Seeing the wood for the trees

[duane]

The following is an article from the Sunday Times. It is long so skim thru the intinial part and see the highlighted pieces.
From The Sunday TimesSeptember 9, 2007

Seeing the wood for the trees
Fifteen million trees were torn down by the Great Storm of 1987, and in our panic to restore England's landscape in the aftermath, we succeeded only in creating more chaos. Twenty years on, nature has proved it can heal itself without the help of mankind. So what lessons can we learn from our land's innate wisdom?
Emmetts House, Kent, and the grounds, after the 1987 storm

Richard Girling
Everyone remembers where they were. On the evening of October 15, 1987, I'd driven south along the Old Kent Road towards a lurid sky of angry, tropical purple. The lank air twitched like an assassin's finger teasing the trigger. Dust hissed in the gutter.

I did not hear poor Michael Fish deny the approaching hurricane. Technically (that is to say, by the precise definitions of scientific meteorology), he was right, but it made little difference to people in the target area. It was like being told there was no threat from rockets, then being hit by mortars. Through an unsleepable night of pulsing fear, wind speeds reached 94mph in London and 110mph in Kent. Our sturdy Victorian house, anchored deep in the south London clay, groaned like a galleon.

Those who woke in the southeast the next morning — and, with oak trees and chimneys crashing through roofs, not everybody did — met a scene unparalleled since the Blitz. Woods had been flattened like cornfields. Flying caravans had spilt their innards like clam packs. Roofs from buildings had been flicked away like Frisbees. Cars lay flat beneath trees. Power lines draped the countryside in a bewildering cat's cradle of high-voltage chaos. Whole villages were imprisoned behind walls of timber. A Sealink ferry had been driven aground at Folkestone, and Shanklin lost its pier. Nothing outside was where anyone had left it. Hospitals postponed operations; the Bank of England, Stock Exchange and Gatwick airport went dark; London Underground and railway lines skidded to a halt, and commuters were told to stay at home. Eighteen people lay dead, and the insurance industry faced a bill of £500m.

Death and destruction did not end with the storm. From every direction into the devastated southeast came a mercenary rabble armed with chainsaws. "They thought they could come down and make their fortunes," says Ray Hawes, head of forestry for the National Trust. There was money to be made from clearing the debris, and more to be made from the timber. Traumatised forestry professionals watched in horror as the cowboys went to work. Damaged trees were clumsily lopped; undamaged ones killed by the assault on their fallen neighbours; ground compressed and trampled by lorries and bulldozers. From out of disorder came chaos.

Some of the mercenaries paid a horrible price. In the hands of novices, chainsaws do not cream smoothly through yielding timber; they buck and twist like cats. The accidents were horrific. Untrained men would hack at the upper branches of bent or leaning trees, oblivious to the laws of physics. "There is a huge tension when a tree falls," says Ray Hawes. "When people cut through them and take the weight off the top, at a certain stage they will spring back." The result is like a Roman ballista, except that the missile catapulted 20 yards is not a rock but a human body with a screaming chainsaw. In the worst case, recalled by Peter Creasey, the Trust's head warden at Box Hill in Surrey, a man took the precaution of harnessing himself to a bough. His tragedy was to choose the wrong tree — not the one he was sawing, but the one it was leaning against. The ballista tore him apart.

Even professionals found their judgment deserting them. On the morning of the storm, Steve Scott, then a district forester and now Forestry Commission director for the east of England, set off from his tile-ripped home in Ipswich, heading for Rendlesham Forest near Woodbridge with the mad, do-or-die instinct of a soldier under fire. On foot, with all roads blocked, he edged forward at an average of 11/2 mph. "Trees were still blowing down around me as I climbed over them," he says. Mature Corsican pines, 50 or 70 years old and weighing upwards of three tonnes, slammed down like guillotines. On one stretch of road, empty shipping containers came flying past as the landscape rearranged itself. All over southern and eastern England, as they emerged from their homes and tried to believe what they were seeing, people became strangers in their own land. Robbed of ancient landmarks, we walked out into a different world and were lost.

Damage to buildings, cars and human bodies dominated the news; but cars can be replaced, houses rebuilt or repaired. You can't replace a landscape. Woods are the work of centuries, stretching across multiple human lifetimes, renewing themselves in a multigenerational cycle of growth and decay. They are engines of life, vital to everything from moulds and fungi to birds, animals and the trees themselves. That earthy smell of rot at the heart of an ancient wood is the smell of genes looking after themselves, of the future sprouting from the past. In the early hours of October 16, 1987, south and east of a line between Bournemouth and King's Lynn, all of that was blown away.

The chainsaw Klondike was soon over, leaving a glut of second-hand machines and green timber. In just one small corner of East Anglia, around Rendlesham on the Suffolk coast, 1,500 hectares of Forestry Commission pinewood was reduced overnight to 400.

A million trees had gone — 30 years' worth of timber — leaving something more like a first-world-war battlefield than a living forest. Loaded onto 20-tonne lorries parked nose to tail, the log jam would have stretched from Cambridge to Newcastle and back. Nationally more than 15m trees were lost. It all added up to 4m cubic metres of timber, equivalent to a solid cube nearly 159 metres high. Owners of felled trees were warned to abandon any notion of making a fortune — the market had virtually collapsed, with prices at rock bottom.

The problem was not just a glut on the market. Moving, logging and preserving such a crop — never mind using it — was a technical and logistical challenge unmatched since neolithic farmers first took up the axe. Pine in particular cannot be left to lie. Within weeks it will be invaded by a fungus that stains it blue and makes it unusable. Torn from its roots, a forest like Rendlesham is as fragile as the Mary Rose. The hulks had to be hauled to a quarry near Thetford, where they were sprayed with water.

As the crisis subsided, a new realisation dawned. There was a clear parallel with the events of 40 years earlier, when urban planners had faced a blank canvas after the war. That had been recognised as an occasion for imaginative, forward-looking redevelopment (even though, with hindsight, we may not think the opportunity well used). The woods, forests and gardens of southern England now found themselves similarly blighted, but also similarly gifted with opportunities to erase mistakes and plan for a more enlightened future.

I am looking at the most enormous cowpat I have ever seen. It is not only large but also rich, firm and dense, like cold Christmas pudding, a faecal miracle that has brought study teams hurrying from Cambridge University. A few yards away a belted Galloway steer browses on a birch tree, unaware of how clever he's been, or why it matters. This is Box Hill, 1,200 hectares of glorious mixed woodland on a chalk hill above Dorking in Surrey. Central London lies only 21 miles away, but the sense of deep countryside, running on oak time and deaf to the clock, remains as profound as it was when Jane Austen described a picnic here in Emma, or when Keats sat on the grass composing Endymion.

This is how England was when the leaf canopy closed after the ice age, and this (so you might suppose) is how it has remained ever since. Fairy tales owe their existence to such places — an hour in a wood, with all its unseen rustlings, is an hour lifted from childhood. Beneath the trees — beeches and oaks, 1,000-year-old yews and the wild box trees (40% of Britain's total) that give the hill its name — the filtered sun picks out an understorey broiling with life. There are moulds, fungi, insects, wild flowers, birds and mammals (everything from dormice to deer) — all the cogs and linkages in a super-efficient, self-regulating ecosystem, Gaia with a smile on her face. Many of the species — butterflies, orchids, birds — are locally common but nationally rare.

It takes an expert to read the clues that confound the aura of timelessness. Here and there, standing or lying amid the tangle, are the stripped and branchless hulks of dead beech trees — objects of stark and sculptural beauty, as if nature had taken its cue from Barbara Hepworth. The long view is odder still. Across the valley you see a seam of whole dead trees, bare white branches standing like coral against the backwash of green. These mark the track of the 1987 storm. Two thousand trees, mostly beech, came down on Box Hill (oaks are anchored by tap roots as deep as the trees are high; beeches, like pines, are shallow-rooted and much likelier to topple). The most important clue is the hardest to spot: spindly young trees, still wearing their infant tree guards, are being literally throttled by birch and ash invading their space.

Peter Creasey echoes a consensus among tree men when he affirms that, yes, if a similar storm were to strike tomorrow, then the response to it would be rather different.

By this he does not mean just banning the cowboys. He means recognising the power of nature to heal itself. "If you want a woodland in Britain," he says, "you don't have to plant trees. You just have to sit back and wait." The great mistake, typical of people in crisis, is to think that something has to be done. Across the raw skin of southern England in 1987, there was a rush to salve the wounds. In many cases it was the worst kind of first aid, making the patient worse rather than better.

Jenifer White, now senior landscape adviser for English Heritage, was working for the landscape conservation team at Surrey county council and would shortly join Task Force Trees, a commando unit of the Countryside Commission set up to distribute emergency funding. "Some clearance work obviously had to be done," she says, "to clear roads and just get on with life. But perhaps too much was done. The heavy machinery caused compaction,

which damaged flora and hampered regrowth, and in some ancient forests there was pressure to tidy up old pollards. Now we have learnt that some of those techniques didn't help trees rejuvenate. We took off too many limbs and they went into shock."

The important thing to remember is that order in nature is not the same as order in the human mind, which has an exaggerated respect for tidiness. "A lot of lessons have been learnt," she says. At Box Hill, for example, the blitzed areas were replanted with beech and oak, but you now have to look very hard to see them. Squirrels are a particular problem. For them, young beeches are irresistible fast-food joints, where they strip off the bark to reach the sugars in the sap. At best this cripples the trees; often it kills them. The very worst enemies, however, are other trees.

"Most of the planting that was done," says Peter Creasey, "has been overwhelmed by trees just seeding themselves naturally." It is this process of force majeure that has brought the change of policy — in effect, a willing surrender to a needless enemy. Instead of nurturing the planted beeches, says Creasey, "we decided to let natural succession take place. It happens in a natural sequence. First you get pioneer trees like birch and, to a certain extent, ash. The birch will last for about 60-odd years and then will be overtopped by the longer-lived trees like oak and beech. Eventually you get a natural broad-leaved mixed woodland, but it does take time and patience."

That was Lesson One. If you want a natural outcome, then the best architect is nature itself. The early stages are not conventionally beautiful. One part of the site, cleared by the storm, has been left completely untouched, as an experiment. Densely crammed with weedy poles, it looks like wasteland, and in a sense it is. Much of the young birch and ash will fail in the scramble for light, and only the fittest will survive to maturity. Light is the other bonus of the storm. The rich interior life of a beechwood is, in truth, a bit of an illusion. The canopy shuts out the sun, and there's not much that will grow in the dark. Beechwoods in particular shed a mulch of fallen mast that suppresses undergrowth. By opening the canopy and creating space, the gale cleared a path for new life. Box Hill is typical of many woodlands that have grown stronger through adversity.

"The floor has increased in diversity enormously," says Creasey. "And because the woodlands themselves are more diverse, you don't have such a thick beech mulch. So a lot more plants can grow." Box Hill now has 17 species of woodland orchid, and insects have multiplied in both variety and number.
Birds also vote with their wings. "Because woodlands have been opened up, with many more glades and rides, the diversity of species has increased." This was repeated along the entire track of the storm. Pied flycatchers bred in the New Forest for the first time; nightjars took possession of the Suffolk coast. Strangely, this is where Box Hill's Galloway cattle come in, and sheep, too. Left untouched, open ground doesn't stay open for long: it has to be grazed. Like mowers, sheep produce a tight, lawn-like finish preferred by some butterflies and orchids (autumn ladies' tresses, for example). Cattle, which rip the grass with their tongues, leave a longer sward ideal for grasshoppers, beetles and some other butterflies. Large tracts of downland at Box Hill, including some that were forested before the storm, are now kept open like this, so that the ecosystem is immensely richer.

Which brings us back to cowpats. Farmed cattle usually are doctored with worming agents that kill not only the parasites in their gut but also the microfauna in the dung and the beetles that feed on it. Box Hill's Galloways get none of this, nor anything else that doesn't grow naturally. Their dung therefore is a pure, unmodified product of nature. "Students from Cambridge University spent two weeks comparing it with samples from a farm," says Creasey.

"They found it was much richer and drier, with many more invertebrates in it." Birds and bats gorge on the insects, and so another link is welded into the food chain.

Lesson Two: in nature there is no such thing as waste. Life likes nothing better than death. "Some experts reckon," says Creasey, "that if you want an ecologically healthy woodland, then

50-60% of the timber should be dead or dying." This is not as morbid as it sounds. "An oak, for instance, will take 200 years to reach anything like maturity. Then it will sit for 1,200 years being mature; then it will spend another 200 or 300 years slowly dying. Its timescale is very different to ours."

You see the evidence wherever old hulks have been left. Woodpeckers feed on insect larvae in the dead timber; bats roost in it; stag beetles breed and joust like their mammalian namesakes; dormice — fastidiously intolerant of anything short of ecological perfection — move in with fixed, erotic intent. Even in the preindustrial age, when forests supplied the raw material for everything that was built, crafted or fired, nature never got a better deal than this.

Under its environment secretary Nicholas Ridley (until then, nobody's idea of a green crusader), the Conservative government after the storm shelled out £6m for new "amenity planting" directed by Task Force Trees (TFT), which was established in 1987 and went on until 1994. Much good came from this. Urban streets and squares got their trees back, and councils suddenly were forced to think creatively.

"Most local authorities didn't have a strategy or a management approach to trees," says the TFT's then director, David Coleman. "They tended to look at them as problems — problems with cabling under streets, and with insurers telling householders to take down trees that were too close to their properties." London was a particular beneficiary. "No-one before had looked at London trees as a resource. The Forestry Commission had estimated the number of trees, but we were able to make a proper aerial survey and the real figure turned out to be three times more." They counted everything — in private gardens as well as streets and parks — and came up with a total of 7m.

The very accuracy of the count, which included even cypresses in garden hedges, made it controversial, and the planting trend was away from big landscape trees like plane, lime, ash and oak towards smaller ornamental stuff, but it all added to the momentum. The Forestry Commission for the first time appointed a regional director for London, and — as a condition for regeneration grants — boroughs were made to think about trees. London being what it is, there are still some foot-draggers, but civic pride in most places has done its stuff. Most boroughs now have electronic databases tracking their tree stock, and the principles of forest management are becoming the wisdom of the street. In Croydon, for example, all the tree waste — loppings and thinnings — is taken to fuel an electricity generating station in Slough.

Other minds were being concentrated too. One of the dilemmas facing the owners of historic parks and gardens had been how to maintain them. With every tree a carefully considered brush stroke in a designer's vision, how could the masterpiece be restored without ruining it? Should Capability Brown's trees be nurtured to their last drop of sap? Or should they be felled and replaced? For many owners in October 1987, the burden of responsibility was lifted. No respecter of pedigree, the gale ripped into these sylvan antiques and crushed them to bits. "It pushed us to think of a whole new philosophy of how to restore and conserve," says Jenifer White.

English Heritage itself distributed £4m worth of grants to help owners develop strategies that would not only reflect the history of a property but also consider its future. More than 280 sites — involving everything from medieval deer parks to modern pleasure grounds — were helped not merely to heal their wounds but to reverse decades of neglect and reassert their sense of identity. Between them, they would spend more than £10m.

English Heritage reckons that only 18% of the restorations would have happened without the storm. "A handful of sites were at a critical stage of neglect when the storms struck," it says, "and without grant aid would have been lost altogether." In many places the gale itself reopened carefully planned vistas that had been obscured by inappropriate planting — rhododendrons, for example — or by the spread of scrub. Sometimes whole new layouts were uncovered. Creech Grange in Dorset, for example, had been known for its 19th-century park. Until the storm revealed it, nobody had suspected the existence of an earlier design dating back to 1740.

But perhaps the greatest of the gale's achievements was to fire the public mood. As they came down around us, we suddenly remembered how much trees meant to us. They are central to the very idea of English landscape and art. For centuries our wealth and security had depended on them: they are what put the roofs over our heads, the wheels on our economy, the ships in Nelson's fleet. And where else would we carve our initials when we fall in love?

In response to the devastation of 1987, the Tree Council resolved to expand the network of local tree wardens that had begun in Leicestershire and East Sussex. Aided since 1997 by sponsorship from the National Grid, and more recently by the Department for Communities and Local Government, it has been expanding ever since. There are now 7,500 active wardens, appointed usually by parish councils or community groups, organised in 138 networks co-ordinated by local authorities. Even Ambridge has one. They survey and protect existing trees, plant and nurture new ones, create tree nurseries, test Tree Council projects before they are launched nationally, and make a powerful Swat team in times of emergency.

In 1995 they were mobilised to defend street trees whose roots were threatened by cable TV companies and other urban trench-diggers. In 1996 they reinforced the Forestry Commission in its battle against the Asian longhorn beetle. Next time a hurricane strikes, they'll be there. Each year this ad-hoc army, embracing everyone from students to pensioners, contributes a combined total of 1.8m hours' worth of voluntary work time. Applying the Heritage Lottery Fund's valuation of voluntary labour at £50 a day, this comes to £13m.

But monetary values are like heffalump traps in the pathways of enlightenment. No price can be put on a vista, an ecosystem or the power of landscape to raise the spirit, though "profit" is all too easily adduced by the enterprises that destroy them. This is why so many crucial battles have been lost. The gales of 1987 and '90 caused too much pain and heartbreak to be recorded as blessings rather than just acts of God. That something positive did come out of them, however, is evidence that, somehow, despite our obsession with speed, material gratification and cutting a deal, we haven't lost sight of what's good for us.