4> Trees and All That. part two

I have been gazing at an aerial photo of the valley I live in now.
In 1946 it looks a denuded wasteland, holding less than half the trees now growing here.
Woods that I had taken for granted as dripping West Wales rain-forest are only sixty years old. There is not a shred of bush or stump in view. You can trace where the ribs of rock ridges show through, as if the earth was starved after five years of total war. Like an over-worked horse.



Bald bites of clearfell glare bright inside what woods remain. Fields long since sunk into marginal grazing are pockmarked with regular heaps of lime or slag ready for spreading.
The enormity of how different it is hasn’t sunk in. I need to gaze at it for hours.
We have built an idyll of an earlier landscape expressing peasants' intimate care, when perhaps it was as scavenged and bare as third-world peasant landscapes are today.

What it does here though is explain how happily people embraced the large-scale Forestry Commission coniferous plantings after the war as welcome totems of new growth in such a scarred and hard-faced landscape.




After I had picked my way through those young moorland Sitka plantations for a day’s moss, I could call on the district forester, Glyn Jones, who knew his patch pretty well, so we could share information.
He lent me a boot-full of forestry in-house periodicals. They start by extolling the vigour and excitedly charting likely yields of the various conifer species being planted.
Leafing on ten years, articles on how to combat different mites and rusts and squirrel attacks dominate.
Another ten years and the absence of any realistic price has dawned, along with discussions on ‘re-spacing’ to counter ‘wind-throw’, and how to avoid the attack of spruce-bark beetles.

It was bleak reading.

Having been re-elected on a landslide, Margaret Thatcher was just starting to ‘rationalise’ the Forestry Commission, by making them sell their less profitable holdings. They had dragged their heels during her first term of office, so she was out for blood.
I suspect that they were still deluding themselves, or wearing the invisibility coat of pride, in not admitting that none of the forests they managed were, or were ever likely to be, profitable in current Monetary terms. (When that creed’s logic was eventually extended to embrace the Whole Earth's economy of carbon credits and sinks, the case changed, but too late for the FC estate. )
They idiotically decided to sell of their more diverse, older woods, keeping the sitka monocrop moorland forests: that needed no more subtle management than a mad monkey or a timely box of matches could have given.

That was when I became a woodland owner rather than just a nomadic watcher of events. It was the start of a time when I seemed to know less each day.



Twenty years on and we all I hope know more of that less. There is a lot to unlearn.

People tell me that the Forestry Commission has changed, but I suspect its underlying default of proactive regulation to maximise tree growth remains.

There is a kind of deft, cursory care that the natural world seems to love and respond to. These ‘little disturbances of man’ can trigger response in quiescent ecosystems.
I remember hearing of an elaborate scheme to raise water-levels on Borth Bog, the flower of which was a long pool filling a rut left by a tracked digger.

This was a lesson of 'chance, occurrence overwhelming prescriptive control. Heart over Head.

3>Trees and All That . part one

You don’t realise what you take for granted, your body of knowledge, until it is called upon or challenged. I have been wandering in the gloom of woods for enough years now to have long lost the trail of white stones that lead back to the trodden path, or the wish to do so.



Most of our current mainstream mantras about trees and woodland have come to seem such emotionally-loaded and inaccurate bollocks, that it’s hard to find a shared clearing in which to start to describe things from my point of view.
Cutting down trees is wrong. So the story goes. They teach it in primary school. The woe and guilt for a lost Eden is cast upon the woodsman. We carry the blame for the sense of disociation felt by urban man. It is a motto as simple and shallow as ‘greedy farmers’.
The exercise of righteousness rather than the effort of understanding. We all do it.

I spent my childhood painfully negotiating ascent up garden trees that I only knew by species years later. A couple of birches were friendly. Two copper beeches were more of a challenge but were a whole dark, secret world inside. My brother had commandeered a huge sycamore for his fastness, but my giant was a many tiered elm, as intricate a climb as Jack’s beanstalk. We had built a platform on every possible level. Gazing from the top, I felt like Doctor Who, looking out over a gleaming, distant urban dreamscape, that was in fact Birmingham’s emergent Bull Ring. That tree fell spectacularly a few years after we had moved. The Bull Ring is being clawed down now too.




Apart from these early friends, trees were mainly just the bigger greenstuff that filled up the bits between buildings. The flat stuff was grass.
Having learnt a bit more since then, I try to remember that green is green to most, indistinguishable whether they are looking out over an intensive dairy sward or a long tended hay meadow.
I didn’t really take trees seriously until led there by the logic of my living.
I was after moss, which grows, as you know, between trees. Explanations are like branches, which can lead to thinner and thinner twigs, so let’s just accept that moss was a mission that led me down many a dark bank and into places long untrod.
This was in the Era of the Great Smother.




The Forestry Commission had eagerly planted as many bits of moorland and woodland that had been ransacked for the War, as it could acquire, with plantations, mainly of coniferous trees, and mainly of Sitka Spruce, at regular three foot intervals. Millions of them.
Literally millions were planted between 1955 and 1965.

Literally millions.


The government were acting out resolutions made during years of siege by ‘U’boat. Governments it seems, have a tendency to act out all the things they feel they should have done before the last war, as if the next one will be a re-run.
Elsewhere, demobbed male zeal wore out a plough an hour planting groundnuts.
Africa perhaps heals more quickly. We still look out on the ragged outlines of conifers long past their fell-by dates, largely ignored by a Forestry Commission that has put more effort into virtual forest models and remodelling its public image.




I ventured into forests that were still quietly swallowing peasant landscapes. There were Sitka dangling innocently over old lanes that led to moorland holdings. Bilberry and rowan still grew on field banks in the rides before the wall of Sitka blanketed them.
I saw these plantations grow, and then fall down from inside, trees leaning on each other, broken and creaking.
The Age of Harvesters arrived to swipe them off at the butt, leaving the stumps to be flipped into tangles by a lonely hymac, looking for new clay beneath the peat, for the contract planters to pick their way to, cramming a new generation of sitka clones into place.




There were valley woodlands where some valiant ash regrowth was never beaten by planted Spruce and Larch, but most deciduous stools succumbed to the conifer shadow, and larger stems were ring-barked.
Western Hemlock will grow in semi-shade, so was favoured to ‘fatten up’ old woodlands. Unfortunately, it is vulnerable to stump-rot, which thrives in an ancient forest-floor. Nobody wanted the timber anyway, which was impossible to peel, prone to deep fissures, and wouldn’t even burn well.

It still occupies many woods, blocking the seedbed, and ready to seed itself if a chink in the canopy occurs. There were other disastrous exotics planted, but this is not the place to detail them.

This is not the dock of an ecological war-crimes trial.