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Trees have been in the news quite a bit recently. First there was the national mourning for the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore (see CA 405). Never has a sycamore been held in higher regard. More typically these prolific self-sowers are dismissed as ‘weed’ trees, though – as the Hadrian’s Wall example demonstrates – they have an aesthetically pleasing shape, not to mention acid-green spring flowers and golden autumn leaves.
It seems that everyone has a story to tell about that tree. Sherds remembers when our 11-year-old daughter declared herself to be utterly bored with the walk we were taking along Hadrian’s Wall. She stomped off to get the walk over and done with – and when we caught up with her, she was standing in open-mouthed contemplation of this tree, mesmerised by its magic. Now in her 30s, her favourite activity is (guess what) going for a country walk.
The National Trust has quite rightly said that the sycamore will put out new growth – it has been pollarded rather than destroyed. The late Oliver Rackham, woodland and tree archaeologist, would have told us that most trees were treated like this until quite recently – as a crop to be harvested regularly for the poles that will grow again from the stump.
Rackham would probably also remind us that there are three stages to the typical life cycle of a tree: the saying is that ‘oaks take 300 years to grow, 300 years to stay, and 300 years to die’. Sad to say, we have a whole industry based on cutting this cycle short. How often do we read that trees are to be cut down because they are ‘a danger to the public’? The Times reported on 25 October that the beech avenue near Armoy, Co. Antrim, is under threat because ‘a majority of them are in poor health and one is dead’. The avenue became a tourist attraction in the TV series Game of Thrones, but ‘experts at Tree Safety’ have recommended that 11 of the 80 trees – from the 150 originally planted in the late 18th century to line the road to Gracehill House – should be felled.
Such destructive proposals are always attributed to ‘experts’, like the decision to fell trees in Sheffield ‘following specialist advice’. ‘Expert’ simply means firms that were once known by the euphemistic term ‘tree surgeons’ but now prefer to be called ‘arborists’. Their chief skill seems to be chain-saw wielding and stump grinding. A true tree expert would say that dying trees provide a haven for invertebrates, birds, squirrels, fungi, lichens, mosses, and a host of other organisms. By all means fence off a dying tree, but leave it to its own devices, please.
Planting predicaments
Also under threat, but for a different reason, is Darwin’s oak – so called because Charles Darwin sat in the shade of its boughs and climbed its branches as an eight-year-old. With a girth of 7m (23ft), and an approximate age of 550 years, this is one of nine veteran trees condemned by the proposed Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, which will cut through an area of green meadows beside the River Severn that forms the last green space in Shrewsbury.
In reaction to the decision by Shropshire County Council’s planning committee to approve the destruction of the trees, campaigner Rob McBride said ‘there’s too many dinosaurs on that committee’. Perhaps one might ask, too, whether we should really be building new roads when the motor car is itself now in its declining phase.
Another kind of ‘expert’ fondly advocates tree-planting on a massive scale, which is the cause of a new kind of threat to the historic environment. When corporations find it difficult to achieve the ambitious target of net-zero carbon by 2040, their tactic is to ‘offset’ their carbon emissions by paying for the planting of trees that will, in theory, absorb an equivalent amount of the gas. As a result, there is now a lively market in farmland that is being bought up for tree-planting. Driving round Wales, you will currently spot campaign posters designed to look like estate agents’ signs along rural roads that say: ‘Wales is not FOR SALE’. The concern in rural Wales is that indiscriminate afforestation will devastate communities by consuming the agricultural land that is a major source of employment, not to mention its impact on buried archaeology.
Tree-planting is not all bad news, however. Areas of the Brazilian jungle that have been left bleak and treeless by illegal logging are now being successfully restored, and in Kenya the negative impact on rivers and water supplies caused by tree-clearance is being reversed by the government’s plan to plant 15 billion trees in the next ten years.
Squirrelling away
If trees are an emotive subject, so too are the squirrels that inhabit their sheltering cavities. Peter Coates, Emeritus Professor of American and Environmental History at Bristol University, argues in his new book Squirrel Nation (Reaktion Books, 2023) that the language we use about red and grey squirrels is a proxy for deep-seated attitudes. Typically, reds evoke affection and greys loathing and contempt. The depth of emotion that surrounds this topic is well-illustrated by two debates that took place in the House of Lords: one concerned with NATO membership and UK defence policy lasted 11 minutes, and the other, on the invasion of the UK by greys, lasted four hours.
Peter Coates’ history of the two species tells us that reds were once as vilified as greys are now. In its early years, Country Life (founded in 1897) regularly featured inflammatory letters and complaints about their destruction of the bark, buds, and leaves of freshly planted trees, and the Board of Agriculture formally endorsed a programme of intensive culling by shotgun in 1912. Vice versa, greys were seen as charming and engaging novelties when the first specimens were introduced to the UK. Liverpool Zoological Gardens had caged squirrels as early as 1833, but the first verified introduction into the wild occurred in 1876, when R E Knowles – whose family owned coal mines and brickworks – released them into the grounds of his Cheshire home.
The second recorded introduction took place in Richmond, south-west London, in 1889, when George Shepherd Page, an American businessman, decided to ‘give Britain a living gift from America’ – an act which one newspaper described as ‘the benevolence of a wealthy gentleman from New York’. Squirrels were not the only deliberate introductions: the Duke of Bedford kept a whole menagerie of animals (including chipmunks and flying squirrels) that he hoped would naturalise on the Woburn estate, but it was his release of ten grey squirrels in 1890 that proved to be most successful. It was not long before Woburn’s residents began to complain about greys raiding their orchards and vegetable plots.
Country Life then began writing about the ‘grey peril’ and the ‘troublesome grey’. To add to its sins, greys had begun to ‘oust its pretty little brown counterpart’, the smaller native squirrel ‘over a considerable extent of the country’. Peter Coates detects more than a hint of nationalism – racism, even – in our emphasis on the ‘foreign’ origin of the grey, along with talk of an ‘invasion’ (which some commentators even compared to the European colonisation of America), as he shows how the idea grew that the native species is inherently superior in value as well as more ‘correct’, desirable, and beautiful.
Today we continue to judge greys harshly: Woody Allen’s quip that pigeons are simply rats with wings is often paraphrased to say that greys are rats with bushy tails. Naturalists tend to take the view that it was a mistake to introduce them, but they are now a permanent addition to the British fauna and we should enjoy them for their restless vitality and acrobatic charm. Meanwhile, another introduction suggests that not all is lost for the reds. Pine martens were recently introduced to woodland in the Rheidol Valley of central Wales; some feared that red squirrels would suffer as a consequence, but the red population has increased. One reason seems to be that the omnivorous pine martens can catch the heavier greys, whereas the lighter reds are able to escape to the very tips of tree branches where the martens cannot follow.
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