Wills - A History of Trees

A History of Trees

To Max, who particularly likes trees to hide behind.

Simon Wills

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Pen & Sword White Owl

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Simon Wills 2018

ISBN 978 1 5267 0159 6

eISBN 978 1 5267 0161 9

Mobi ISBN 978 1526 7 0160 2

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T rees and woodland have perhaps always had a special place in our psyche, maybe because we are apes and we know that we came from the trees. My interest in trees started as a child. My parents loved Badbury Rings in Dorset with its famous huge double avenue of beech trees, so we often went there, and I still think its wonderful. I was a determined tree climber too, and still have the wrist injury that resulted from a fall sustained about forty years ago.

Trees impress us because of their size, majesty, beauty and endurance. Many of them live to a greater age than we do, so it is possible to sit next to an elderly oak tree and ponder that it was standing throughout the reign of Queen Anne and when Nelson won at Trafalgar. And plenty of trees have witnessed even greater spans of history than this.

Trees also connect us with nature: they demonstrate the seasons very dramatically in the case of deciduous trees, they provide homes and food for multiple other organisms, and they are very visible and characteristic features of British gardens, parks, towns and countryside. In earlier centuries, when the countryside was bigger and more people lived and worked in it, the practical benefits of trees to everyday life were both more numerous and more obvious. Trees provided our ancestors with food, timber for construction, medicines, protection from the elements, boundary markers, creative inspiration, fuel, charcoal and folklore. One of our favourite national heroes, Robin Hood, lived in a forest, and certain trees were held to be sacred to the ancient druids or were believed to be inhabited by spirits and elves.

As a lover of trees, it has been difficult to decide which trees to include and which to leave out. The choice is to some extent dictated by the size of the book, which makes it impossible to include every British tree. However, I have tried to focus on trees that have an interesting tale to tell, and are common and familiar. Within the text I have, from time to time, described certain trees as being native and perhaps this term needs some explanation. Trees described as native are the ones that grew in the UK after the end of the last ice age while this country was still physically connected to mainland Europe; non-native trees are those that were brought here by humans at a later date. I have used the categorisation of native species promoted by the Woodland Trust ( www.woodlandtrust.org.uk ) as the basis for my use of this term.

Beyond their practical utility to us and our simple liking of them, trees form the great forests of the world, which are said to be the lungs of the planet. So trees, more than anything else, keep us alive.

M any websites now make original historical texts available freely to researchers and historians, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them, and especially the following:

Complete Works of William Shakespeare: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/

Internet Archive: https://archive.org/

Early English Books Online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/

Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Note that where I have quoted from some of the more ancient authors, I have sometimes altered spellings and punctuation to match modern English usage.

I am particularly grateful that two organisations allow writers to use illustrations from their priceless online collections for research and for publication:

British Library illuminated manuscripts: www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts uses a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/reuse.asp

The Wellcome Collection https://wellcomecollection.org also makes many images available under a Creative Commons licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Jeanie Smith and the staff at the Guildhall Library in London kindly helped me with access to some resources, as did the staff of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Library. Thank you.

My editor Linne Matthews has been brilliant as ever and I wanted to thank her for being so careful and thorough, and lovely with it. My partner, B, is always caring and supportive, but especially when I am writing a book: I dont know what Id do without him. Anyone who has a writer in the house will know what Im saying here. Finally, I would like to thank Max, to whom this book is dedicated, for allowing me to frequently stop his walk and take photos of trees. Hes very tolerant.

Distinctive leaves of common alder.

A lder or aller was a valuable tree to our ancestors. All parts of it were exploited to make dyes, including the leaves, bark, wood, catkins and twigs, and they produced a variety of colours yellow, green, brown, black and red depending upon the dyeing technique. Sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard explained that the bark is much used of poor country dyers for the dying of coarse cloth, caps, hose and such like into a black colour, whereto it serveth very well. The dried catkins were used to make an ink, and the astringent alder bark was sometimes employed in the leather industry for tanning.

The tree grows mainly in damp conditions the seventeenth-century writer John Evelyn described it as the most faithful lover of water and boggy places. When freshly cut, the timber has a characteristic bright orange colour, and although not as extensively used as many other woods, alder has some useful properties. It was soon discovered, for example, that the timber itself was particularly suited to wet conditions where it could retain its integrity for long periods. Neolithic people in the UK are known to have laid down alder logs to support raised structures in the water such as jetties. In the west of England, a Neolithic walkway known as Abbots Way was constructed to cross the boggy Somerset Levels in safety. Just over 2.5 kilometres long, it joined the sand island of Burtle with the rock island of Westhay and comprises over 30,000 split alder logs or planks.