

y Four: Tree Aesthetics

1 Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta, 1st edn 1773 (London,
1806), pp. 62–5; Katherine Turner, ‘Brydone, Patrick (1736–1818)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); G. E. Ortolani,
Biografia degli uomini illuustri della Sicilia (Naples, 1818–21), vol. ii.

283
 Trees, Woods and Forests

2 Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Literature (Cambridge,

1997). Knight intended to publish a description of his ‘Expedition into
Sicily’ of 1777. A version was eventually published in translation by Goethe
in 1810, and the original English version was rediscovered by Claudia
Stumpf at Weimar in 1980 and published in 1986. See Richard Payne
Knight, Expedition into Sicily [1777], ed. Claudia Stumpf (London, 1986).
3 Knight, Expedition, p. 58, Aci Reale 1 June 1777.
4 Castagno dei Cento Cavalli, Jean-Pierre Houël. 1776–1779 Voyage
pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari (Paris, 1782).
5 William Linnard, Welsh Woods and Forests (Llandysul, 2000), Peniarth ms
28, p. 21.
6 Michael Camille, ‘The “Très Riches Heures”: An Illuminated Manuscript in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990), pp. 72–107.
7 G. Bartrum, Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist
(London, 2002).
8 Erik Hinterding, Ger Luijten and Martin Royalton-Kisch, Rembrandt the
Printmaker (London, 2000), pp. 247–50.
9 Cynthia Schnieder, Rembrandt’s Landscapes (New Haven, ct, and London,
1990); Christiaan Vogelaar and Gregor Weber, Rembrandt’s Landscapes
(Zwolle, 2006).
10 Seymour Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings,
Drawings and Etchings (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001) p. 249;
Seymour Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape (London, 2005),
p. 46.
11 Peter Ashton, Alice I. Davies and Seymour Slive, ‘Jacob van Ruisdael’s
Trees’, Arnoldia, 42 (1982), pp. 2–31; Slive, Complete Catalogue, p. 268;
Slive, Ruisdael Landscape, p. 29.
12 Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough (New Haven, ct, and
London, 1999), pp. 183–6; Slive, Ruisdael Landscape, p. 24.
13 Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven, ct, and London, 2002).
14 Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, Gainsborough (London, 2003),
pp. 78, 80.
15 Ibid., pp. 84, 96, 104; Elise L. Smith, ‘“The Aged Pollard’s Shade”:
Gainsborough’s Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid’, Eighteenth-
century Studies, 41 (2007), pp. 17–39.
16 Helen Langdon, Salvator Rosa (London, 2010), p. 258; Charles Watkins
and Ben Cowell, ‘Letters of Uvedale Price’, Walpole Society, 68 (2006),
pp. 1–359, Uvedale Price to Sir George Beaumont, 12 January 1822,
pp. 299–300.
17 David Watkin, The English Vision (London, 1982), p. vii.
18 William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty (London, 1754), p. 52.
19 Isabel Chace, Horace Walpole: Gardenist, an Edition of Walpole’s The History
of the Modern Taste in Gardening with an Estimate of Walpole’s Contribution
to Landscape Architecture (Princeton, nj, 1943), pp. 35–6.
20 Chace, Walpole, pp. 25–7, 31, 35–7.
21 William Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints (London, 1768), pp. 2–3.
22 William Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England Relative
Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), p. 328.

284
 References

23 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye (London, 1782), p. 1.

24 Uvedale Price, Essays (London, 1810), vol. i, p. 40.
25 Ibid., pp. 345, 22–3, 50, 114, 22, 55, 57, 244.
26 William Gilpin to William Mason, 12 July 1755; Carl P. Barbier, William
Gilpin: His Drawings, Teaching and Theory of the Picturesque (Oxford,
1963), p. 53.
27 Robert Mayhew, ‘William Gilpin and the Latitudinarian Picturesque’,
Eighteenth-century Studies, 33 (2000), pp. 349–66, 351.
28 John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation,
1st edn 1691 (London, 1771), p. 87.
29 William Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery (London, 1791), vol. i, p. 103,
note.
30 Ibid., pp. 1–3.
31 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 305–7.
32 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 7–8; John Considine, ‘Lawson, William (1553/4–1635)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004); William Lawson,
A New Orchard and Garden, or, The Best Way for Planting, Grafting, and to
Make Any Ground Good for a Rich Orchard; Particularly in the North Parts
of England (London, 1618).
33 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 8–9, 14.
34 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 10–14; Price, Essays, vol. i, p. 244.
35 Watkins and Cowell, ‘Letters’, Uvedale Price to Lord Abercorn, 31 May
1796, p. 85.
36 Ibid., Uvedale Price to Lord Aberdeen, 6 February 1818, p. 274. Price
may have come across this analogy via Joseph Addison, who in The
Spectator, 215, 6 November 1706, stated that Aristotle in his Doctrine
of Substantial Forms tells us that ‘a Statue lies hid in a Block of Marble’.
37 Ibid., Uvedale Price to Lady Beaumont, August 1803, p. 165.
38 Gilpin, Forest Scenery, vol. i, pp. 4, 34, 15.
39 Ibid., p. 4; Arthur Young, A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties
of England and Wales (London, 1769) pp. 92, 308; J. Middleton, General
View of the Agriculture of the County of Middlesex (London, 1813),
pp. 344–7; Watkins and Cowell, ‘Letters’, Uvedale Price to Lord Abercorn,
14 July 1792, p. 79.
40 Linnard, Welsh Woods, p. 156; H. S. Steuart, The Planter’s Guide: or A
Practical Essay on the Best Method of Giving Immediate Effect to Wood by the
Removal of Large Trees and Underwood (Edinburgh, 1828), p. 60; J. G.
Strutt, Sylva Britannica; or, Portraits of Forest Trees, Distinguished for their
Antiquity, Magnitude, or Beauty (London, 1830), p. 98; J. Main, The Forest
Planter and Pruner’s Assistant, Being a Practical Treatise on the Management
of the Native and Exotic Forest Trees Commonly Cultivated in Great Britain
(London, 1839), p. 236.
41 W. M. Craig, A Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting, and Engraving
Considered as Branches of Elegant Education Delivered in the Saloon of the
Royal Institution (London, 1821), p. 286; Anonymous, Woodland Gleanings:
An Account of British Forest-trees (London, 1865), p. 20; Anonymous,
English Forests and Forest Trees: Historical, Legendary, and Descriptive
(London, 1853), p. 107; J. Dagley and P. Burman, ‘The Management

285
 Trees, Woods and Forests

of Pollards of Epping Forest: Its History and Revival’ in Pollard and

Veteran Tree Management ii, ed. Helen Read (London, 1996), pp. 29–41.

y Five: Pollards
1 Sandrine Petit and Charles Watkins, ‘Pollarding Trees: Changing Attitudes
to a Traditional Land Management Practice in Britain, 1600–1900’, Rural
History, 14 (2003), pp. 157–76; Helen Read, Veteran Trees: A Guide to
Good Management (Peterborough, 2000).
2 Frans Vera, Grazing Ecology and Forest History (Wallingford, 2000).
3 I. Austad, ‘Tree Pollarding in Western Norway’, in The Cultural Landscape:
Past, Future, Present, ed. H. Birks et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 11–29;
E. Bargioni and A. Z. Sulli, ‘The Production of Fodder Trees in Valdagano,
Vicenza, Italy’, in The Ecological History of European Forests, ed. Keith J.
Kirby and Charles Watkins (Wallingford, 1998), pp. 43–52; C.-A.
Hæggström, ‘Pollard Meadows: Multiple Use of Human-made Nature’,
in The Ecological History of European Forests, ed. Kirby and Watkins,
pp. 33–42; Paul Halstead, ‘Ask the Fellows Who Lop the Hay: Leaf-fodder
in the Mountains of Northwest Greece’, Rural History, 9 (1998), pp. 211–34;
F.-X. Trivière, ‘Emonder Les Arbres: Tradition Paysanne, Pratique
Ouvrière’, Terrain, March (1991), pp. 62–77.
4 Sandrine Petit, ‘Parklands with Fodder Trees: a Full Response to
Environmental and Social Changes’, Applied Geography, 23 (2003),
pp. 205–25; J. Anderson et al., ‘Le Fourrage Arboré à Bamako: Production
et Gestion des Arbres Fourragers, Consommation et Filières
d’Approvisionnement’, Sécheresse, 2 (1994) pp. 99–105; Food and
Agriculture Organization, Forests, Trees and Food (Rome, 1992).
5 R. C. Khanal and D. B. Subba, ‘Nutritional Evaluation of Leaves from
Some Major Fodder Trees Cultivated in the Hills of Nepal’, Animal and
Feed Science Technology, 92 (2001), pp. 17–32; D. A. Gilmour and
M. C. Nurse, ‘Farmer Initiatives in Increasing Tree Cover in Central
Nepal’, Mountain Research and Development, 11 (1991), pp. 329–37;
J. L. Hellin et al., ‘The Quezungual System: An Indigenous Agroforestry
System from Western Honduras’, Agroforestry Systems, 46 (1999), pp. 229–37.
6 Eirini Saratsi, ‘Landscape History and Traditional Management Practices
in the Pindos Mountains, Northwest Greece, c. 1850–2000’, PhD thesis
(University of Nottingham, 2003), pp. 199–207.
7 Ibid.
8 Pantelis Arvanitis, ‘Traditional Forest Management in Psiloritis, Crete,
c. 1850–2011: Integrating Archives, Oral History and GIS’, PhD thesis
(University of Nottingham, 2011), pp. 203–55.
9 Ibid.
10 Ruth M. Tittensor, ‘A History of the Mens: A Sussex Woodland
Common’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 116 (1977–8), pp. 347–74;
Oliver Rackham, The Last Forest: The Story of Hatfield Forest (London,
1989), p. 247.
11 Petit and Watkins, ‘Pollarding Trees’; N.D.G. James, An Historical
Dictionary of Forestry and Woodland Terms (Oxford, 1991); Richard Muir,

286
 References

‘Pollards in Nidderdale: A Landscape History’, Rural History, 11 (2001),

pp. 95–111.
12 J. Worlidge, A Compleat System of Husbandry and Gardening (London,
1669), p. 133, in the 1728 edition it is p. 212; Moses Cook, The Manner
of Raising, Ordering, and Improving Forest-trees: With Directions How to
Plant, Make, and Keep Woods, Walks, Avenues, Lawns, Hedges, &c (London,
1676), pp. 42, 141; Batty Langley, A Sure Method of Improving Estates by
Plantations of Oak, Elm, Ash, Beech, and Other Timber-trees, Coppice-woods,
&c. (London, 1728), p. 212.
13 Arthur Standish, New Directions of Experience Authorized by the Kings Most
Excellent Majesty, as May Appeare, for the Increasing of Timber and Fire-wood
with the Least Waste and Losse of Ground (London, 1615), p. 21, 9; Arthur
Standish, The Commons Complaint (London, 1611), p. 9; Worlidge,
Husbandry, p. 126; John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry: Or the
Way of Managing and Improving of Land (London, 1707), pp. 331, 393.
14 John Evelyn, Sylva, 1st edn (London, 1664), p. 213; 2nd edn (1670), p. 142;
4th edn (1706), p. 208; 2nd edn (1670), p.141; 1st edn (1664), p. 19;
4th edn (1706), pp. 46–7.
15 Cook, Forest-trees, pp. 18, 110, 102; W. Ellis, The Timber-tree Improved or
the Best Practical Methods of Improving Different Lands with Proper Timber
(London, 1742), p. 106.
16 Arthur Young, ‘French Edict in Consequence of the Scarcity in France’, in
Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts (London, 1785), pp. 63–71, 62;
William Marshall, Planting and Rural Ornament, 2nd edn (London, 1796),
pp. 100, 142, 182.
17 John Middleton, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Middlesex
(London, 1813), p. 345; W. T. Pomeroy, General View of the Agriculture
of the County of Worcester (London, 1794), p. 21; J. Clark, General View
of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford (London, 1794), p. 66. See also
John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840
(Cambridge, 1972).
18 W. Pearce, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Berkshire
(London, 1794), p. 57; T. Stone, General View of the Agriculture of the
County of Bedford (London, 1794), p. 53; J. Clark, General View of the
Agriculture of the County of Radnor (London, 1794), p. 28.
19 J. Anderson, Essays Relating to Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Edinburgh,
1784), vol. ii, p. 17, fn.
20 Uvedale Price, ‘On the Bad Effects of Stripping and Cropping Trees’,
Annals of Agriculture, 5 (1786), pp. 241–3.
21 Price, ‘Stripping’, pp. 247–9.
22 Herefordshire Record Office, bc 986a.
23 J. Priest, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Buckinghamshire
(London, 1813), pp. 258–9; Middleton, Middlesex, pp. 344–7; Clark,
Hereford, p. 26.
24 Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection
(London, 1985), p. 273.
25 Elizabeth Baigent, ‘A “Splendid Pleasure Ground [for] the Elevation and
Refinement of the People of London”: an Historical Geography of Epping

287
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Forest, 1860–95’, in English Geographies, 1600–1950: Historical Essays on

English Customs, Cultures and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton, ed.
Elizabeth Baigent and Robert Mayhew (Oxford, 2009), pp. 104–26;
Edward Buxton, Epping Forest (London, 1884).

y Six: Sherwood Forest

1 Ivanhoe was first published on 18 December in Edinburgh and 31
December 1819 in London, ‘so close to the end of the year, Ivanhoe bore
the date 1820 on its title-page’, Walter Scott Digital Archive, University
of Edinburgh, www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk.
2 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
(London, 1981).
3 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Edinburgh, 1820), pp. 195, 561.
4 Washington Irving, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey (London, 1835),
pp. 233–4.
5 There is a large literature on the history of royal forests. See for example:
Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Philadelphia, pa,
1979); Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland (London, 1980); Rackham,
The Last Forest: The Story of Hatfield Forest (London, 1989); N.D.G. James,
A History of English Forestry (London, 1981); John Langton and Graham
Jones, Forests and Chases of England and Wales, c. 1000 – c. 1500 (Oxford,
2010); Mary Wiltshire et al., Duffield Frith: History and Evolution of a
Medieval Derbyshire Forest (Ashbourne, 2005).
6 Stephanos Mastoris and Sue Groves, Sherwood Forest in 1609: A Crown
Survey by Richard Bankes (Nottingham, 1997).
7 Jacob George Strutt, ‘Introduction’, in Sylva Britannica (London, 1826).
8 J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London, 1982).
9 Charles Watkins,‘“A Solemn and Gloomy Umbrage”: Changing
Interpretations of the Ancient Oaks of Sherwood Forest’, in European
Woods and Forests: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Watkins
(Wallingford, 1998), pp. 93–114.
10 ‘The Fourteenth Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into
the State and Condition of the Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues of the
Crown, and to Sell or Alienate Fee Farm and Other Unimproveable Rents’,
House of Commons Journal, 48 (1793), p. 469.
11 Ibid., p. 469.
12 Ibid., pp. 473, 509.
13 Ibid., p. 481.
14 Ibid., pp. 473, 481.
15 Ibid., pp. 472–3.
16 Ann Gore and George Carter, Humphry Repton’s Memoirs (Norwich, 2005),
p. 106; Hayman Rooke, A Sketch of the Ancient and Present Extent of
Sherwood Forest, in the County of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1799),
incorporated material from the Commissioners Report on Sherwood Forest
of 1791 and the results of some of his archaeological work.
17 Rooke, Sketch, pp. 5–6.
18 Evelyn, Sylva (1670), pp. 159–60.

288
 References

19 Rooke, Sketch, pp. 16–17.

20 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
21 William Howitt, ‘Sherwood Forest’, in The Rural Life of England (London,
1838), pp. 383, 387, 385.
22 January Searle, Leaves from Sherwood Forest (London, 1850), pp. 71–2.
23 Christopher Thomson, Autobiography of an Artisan (London, 1847),
pp. 301–2.
24 Christopher Thomson, Hallamshire Scrapbook, 4.
25 Anonymous, Worksop, ‘The Dukery’ and Sherwood Forest (London, 1850)
p. 244; E. Eddison, History of Worksop: With Historical, Descriptive and
Discursive Sketches of Sherwood Forest (London, 1854), pp. 194–5.
26 Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Beautiful Genius Ivan Turgenev’, in Memories and
Impressions (London, 1971), p. 129.
27 F. Sissons, Beauties of Sherwood Forest (Worksop, 1888), p. 58.
28 Searle, Leaves, pp. 72, 104.
29 Victoria County History of Nottinghamshire (London, 1908), vol. i, p. 93.
30 Ibid., p. 100.
31 Ibid., p. 156.
32 W. J. Sterland, The Birds of Sherwood Forest (London, 1869), p. 144.
33 Sissons, Sherwood Forest, p. 2.
34 Nottingham University Manuscripts Department (numd) ma 2s 7,
p. 117.
35 Sissons, Sherwood Forest, p. 71.
36 Joseph Rodgers, Sherwood Forest (London, 1908), p. 16; Nottingham
University Manuscripts Department (numd) ma 2c 132.
37 numd ma 2c 133; numd ma 2c 208.
38 numd ma 4e 81.
39 numd ma 3e 151.
40 James, English Forestry, p. 247.
41 numd ma 5e 211.
42 numd ma 5e 211.
43 numd ma 4a 7/41.
44 numd ma 4a 7/49/2.
45 numd ma 4a 7/56.
46 numd ma 4a 7/43.
47 numd ma 3e 4799.
48 numd ma 2a 94.
49 Interview with George Holt (1998).
50 Royal Forestry Society 1984.
51 numd ma 4a 7/41.
52 Brian Wood, ‘Land Management and Farm Structure: Spatial Organisation
on a Nottinghamshire Landed Estate and its Successors, 1860–1978’, PhD
Thesis (University of Nottingham, 1981).
53 Interview with John Irbe (1998).
54 numd ma 4a 7/41.
55 Nikolaus Pevsner, Nottinghamshire (London, 1979), p. 120. Architects Ian
Pryer, William Saunders and Partners 1973–6.
56 numd ma 4a 7/41.

289
 Trees, Woods and Forests

57 C. R. McLeod et al., The Habitats Directive: Selection of Special Areas of

Conservation in the uk, 2nd edn (Peterborough, 2005), www.jncc.gov.uk/
sacselection; Charles Watkins et al., ‘The Use of Dendrochronology to
Evaluate Dead Wood Habitats and Management Priorities for the Ancient
Oaks of Sherwood Forest’, in Forest Biodiversity: Lessons from History for
Conservation, ed. O. Honnay et al. (Wallingford, 2004), pp. 247–67.
58 Interview with Andrew Poole (1998).

y Seven: Estate Forestry

1 John Stoddart, Remarks on the Scenery and Manners in Scotland during the
Years 1799 and 1800 (Edinburgh, 1801). The drawing is by Hugh William
‘Grecian’ Williams, bm 1872,0413.289.
2 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Edinburgh, 1823), vol. ii,
p. 316.
3 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London, 1814), chapter 6.
4 D. Hudson and K. W. Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts: 1754–1954
(London, 1954), pp. 86–9.
5 Uvedale Price, Essays (London, 1810), vol. i, pp. 259–63.
6 J. C. Loudon, Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and
Ornamental Plantations (Edinburgh, 1804).
7 John Claudius Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (London,
1838), vol. i, pp. 1–2.
8 Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, ‘Picturesque Landscaping and Estate
Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829’, Rural History, 2
(1991), pp. 141–70; J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure
and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993). See also
Nicola Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places: Trees in the Early
Modern Landscape’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76 (2013), pp.
499–517; Carl Griffin, ‘Protest Practice and (Tree) Cultures of Conflict:
Understanding the Spaces of “Tree Maiming” in Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth-century England’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 33 (2008), pp. 91–108.
9 Tim Shakesheff, ‘Wood and Crop Theft in Rural Herefordshire, 1800–60’,
Rural History, 13 (2002), pp. 1–17, 14.
10 E.J.T. Collins, ‘Woodlands and Woodland Industries in Great Britain
during and after the Charcoal Iron Era’, in Protoindustries et Histoire des
Forêts, ed J.-P. Métaillé (Toulouse, 1992), pp. 109–20.
11 J. Main, The Forest Planter and Pruner’s Assistant (London, 1839); J. West,
Remarks on the Management or Rather the Mismanagement of Woods,
Plantations and Hedgerow Timber (London, 1842); J. Standish and C. Noble,
Practical Hints on Planting Ornamental Trees (London, 1852).
12 William Ablett, English Trees and Tree Planting (London, 1880),
p. 402.
13 Tom Bright, Pole Plantations and Underwoods (London, 1888), pp. 20–21.
14 J. Nisbet, James Brown’s The Forester, 6th edn (London, 1894), vol. i,
p. 44.
15 J. Nisbet, The Forester (London, 1905), vol. i, p. 49.

290
 References

16 H. FitzRandolph and M. Hay, The Rural Industries of England and Wales

(Oxford, 1926); Herbert Edlin, Woodland Crafts in Britain (London, 1949);
Eastnor Estate coppice sale records, Eastnor Estate Muniments, 1933.
17 George Sinclair, Useful and Ornamental Planting (London, 1832), p. 2.
18 Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, 2000).
19 J.L.F. Fergusson, ‘Forestry in Perthshire: Notes on Past History’, Forestry,
29 (1956), pp. 84–5.
20 Ibid., p. 86.
21 H. M. Steven, ‘Silviculture of Conifers in Britain’, Forestry (1927), p. 9.
22 K. Garlick and A. Macintyre, ‘3 October 1801’, in The Diary of Joseph
Farington (New Haven, ct, and London, 1978–98), p. 1644.
23 Richard Moore-Colyer, ‘Thomas Johnes (1748–1816)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); William Linnard, Welsh Woods and
Forests (Llandysul, 2000), Peniarth ms 28.
24 Price, Essays, vol. i, p. 26.
25 Ibid., pp. 265–6.
26 Ibid., pp. 26–7.
27 Ibid., pp. 273–6.
28 Charles Watkins and Ben Cowell, ‘Letters of Uvedale Price’, Walpole
Society, 68 (2006).
29 Price, Essays, vol. i, pp. 270–73.
30 John Claudius Loudon, Hints on the Formation of Gardens and Pleasure-
grounds with Designs in Various Styles of Rural Embellishment (London,
1812).
31 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Gardening (London, 1830), p. 943.
32 Sophieke Piebenga, ‘William Sawrey Gilpin’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
33 R. Monteath, The Forester’s Guide and Profitable Planter, 2nd edn
(Edinburgh, 1824); A. C. Forbes, English Estate Forestry (London, 1904),
pp. 16–17.
34 Linnard, Welsh Woods, pp. 160–61.
35 Forbes, English Forestry, p. 318.
36 Ibid.
37 J. Brown, The Forester, 4th edn (Edinburgh, 1871), advertisement, p. 836.
38 Forbes, English Forestry, p. 17.
39 Brown, Forester, p. 568.
40 J. Brown, The Forester (Edinburgh, 1851), pp. 138, 420.
41 Loudon, Plantations; Jane Loudon, A Short Account of the Life and Writings
of John Claudius Loudon (London, 1845), pp. xiii–xvi.
42 Paul Elliott et al., ‘William Barron (1805–91) and Nineteenth-century
British Arboriculture: Evergreens in Victorian Industrializing Society’,
Garden History, 35 supplement 2 (2008), pp. 129–48.
43 William Barron, The British Winter Garden (London, 1853), pp. 9–24.
44 ‘Champion Trees’, at www.bicton.ac.uk.
45 Thomas Baines, ‘Eastnor Castle, Ledbury: The Seat of Earl Somers’,
Gardeners’ Chronicle, 19 January (1878), p. 76.
46 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye . . . 2nd edn (London, 1789),
p. 6.

291
 Trees, Woods and Forests

47 Colin Ellis, Leicestershire and the Quorn Hunt (Leicester, 1951), p. 61.
48 J. Otho Paget, Hunting (London, 1900), pp. 81–4.
49 C. C. Rogers, ‘Pheasant Management and Shooting in Hill Countries’,
in Shooting, ed. Horace G. Hutchinson (London, 1903), p. 55.
50 Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England (London, 1980), pp. 15, 59,
228–9.
51 Ibid., pp. 228–9.
52 Alexander J. Napier, ‘Pheasants at Holkham’, in Shooting, ed. Horace G.
Hutchinson (London, 1903), pp. 35–6.
53 John Simpson, Game and Game Coverts (Sheffield, 1907).
54 Rogers, ‘Pheasant Management’, pp. 59–64.
55 C. J. Cornish, ‘Pheasants at Nuneham’, in Shooting, ed. Hutchinson, p. 45.
56 Jonathan Garnier Ruffer, The Big Shots (London, 1977), pp. 79–81.
57 J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. v (1860), in Selections from the Writings
of John Ruskin (Edinburgh, 1907), pp. 79–81.
58 John Ruskin to John Davidson, 24 February 1887, in Transactions of the
English Arboricultural Society (1887), pp. 156–7.

y Eight: Scientific Forestry

1 Hannss Carl von Carlowitz, Sylvicultura Oeconomica (Leipzig, 1713);
Christoph Ernst ‘An Ecological Revolution? The “Schlagwaldwirtschaft” in
Western Germany in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in European
Woods and Forests: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Watkins
(Wallingford, 1998), pp. 83–92.
2 Ibid., pp. 84, 90.
3 Richard Keyser, ‘The Transformation of Traditional Woodland
Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne’, French
Historical Studies, 32 (2009), pp. 353–84, 356, 361.
4 Ibid., pp. 366, 368.
5 Ibid., pp. 366, 368, 372, 375.
6 Ibid., pp. 379–80.
7 Ibid., pp. 356–7, 380, 384.
8 Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern
Germany (Cambridge, 2006), p. 171; Joachim Radkau, ‘Wood and Forest
in German History: In Quest of an Environmental Approach’, Environment
and History, 2 (1996), pp. 63–76, 65.
9 Radkau, ‘Wood and Forest’, p. 66.
10 Ibid., pp. 71–2.
11 Gregory Barton, ‘Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism’,
Journal of Historical Geography, 27 (2001), pp. 529–52.
12 David Prain, ‘Brandis, Sir Dietrich (1824–1907)’, revd M. Rangarajan,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); R. S. Troup,
‘Schlich, Sir William Philipp Daniel (1840–1925)’, revd Andrew Grout,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
13 William Schlich, A Manual of Forestry (London, 1889–95) vol. i, pp. v–vii.
14 Troup, ‘Schlich’.
15 Schlich, Forestry, vol. iii, p. ix.

292
 References

16 Dr Richard Hess, Professor of Forestry, University of Geissen; Dr Karl

Gayer, Professor of Forestry, University of Munich.
17 John Nisbet, Studies in Forestry (Oxford, 1894), pp. vii–viii.
18 J. M. Powell, ‘“Dominion over Palm and Pine”: The British Empire
Forestry Conferences, 1920–47’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007),
pp. 852–77.
19 Karen Hovde, ‘Charles Sprague Sargent’, Forest History Today (Spring
2002), pp. 38–9; Barton, ‘Empire Forestry’.
20 Charles Sprague Sargent, Garden and Forest, 9 (1896) pp. 191–2, quoted
by Barton, ‘Empire Forestry’, p. 540.
21 Barton, ‘Empire Forestry’, pp. 541, 542; Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New
Ground (Washington, dc, 1998), p. 27.
22 Carl Alwin Schenck Photograph Series mc35, nscu Library, note on reverse
of photograph of Frederick Law Olmsted, at www.lib.ncsu.edu; Carl Alwin
Schenck, Cradle of Forestry in America: The Biltmore Forest School,
1898–1913 (Durham, nc, 2001).
23 A. B. Recknagel, The Theory and Practice of Working Plans, 2nd edn
(New York, 1917), p. v.
24 John Simpson, The New Forestry (Sheffield, 1903).
25 A. C. Forbes, The Development of British Forest (1910), p. 252; N.D.G.
James, A History of English Forestry (London, 1981); N.D.G. James, ‘A
History of Forestry and Monographic Forestry Literature in Germany,
France and the United Kingdom’, in The Literature of Forestry and
Agroforestry, ed. P. McDonald and J. Lassoie (New York, 1996), pp. 15–44;
Judith Tsouvalis and Charles Watkins, ‘Imagining and Creating Forests in
Britain 1890–1939,’ in Forest History: International Studies on Socio-
Economic and Forest Ecosystem Change, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and
S. Anderson (Wallingford, 2000), pp. 371–86.
26 James, English Forestry, p. 75.
27 Thomas Bewick, Quarterly Journal of Forestry (1914); William Schlich,
‘Report on the Visit of Royal English Arboricultural Society to German
Forests’, Quarterly Journal of Forestry, 8 (1914), pp. 75–81.
28 David E. Evans, ‘Robinson, Roy Lister, Baron Robinson
(1883–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004);
G. B. Ryle, Forest Service: The First Forty-five Years of the Forestry
Commission of Great Britain (Newton Abbot, 1969), pp. 21–2.
29 Evans, ‘Roy Robinson’; James, English Forestry, p. 196. Anon., ‘Report on
the reas Meeting in September 1916 on the Present Position and Future
Development of Forestry in England and Wales’, Quarterly Journal of
Forestry, 11 (1917), pp. 20–58.
30 John V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England: 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986);
David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London,
1996).
31 Myfanwy Piper, ‘Nash, Paul (1889–1946)’, revd Andrew Causey, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
32 Andrew Causey, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Nash: Paintings and Watercolours
(London, 1975).
33 Ryle, Forest Service, p. 23.

293
 Trees, Woods and Forests

34 Ibid., pp. 26–8.

35 Ibid., pp. 43, 28.
36 Forestry Commission, Forestry Practice: Forestry Commission Bulletin 14
(London, 1933); R. F. Wood and M. Nimmo, Chalk Downland
Afforestation: Forestry Commission Bulletin 34 (London, 1962), Foreword.

y Nine: Recreation and Conservation

1 Kim Novak interview with Stephen Rebello, March 2003,
www.labyrinth.net.au.
2 Wilson E. Albee in San Jose Mercury, 22 April 1917, quoted by Eugene
T. Sawyer, Santa Clara County, California (Los Angeles, ca, 1922), p. 206.
3 Big Basin Redwoods State Park California, 2011 Leaflet, at
www.parks.ca.gov.
4 Dennis R., ‘Dean Muir, John (1838–1914)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004); Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life
of John Muir (Oxford, 2008).
5 Sue Shephard, ‘Lobb, William (1809–1863)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography Worster, Passion.
6 George Gordon, The Pinetum, 2nd edn (London, 1875), pp. 414–16;
William J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, 7th edn
(London, 1951), vol. iii, pp. 303–5.
7 National Gallery of Art, Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception,
www.nga.gov.
8 John Auwaerter and John Sears, Historic Resource Study for Muir Woods
National Monument (Boston, 2006), p. 59.
9 Worster, Passion, p. 170.
10 John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston, 1901).
11 Ronald A. Bosco and Glen M. Johnson, Journals and Miscellaneous
Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, ma, 1982) vol. xvi,
12 May 1871, pp. 237–9.
12 Muir, National Parks.
13 Auwaerter and Sears, Muir Woods, pp. 41–3.
14 Ibid., pp. 48–50.
15 F. E. Olmsted, Muir National Monument Redwood Canyon: Marin County,
California, unpublished report, 26 September 1907, pp. 4–5, Muir Woods
Park Files, quoted in Auwaerter and Sears, Muir Woods, p. 73.
16 William Kent, ‘Redwoods’, Sierra Club Bulletin, 6 (June 1908),
pp. 286–7.
17 A. MacEwen and M. MacEwen, National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics?
(London, 1982).
18 The National Archives tna f18 162, Forestry Commission Mimeograph (1929).
19 Ibid.
20 George Revill and Charles Watkins, ‘Educated Access: Interpreting Forestry
Commission Forest Park Guides’, in Rights of Way: Policy, Culture and
Management, ed. Charles Watkins (London, 1996), pp. 100–128.
21 Forestry Commission, Report of the National Forest Park Committee 1935
(London, 1935), pp. 2–6.

294
 References

22 Internal report written by Sir Roy Robinson for Sir Francis Acland
(Commissioner, 1919–39), on the Forestry Commissioners’ contributions
towards the idea underlying National Parks, c. 1936.
23 Hansard, 9 December 1936, p. 2105.
24 J. R. Aaron, ‘H. L. Edlin, mbe’, Forestry, 55 (1977), pp. 203–5.
25 H. L. Edlin, ‘Fifty Years of Forest Parks’, Commonwealth Forestry Review,
48 (1969), pp. 113–26, 125.
26 Forestry Commission, Thirtieth Annual Report of the Forestry Commissioners
for the Year Ending 30th September 1949 (London, 1950), p. 87.
27 Forestry Commission, Thirty-second Annual Report of the Forestry
Commissioners for the Year Ending 30 September 1951 (London, 1952), p. 50.
28 Forestry Commission, National Forest, p. 5.
29 Forestry Commission, Report of the National Forest Park Committee (Forest
of Dean) (London, 1938), pp. 4–6.
30 W. E. S. Mutch, Public Recreation in National Forests: A Factual Survey
(London, 1968), p. 83.
31 Edlin, ‘Fifty Years’, p. 125.
32 William Wordsworth, ‘A Guide through the District of the Lakes’ (1835),
in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed. J. Hayden (London, 1988), p. 57.
33 Miles Hadfield, Landscape with Trees (London, 1967), p. 181.
34 H. H. Symonds, Afforestation in the Lake District: A Reply to the Forestry
Commission’s White Paper of 26 August 1936 (London, 1936), pp. 51, 16.
35 Edlin, ‘Fifty Years’, pp. 117, 116.
36 Alan Horne, ‘Rooke, Noel (1881–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
37 John Walton, The Border Forest Park Guide (London, 1962), p. 1.
38 John Moore, Wood Properties and Uses of Sitka Spruce in Britain
(Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 1–2.
39 H. L. Edlin, ‘Britain’s New Forest Villages’, Canadian Forestry Gazette
(1953), pp. 151–8.
40 Frank E. Lutz, Nature Trails: An Experiment in Outdoor Education,
Miscellaneous Publication 21, The American Museum of Natural History
(New York, 1926).
41 Ralph H. Lewis, Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service,
1904–1982, National Park Service (Washington, dc, 1993), p. 38.
42 Lutz, Nature Trails, p. 3.
43 Ibid., p. 36.
44 J. N. Rogers, Yosemite Nature Notes, 9 March (1930), p. 17, at
www.nps.gov.
45 David Matless et al., ‘Nature Trails: The Production of Instructive
Landscapes in Britain, 1960–72’, Rural History, 21 (2010), pp. 97–131.

y Ten: Ligurian Semi-natural Woodland

1 Diego Moreno, Dal Documento: Storia e Archeologia dei Sistemi Agro-Sylvo-
Pastorali (Bologna, 1990); Ross Balzaretti et al., Ligurian Landscapes: Studies
in Archaeology, Geography and History (London, 2004); Roberta Cevasco,
Memoria Verde: Nuovi Spazi per La Geografia (Reggio Emilia, 2007).

295
 Trees, Woods and Forests

2 asp Uff. Confini, b.266/1. Paulo De Podio, public notary, 27/09/1564

(Reference provided by Roberta Cevasco).
3 Diego Moreno and Osvaldo Raggio, ‘The Making and Fall of an Intensive
Pastoral Land-use System: Eastern Liguria, 16–19th Centuries’, Rivista di
Studi Liguri, lvi (1990), pp. 193–217, 196.
4 Ibid., p. 204.
5 Archivio De Paoli, Porciorasco, n. 8, Museo Contadini, Cassego.
6 Archivio De Paoli, Porciorasco, n. 13, Museo Contadini, Cassego.
7 The coring was done by Roberta Cevasco, Diego Moreno and Charles
Watkins; the ring counting was undertaken by Robert Howard,
Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory.
8 M. Conedera et al., ‘The Cultivation of Castanea Sativa (Mill.) in Europe,
from its Origin to its Diffusion on a Continental Scale’, Vegetation History
and Archaeobotany, 13 (2004), pp. 161–79, 165.
9 Nick P. Branch, ‘Late Würm Lateglacial and Holocene Environmental
History of the Ligurian Apennines, Italy’, in Ligurian Landscapes: Studies
in Archaeology, Geography and History, ed Ross Balzaretti et al. (London,
2004), p. 57.
10 Conedera et al., p. 61.
11 Ross Balzaretti, Dark Age Liguria (London, 2013), p. 57.
12 Enzo Baraldi et al., ‘Ironworks Economy and Woodmanship Practices,
Chestnut Woodland Culture in Ligurian Apennines (16–19th C.)’, in
Protoindustries et Histoire des Forêts, ed. Jean-Paul Métaillé (Toulouse,
1990), pp. 135–50.
13 Cécile Robin and Ursula Heiniger, ‘Chestnut Blight in Europe: Diversity
of Cryphonectria Parasitica, Hypovirulence and Biocontrol’, Journal of Forest
Snow and Landscape Research, 76 (2001) pp. 361–7.
14 Carlo Montanari et al., Note Illustrative Della Carta Della Vegetazione
dell’Alta Val di Vara, Supplemento agli atti dell’Istituto Botanico e Laboratorio
Crittogamico dell’Universita di Pavia, Serie 7, 6 (1987).
15 Charles Watkins, ‘The Management History and Conservation of Terraces
in the Val di Vara, Liguria’, in Ligurian Landscapes: Studies in Archaeology,
Geography and History, ed. Ross Balzaretti, Mark Pearce and Charles
Watkins (London, 2004), pp. 141–54.
16 Diego Moreno, ‘Liguria’, in Paesaggi Rurali Storici per un Catalogo
Nazionale, ed. Mauro Agnoletti (Rome, 2010), pp. 180–203, 185.
17 See www.wildenerdale.co.uk and www.rewildingeurope.com.

y Afterword
1 Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography
(Cambridge, 1989); George F. Peterken, Natural Woodland (London,
1996); George F. Peterken, Meadows (Gillingham, 2013).
2 Colin Tudge, The Secret Life of Trees (London, 2005).
3 William Cobbett, The Woodlands (London, 1825) paragraph 323.
4 Forestry Commission Scotland, ‘Historic Woodland Survey at South Loch
Katrine’, www.forestry.gov.uk/histenvpolicy. The research was undertaken
by Coralie Mills, Peter Quelch and Mairi Stewart.

296
 References

5 Louis Gil, Pablo Fuentes-Utrilla, Álvara Soto, M. Teresa Cervera and

Carmen Collada, ‘English Elm is a 2,000-year-old Roman Clone’, Nature,
431 (28 October 2004), p. 1053.
6 Robert Lowe, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Nottingham
(London, 1798).
7 A complete history of spread of this disease and its identification, with a
distribution map, is at www.forestry.gov.uk/chalara.

297
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300
 m Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all members of my family and friends who have encouraged my
research for this book, which is dedicated to the memory of my parents Ken and Ruth
Watkins. Many friends and colleagues have provided help, assistance and advice
over the years and special thanks are due to: Professor Mauro Agnoletti, Dr Pantelis
Arvanitis, Dr Sallie Bailey, Dr Kostas Baginetas, Dr Ross Balzaretti, Dr Mark
Bradley, Dr Clive Brasier, Dr Raffaella Bruzzone, Dr Roberta Cevasco, Dr Fiona
Cooper, Professor Carl-Adam Hæggström, Sir Andrew and Lady Buchanan, Dr Harry
Cocks, Dr Fiona Cooper, Dr Ben Cowell, Professor Stephen Daniels, Major David
and Lindy Davenport, James Davenport, Dr Catharine Delano-Smith, Professor
Paul Elliott, Professor Georgina Endfield, Dr Robert Fish, Dr Somnath Ghosal,
Harry Gilonis, Dr Carl Griffin, Dr Richard Hamblyn, Dr Beryl Hartley, Dr Robert
Hearn, Professor Mike Heffernan, Dr Della Hooke, Robert Howard, Dr Nuala
Johnson, Dr Matthew Kempson, Dr Keith Kirby, Don Sandro Lagomarsini, Dr
Jack Langton, Dr Chris Lavers, Michael Leaman, Dr Stephen Legg, Norman Lewis
mbe, Dr Haydn Lorimer, Professor David Matless, Dr Peter Merriman, Professor
Jean-Paul Métaillé, Dr Paul Merchant, Dr Briony McDonagh, Professor Diego
Moreno, Professor Mark Pearce, Dr George Peterken, Dr Sandrine Petit, Pietro
Piana, Professor Pietro Piussi, Dr Clive Potter, Professor Oliver Rackham, Dr
George Revill, Dr Mark Riley, Dr Graham Riminton, Jeremy Rison, Dr Eirini
Saratsi, Dr Susanne Seymour, Professor Brian Short, Dr Emily Sloan, Susan Sloman,
Professor Chris Smout, Jonathan Spencer, Professor Setsu Tachibana, Dr Judith
Tsouvalis, Dr Alex Vasudevan, Dr Lucy Veale, Professor Frans Vera, Dr Paul
Warde, Elaine Watts, Dr Philip Wheeler, David Whitehead, Professor Tom
Williamson and Guy Woodford.
The following archives, libraries and galleries have been of great assistance:
Abbazia di S Colombano, Bobbio; Arni Magnusson Institute, Reykjavík; the
Athenaeum Library, London; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue
Pinakothek, Munich; Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library, London; British
Museum, London; Musée Condé, Chantilly; Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery,
London; Forest History Society, Durham, North Carolina; Hallward Library,
University of Nottingham; Herefordshire Record Office; Linnean Society of London;
Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris; Kunsthalle Hamburg; National
Gallery of Art, Washington, dc; Norfolk County Council; Paul Mellon Centre for

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Studies in British Art, London; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery, London; National
Portrait Gallery, London; Soane Museum, London; Society of Antiquaries of
London; South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano; Collection of Earl Spencer,
Althorp; Staatliche Museen, Berlin; Thoresby Estates, Nottinghamshire; Tate,
London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; National Art Library, Victoria &
Albert Museum, London.
I would also like to thank all my colleagues in the School of Geography,
University of Nottingham, for their help and support and the undergraduates and
research students at Nottingham who provide such a rich fund of knowledge and
enthusiasm. Of course, the best way of learning about trees, woods and forests is to
study and work with and in them. Hundreds of woods in Britain owned by organ-
izations such as the National Trust, the County Wildlife Trusts and the Woodland
Trust are open to the public. Many insights into woodland management and his-
tory can be gained by joining the Royal Forestry Society and attending the woodland
visits they organize every year.

302
 m Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of
illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it:

Althorp House, Northamptonshire (Spencer Collection): 46; Árni Magnússon

Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík (Ms. am 738 4to): 16; from Aaron
Arrowsmith, Plan of the Arboretum in the Garden of the Horticultural Society at
Chiswick, March 1826 (London, 1826): 31; photos author: 3, 51, 52, 53, 54, 65, 66,
77, 80, 99, 102, 105, 107, 111; photos Ross Balzaretti: 106, 109; British Museum,
London (photos © Trustees of the British Museum): 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 18, 20, 21, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 81;
from E. Adveno Brooke, The Gardens of England (London, 1857): 86; from James
Brown, The Forester: A Practical Treatise on the Planting, Rearing, and General
Management of Forest Trees . . . (Edinburgh and London, 1871): 85; from Mrs Comyns
Carr [Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr], North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town and Country
Life (London, 1878): 110; Derby Library (photos © Derby Museums Trust): 58,
84; Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris: 41; reproduced courtesy of the
Forest History Society, Durham, North Carolina: 91, 92, 98; from [Robert Goadby],
A New Display of the Beauties of England: or, a Description of the most Elegant or
Magnificent Public Edifices, Royal Palaces, Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Seats, and other
Curiosities, Natural or Artificial, in different Parts of the Kingdom . . . (London, 1773):
28; from Horace G. Hutchinson, Shooting (London, 1903): 88, 89, 90; Imperial War
Museum, London (photo © Imperial War Museum): 78; from A. H. Kent, Veitch’s
Manual of the Coniferæ: containing a general review of the order; a synopsis of the species
cultivated in Great Britain; their botanical history, economic properties, place and use
in arboriculture, etc., etc. (London, 1900): 87; Kunsthalle Hamburg: 42; Los Angeles
County Museum, reproduced by permission of Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(lacma) Image Library (image Museum Associates/ lacma): 97; from John Claudius
Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum: or, the Trees and Shrubs of Britain,
Native and Foreign, Hardy and Half-hardy, Pictorially and Botanically Delineated,
and Scientifically and Popularly Described . . . (London, 1838): 24, 25, 26; from John
Claudius Loudon, An Encyclopædia of Gardening: comprising the theory and practice
of horticulture, floriculture, arboriculture, and landscape-gardening, including all the
latest improvements . . . (London, 1830): 83; from Robert Monteath, The Forester’s

303
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Guide and Profitable Planter: containing a practical treatise on planting moss, rocky,
waste, and other lands; also a new, easy, and safe plan of transplanting large trees, and of
valuing growing wood and trees of all descriptions . . . (Edinburgh, 1824): 112; Musée
Condé, Chantilly: 35; Museum of Modern Art, New York: 44; National Gallery,
London: 70, 71, 76; National Museum of Art, Washington, dc: 33; National Portrait
Gallery, London (© National Portrait Gallery): 27; National Railway Museum,
York: 74; private collection: 82; photo Edwin Rose (© Norfolk County Council):
5; from George Sanderson, Map of the Country Twenty Miles Round Mansfield,
comprising parts of the counties of Nottingham, Derby, York, Lincoln and Leicester,
shewing the fields and characteristic features of the district . . . from actual survey made
in the years 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833, & 1834 (Mansfield, Notts, 1835): 56; from
Shimada Mitsufusa and Ono Ranzan, Kai (Tokyo, 1759–63): 34; South Tyrol
Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano: 2; Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Gemäldegalerie):
17; photos Setsu Tachibana: 22, 23, 30; from Christopher Thomson, The
Hallamshire scrap book: containing views of Hallamshire, Derbyshire, Notts., and
adjoining counties, with brief descriptive letter-press . . . (Sheffield, 1857?): 59, 60;
from Transactions of the Dublin Society . . ., vol. ii, part 2 (1801): 29; from John
Walton, The Border (London, 1958): 101; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester: 45;
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (Paul Mellon Collection): 19.

Panegyrics of Granovetter, the copyright holder of illus. 6, has published it online

under conditions imposed by a Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
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304
 m Index

Abbotsford 79, 141 Antinous 38

Ablett, William 181 Apollinaris, Domitius 25
Acer campestre 123, 182, 274 arboreta 73–7
Acer criticum 124 Arcadia 29
Acer negundo 67 Argyll, 3rd Duke of 72
Acer platanoides 18 Aristotle 29
Achaeans 31 Arnold Arboretum 83, 213, 231
Acland, Francis Dyke 221–2 Artaxerxes i, King of Persia 43
acorns 26–8, 32, 54, 94, 119, 126–7, ash 15, 18, 21, 29–31, 43, 46–8, 70,
206, 248, 256 90, 115, 119, 121, 128–31, 135,
Adam of Bremen 48 182, 184, 191, 204, 252, 254,
Aelfric 50 257–8, 265, 271–4
Aeneas 40–42 Asius 30–31
Ætheling, Edgar 52 assarting 57, 59
Agamemnon 31 Athanasius, St 50
agricultural depression 199, 219 Atholl, Dukes of 175, 184
agricultural intensification 269 Atkinson, William 79
Aias 31 Atlas, Mount 78
Ajax 31 ‘Auraucaria Avenue at Bicton, The’ 87
Alcinous 32 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park 176–7, 198
Alcock, Rutherford 85
alder 19–23, 119, 121, 128, 131, 177, Bagot, Ralph 60
223, 252, 269, 271, 274 Banister, John 66
Alexander the Great 13, 29, 36 Bankes, Richard 143
Alfonso xii, King of Spain 201 bark 17–18, 24, 26, 30, 85, 89–91,
Altdorfer, Albrecht, Landscape with 94–5, 98, 113, 150, 157, 182,
Spruce and Two Willows 95, 37 233, 274
Ancient Tree Forum 139 Barron, William 193
ancient woodland 12, 21, 159–60, Bartram, John 73
172, 180, 203 Bathurst, Lord 72
Anderson, James 133 Bean, William Jackson 76
Anne, Queen 65 bear 37–8, 50, 122
Antilochus 32 Bedford, 6th Duke of 76, 183

305
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beech 18, 28, 31, 43, 70, 94, 100, 104, Burke, Edmund 107
107, 113, 121, 128, 131, 176, Burnham Beeches 118
184–6, 206–7, 223 Byron, Lord 141, 152
beetles 138, 159, 173, 274
Bellini, Giovanni 95 Caldecott, Randolph, Gathering the
Assassination of St Peter the Martyr Chestnuts 110
76 Call, John 144
Madonna of the Meadows 71 Callitrus quadrivalus 33
Bentham, Jeremy 179 Canadian Forestry Corps 221
Bewick, Thomas 242 Cantalupo, Margery de 60
Red Deer Stag 68 carbon sequestration 268
Biddulph, John 135 Carlos i, King of Portugal 201
Bierstadt, Albert, Grizzly Giant Sequoia Carlowitz, Hanss Carl von 204
97 Carr, Alice Comyns 262
Big Basin Redwoods Park 225 Carr, John 157
Bilhagh 144, 145–8, 153, 160 Carracci, Annibale, Garden of Eden 13
Biltmore 214 Carter, James 155
birch 18–19, 140, 145, 159, 171, 271, Castagno de Cento Cavalli 91–2
274 Catesby, Mark 68
Birklands 144, 145, 145–8, 153, 155–6, Cato, Marcus Porcius 28
160, 172 cattle 28–9, 32, 73, 120, 129, 133,
Birnam Wood 167, 175 173, 205, 252–4, 269–71
blackthorn 128, 197, 259, 260 cedar 30, 36, 72–8, 194, 202–3
Blake, Thomas 242 Central Park 229
Bledisloe, Lord 234 Chalara fraxinea 90, 274
boar, wild 15, 32–3, 37–9, 55–6, 267, Chambers, Thomas, Mount Auburn
20, 21 Arboretum 33
Board of Agriculture 115, 132, 217–18 Champagne, Countess Blanche of 207
Bohun, Humphrey de 62 charcoal 19, 50, 121, 178, 180, 262
Borysthenes 38 Chatsworth 80
box 33, 157, 193 Cheiron 31
Boy with Horse 7 chestnut, sweet 15, 29, 70, 92, 128,
bracken 153, 159, 173, 222 131, 171, 182, 247, 254–66
Brandis, Sir Dietrich 210–14, 211 Christ 48, 99
breck 140, 145 Cicero 34
Breckland 11, 222 Circe 32
Breuteuil, Evrard de 50 Clark, Galen 229
Bright, Tom 181 Clark, John 132
British Mycological Society 159 Clarke, George 145–7
Brown, James 190–92, 192 Claude 105–9, 114, 187
Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 108 clearance 7, 15, 59, 137, 169
browsing 9, 120–22, 205, 250 Clipstone Archway School 61
Bruegel, Pieter, Woodland Scene with Clumber Park 148
Bears 96, 38 clumps 8, 77–80, 179, 187, 197–9
Brydone, Patrick 91–3 coal 133, 136, 160, 180, 221
Bucephalus 37 Cobbett, William 270
Bunbury, Henry William, Hop Pickers Coleman, William 77
81 Collinson, Peter 73

306
 Index

Columbanus, St 248 Downton 92

Columella, Lucius Junius 29, 271 druids 149
common land 119, 128, 137, 205, Dryden, John 69
264, 269 Dukes Wood 271–5, 272
Compton, Henry 65–8 Duleep Singh, Maharajah 201
Conness, John 228 Dunkeld 88, 184
Constable, John 102, 105 Dunstall, John, Pollard Oak 72
Cook, Moses 129, 131 Dürer, Albrecht 95–6
coppice 26–8, 114, 177, 180–82, 190, Adam and Eve 14
200–209, 216–17, 264–5, 271–3, Pine Trees 36
112 Spruce 69
coppicing 11–13, 26, 181–2, 206–8, Dutch elm disease 10, 274, 286
264, 269, 273
Corydon 43 Eastnor 67, 77, 77, 182, 195
Costa dei Ghiffi 102 Eden 43, 45, 99, 101
Cotta, Heinrich 209 Edlin, Herbert 238, 240–45
Coughton, Constance of 60 Edward i, King 56, 62
Council for the Preservation of Rural Ellis, William 131
England 237, 241 elm 15, 19, 21, 28–30, 46, 71, 80, 119,
Courthope, Sir George 235–7 128–35, 184, 191, 195, 271, 274
Coventry, Andrew 179 Elvaston Castle 77, 80, 193, 194
Cowper, William 177 Elwes, Henry John 86–7
Cozens, John Robert 92 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 226–30
Craig, William 117 Ennerdale 267
Cryphonectria parasitica 263 Epping Forest 128, 137, 166
Cryptomeria japonica 195 Erica arborea 253, 265
Cullum, Rev Sir Thomas Gery 117 Etna, Mount 91–2
cultural landscape 15, 268 eu Habitats Directive 173
Cupressus macrocarpa 77 Euryalus 42
Cytisus scoparius 265 Evelyn, John 130–31, 150–51, 27
excarnation 25
Dalhousie, 10th Earl of 210
dead wood 173, 179 faggots 94, 121, 159
Death of Euryalus 11 Farington, Joseph 184
Death of William Rufus 18 Father of the Forest Tree 95
Dedication Scheme 169 Feckenham Forest 55–63
deer 18, 37, 42, 52–62, 115, 129, fig 27–8, 250
146–8, 156, 205, 209, 267 firewood 28–9, 59, 119, 121, 130–37,
Dehra Dun 212 147, 153, 179, 180, 204–6, 229,
dendrochronology 8, 22, 40, 150, 173, 254–7, 273–4
224, 256, 260, 271 First World War 14, 203, 215, 219
Derby Arboretum 80–82 Fisher, W. R. 212
Despenser, Almeric le 60 fitz Nigel, Richard 62
Diana 39–40 Flag Fen 20–24
Domesday Book 177 Fomes fomentarius 17
Douglas, David 242 Forbes, A. C. 190, 216
Douglas fir 87, 89, 195, 233, 241, 24 Fordyce, John 144
Downing, Andrew Jackson 82–3, 231 Forest Charter 54–5

307
 Trees, Woods and Forests

Forest of Dean 10, 52, 56, 143, 146, Harrington, Earls of 193
177, 216–18, 234–40 Hartig, Georg Ludwig 210
Forestry Commission 10–12, 88–9, Hatfield Forest 128
160, 169–73, 222–3, 234–42, Havelock, General Henry 211
267, 271, 274 Havelock, Rachel 211
Fortune, Robert 77 hawthorn 119, 128, 131, 195, 256
fox hunting 14, 177, 196–7, 203 hay 119, 121, 253–60, 265, 269
Foxley 103, 114 Hayachine Mountain 9, 161
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 201 hazel 18–22, 28, 119, 182, 260, 271
Frazer, Sir James 40 Hearne, Thomas, Oak Trees, Downton
Fuji, Mount 85–6 134, 73
Fulham Palace 65, 66 heathlands 11, 222, 269
hedgerows 10, 13–14, 52, 104, 115,
Gainsborough, Thomas 93, 102–5 119, 128–36, 177–9, 184–5, 190,
Beech Trees at Foxley 45 195, 203, 271, 274
William Poyntz 46 Henry i, King 54
Gastineau, Henry, Hafod House 82 Henry ii, King 54
Gayer, Karl 212 Henry iii, King 55
Geerten tot Sint Jons, John the Baptist 17 Hess, Richard 212
Genista salzmannii 264 Hill, Andrew 225
Gilpin, William 93, 108–15, 152, 196 Hillingdon 70
Pollard 49 Hitchcock, Alfred 224
Unbalanced Tree 48 Hogarth, William 107
Gilpin, William Sawrey 189 Holford, Robert 195
Gladwin, John 145 Holkham shooting plan 88
Glasnevin 73, 29 Holroyd, Charles, Eve and the Serpent 1
Glastonbury Abbey 21 holly 21, 128, 193
goats 8, 29, 37, 43, 73, 120–28, 249–50 Holt, George 170
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 92 Homer 30–32
Gooch, Mrs Elizabeth Sarah Villa Real hop poles 181, 272
141 hornbeam 28, 71, 122–3, 128, 131,
Gore, Charles 92 138, 252–60
Gray, Thomas 108 hornbeam, hop 19, 123, 252, 256–61
grazing 9, 11, 14, 23, 120–22, 127, Horticultural Society 79–80, 242
145–7, 170–73, 200–207, 222, Houël, Jean-Pierre 92
242, 247, 255–69 Hovey, Charles 82
Grindal, Edmund 65 Howitt, William 152
Grizzly Giant Sequoia 228 Humboldt, Alexander von 226
Gwydyr Forest 241 hunting 10, 13, 26, 32–55, 60–63, 94,
143, 148, 183, 196–9, 205–8,
Hackert, Jakob Philipp 92 216–19, 230, 240, 271
Hadfield, Miles 240
Hadrian, Emperor 13, 36, 38–9 Ice Man 17–19
Hafod 185, 190 Idomeneus 30
Hall, Spencer 152 Indian Forest Service 212
Hardwick Hall 149 Interstate Palisades Park 246
Hardy, Thomas 182 Irving, Washington 141, 152
Harriman, W. A. 246 ivy 33, 115, 131, 261

308
 Index

James ii, King 65 Loddiges, George 79

Jerome, St 96 London, George 66
John i, King 54, 63 London, Jack 230
Johnes, Thomas 185 lopping 121, 130–39, 147, 256
Johnson, Samuel 91, 175 Lopping Hall 138
Jones, Noah 81 Loudon, John Claudius 65, 69, 74, 80,
Jones, Thomas, Dido and Aeneas 10 179, 188
On the Banks of Lake Nemi 67 Lucan 34
Judeich, Friedrich 212 Lutz, Frank 245
juniper 43, 122, 193–4, 256–7, 265 Lycia 27

Kaempfer, Engelbert 84–5 Mackley, George 241–2

Kalm, Pehr 72 In the Sprucewoods 100
Katrine, Loch 271 Border National Forest Park 101
Kent, Nathaniel 136 Magnolia virginiana 67
Kent, William 107, 231 Main, James 117, 180
Kew 71, 76 Major Oak 155, 158, 160
Kielder Forest 240–42 Mantegna 95
Killerton redwoods 232 Manvers, 3rd Earl 155–59
Kin sen shou 34 Manwood, John 55
Knight, Richard Payne 92, 102, 185 Mariposa Grove 226
Marshall, William 131
Labour Party 172 Martin, John, Fall of Man 12
Lagorara Valley 108 Mason, William 108, 110
Lake District 10, 108, 237, 240–41, meadows 26–8, 35, 50, 121, 268–9
267 Meiggs, Russell 26–7
land abandonment 14, 247, 256–9, Meliboeus 43
264–7 Menzies, Archibald 242
Langley, Batty 129 Middleton, Charles 144
larch 13, 18, 85–9, 176, 184–91, 203, Middleton, John 132, 136
223, 240–41, 26 Miller, Philip 71
Laudine, Lady 50 Millhouse, Robert 152
Lawson, William 112 Milton, John 187
leaf fodder 13, 115, 119–28, 133–6, mistletoe 40, 42, 149
247–50, 266 Monteath, Robert, ‘Coppice Trees’ 112
Leonteus 31 Mornington, 4th Earl of 137
Lievens, Jan, Landscape with Three Mortimer, John 130
Trees 41 Mortimer, Roger 63
Limbourg Brothers, December 35 Morton Bagot Church 22
lime 17, 21, 29, 71, 115, 119, 123 Mount Auburn 82, 83
Lincoln, Abraham 229 Mucianus, Licinius 27
Lindley, John 85, 227 Muir, John 225–34
Linnaeus, Carl 71–3 Muir National Monument 226, 232,
Linnard, William 190 233
lion 36–8, 98, 155
Liquidambar styraciflua 66 Nash, Paul, We Are Making a New
Lloyd George, David 217 World 220, 78
Lobb, William 77, 227 National Forest Park 10, 235–41

309
 Trees, Woods and Forests

National Park 229–31, 236–7, 246 Philip ii, King of Macedonia 36–7
nature trails 245 Philip ii, King of Macedonia 37
Nebuchadnezzar 36 Philip iv, King of France 207
Nehemiah 43 Phillyrea latifolia 124–6
Nemi 39–40 Phytophthora ramorum 89–90
Nestor 32 Picea abies 95
Neville, Hugh de 63 Picea sitchensis 11, 87, 223, 242–5
New England Sawmill Unit 221 Picturesque 13, 102–8
New Forest 10, 52–3, 109–15, 143, pigs 28, 32, 54–9, 73, 94, 153, 206, 248
146, 177, 218, 236 Pinchot, Gifford 213–14
Newcastle, 1st Duke of 148 pine 8, 18–19, 28, 30, 43, 71, 85–7,
Newfoundland Forestry Corps 221 95, 121, 151, 169, 177, 184–95,
Newstead Abbey 141, 55 203, 223, 229, 241
Nicholson, George 76 Pinus insignis 77
Nidhogg 46 Pinus nigra 160, 167
Nisbet, John 182, 212 Pinus pumila 9
Nisus 42 Pinus sylvestris 95, 169, 191–3, 203
Norway spruce 184, 223 Pitt, William the Younger 116
Nottingham Arboretum 32 plane 27, 32, 25
Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust 271 plantations 8, 11–15, 26–7, 80, 85–7,
Novak, Kim 224, 225 114, 148, 151, 160, 169–203,
November, San Colombano, Bobbio 103 216–17, 220, 223, 236–45, 250,
Nuneham, ‘Beaters Crossing the 267
Bridge’ 90 Pliny the Elder 23, 26, 34
Pliny the Younger 25, 26, 33
oak 18–30, 40, 43, 59, 70, 80, 91, 99, Pococke, Richard 72
101, 112–51, 156–60, 169–73, pollard 93, 96–105, 115–36, 144,
177, 182–6, 191, 195, 207, 233, 175–7, 248, 253, 257, 262, 271
248–56, 264–6, 271, 274 pollarding 13, 93, 115–38, 147, 250,
Òðinn 47–8 253, 256, 269
Odysseus 32 Polypoetes 31
olives 26, 261 Pomeroy, W. T. 132
Olmsted, Frederick Law 83, 214, poplar 21, 28–32, 43, 71, 121, 131
229–33 Portland, 3rd Duke of 148, 155–7, 201
Olympic Games 33 Poussin, Nicolas 109, 187
Otho, King of Greece 210 Price, Uvedale 88, 93, 103–16, 133–6,
Ottley, William, Study of Trees and 152, 177–89
Rocks, Ariccia 8 Price, Uvedale Tomkyns 103
Pterocarpus erinaceus 121
Paliama Monumental Olive Tree, public access 11–12, 56, 171, 178, 197,
Crete 65 230–45, 258
Pankrates 38
pasture 9–14, 17, 28, 35–7, 52–7, 93, Quercus cerris 123, 248, 255–6
119, 123, 143, 159, 170–75, 183, Quercus coccifera 124
205, 245–50, 256–8, 268 Quercus frainetto 123
Petre, 9th Lord 72 Quercus ilex 65, 124–5, 23
Peziza Willkommii 87 Quercus petraea 123, 252
pheasant 176, 196–203 Quercus robur 123

310
 Index

Ramblers’ Association 11, 237 Salvin, Anthony 156

Ray, John 65–6, 110 San Francisco Bohemian Club 230
Recknagel, Arthur 215 Sandby, Paul, Mr Whatman’s Paper
Recupero, Guiseppe 91–3 Mill 50
Rembrandt 96–9 Sanderson, George 272
St Jerome 39 Sargent, Charles 76, 86, 213, 231
Three Trees 40 Schenck, Carl Alwin 214, 215
Repton, Humphry 116, 149 Schiller, Friedrich 210
re-wilding 247, 267 Schlich, Sir William 210–18, 215, 221
Reynardson, Samuel 70 Scott, Sir Walter 79, 93, 140–43,
Rhododendron ponticum 89, 203 151–2, 156, 271
Richard i, King 54, 140, 155 Seahenge 25, 5
Richmond, 2nd Duke of 72 Searle, January 153–7
Robin Hood 140–43, 151, 155, 172 Second World War 122, 160, 169,
Robinia pseudoacacia 90, 110, 270, 78 171, 265
Robinson, Roy 218–221, 235–6 semi-natural vegetation 9, 267
Rodgers, Joseph 160 Sequoia giganteum 226–30
Rooke, Hayman 149–55 Sequoia sempervirens 9, 195, 224–32,
Plantations at Welbeck 58 225, 226, 227
Turkish Kiosk in Plantation, sheep 8, 17, 28–9, 37, 73, 120–33,
Farnsfield 84 147, 173, 205, 221, 249–50, 258,
Rooke, Noel 241 265–71
Roosevelt, Theodore 214, 230, 233 shepherds 124–28, 249
Rosa, Salvator 105–6, 109, 112 Sherwood Forest 11, 14, 118, 140–60,
Mercury and the Dishonest 169–74, 222, 79, 80
Woodsman 70 Shield, William 141
Study of Trees 47 shooting 14, 113, 176–7, 196–203,
rowan 119, 121 216–19, 267
Royal Boys 37 shredding 115, 119–37, 247–55, 267
Royal Forestry Society 170, 202, 217 Siebold, Franz von 84–6
Royal Forests 10, 52–61, 143–4, 218 Sierra Club 229, 233
Royal Indian Engineering College 212 Simoeisius 31
Royal Saxon Forest Academy 210 Simpson, John 199
Rubens, Peter Paul, A Boar Hunt 20 Sinclair, George 76, 183
Rufford 148, 155 Slow Food Association 266
Rufus Stone 53 Snowdonia National Forest Park 237
Rufus, Calvisius 26 Somers, 2nd Earl 67, 78, 195
Rufus, Quintus Curtius 38 Somerset Levels 20–22
Ruisdael, Jacob van 93, 100–103, 109, Stanage Game Plan 89
157 Standish, Arthur 130
Forest Marsh 44 Steuart, Sir Henry 117
Landscape with a Cottage and Trees Stewart, James 224, 225
42 Stoddart, John 175
The Three Oaks 43 Strabo 34
Ruskin, John 7, 202–3 Strutt, Jacob 117
Russian Cabin, Sherwood 62 Strutt, Joseph 81–2
Ruysdael Oak, Sherwood 64 Stubbs, George, Freeman, the Earl of
Ryle, George 219, 222 Clarendon’s Gamekeeper 19

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 Trees, Woods and Forests

Sturluson, Snorri 45–6 Viburnum lantana 18

Sweet, Raymond 21 Viburnum tinus 88
Sweet Track 20–21, 4 Victoria, Queen 137
Switzer, Stephen 65, 70 vines 26–9, 250, 255, 260
Virgil 43, 69
Tamalpais, Mount 230–31
tax 8, 56, 169, 207 Wade, Walter 73
terraces 14, 247–68 Walpole, Horace 107–8
Theophrastus 23, 29–30 Wardian case 67
Thomsen, Peter 234 Washingtonia 227
Thomson, Christopher 153 Watkins, Carleton, Grizzly Giant 96
‘The Major Oak’ 59 Waugh, Evelyn 83
‘“Simon the Forester” 60 Welbeck 148, 155, 157–8, 201
Thoreau, Henry David 226 Wellington, 1st Duke of 137, 227
Thoresby 148, 156, 160, 169–73 Wellingtonia 227
Thunberg, Carl Peter 84–5 West, J. 180
Thyrsis 43 Westonbirt 77, 195
timber 12–14, 23–34, 43, 55–9, 68, Whellens, W. H. 159
87–90, 109–36, 140, 144–6, 159, Whitaker, Joseph 159
169, 177–9, 183, 186, 191–3, Whitton Park 28
200–223, 231–46, 253, 267, 274 wilderness 48, 176, 236–8, 241
Tolstoy, Leo 198 Wilhelm ii, Kaiser 201
Trajan 26, 38 William, Duke of Normandy 52
transhumance 123, 249–50 William of Malmesbury 52
Trojans 31–2, 42 William Rufus 52
Troyes, Chrétien de 50 Williams, Hugh William ‘Grecian’,
Trueman, John 157 Birnam Wood 75
Tsuga diversifolia 9 Willingale, Samuel and Alfred 137
Turgenev, Ivan 156, 198 willow 19–21, 28, 93–105, 117, 121,
Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 128–31, 250, 260, 269
The Golden Bough 9 wolf 27, 50, 122
Women’s Forestry Corps 221
Ull 48 wood pastures 56, 123, 205, 255, 271
Ulmus glabra 10, 271, 274 Wordsworth, William 93, 152, 226,
Ulmus procera 10, 271, 274 233, 240
Worksop Manor 72, 148
Valletti, willow pollards at 109 Worlidge, John 129–30
Vanderbilt, George W. 214 Wounded Giant, Sherwood Forest
Varese Ligure 251–2, 257 170
Varnier, Hans the Elder, Tree of Württemberg, Duke of 208
Knowledge 15
Varro, Marcus Terentius 29 yew 18, 48, 193–4
Vaux, Calvert 231 Yggdrasill 46–9, 16
Veitch, John Gould 77, 85–7, 195, Yosemite 226–9, 234–5, 246
227 Young, Arthur 115, 133
Vergina 36, 6 Yvain 50
vert 56
Vertigo (film) 224, 225 Zaros, Crete 125, 127

312