Unfeasible Trees, Triumphant Trees, and Trees that Try

Have you ever stopped and wondered at the tenacity of a tree which has been toppled in a storm – root ball flailing - and yet along its trunk, fifteen new young trees are surging their way towards the light? It’s a beautiful testament to the resilience of life. 

You may well not have seen one. Not many of us get the chance because they are mostly chopped for firewood, whilst most other trees are encouraged to be mono stemmed to create harvestable timber. In woodlands managed for forestry, fallen trees are systematically cleared away and living trees expressly have their lower branches ‘cleaned’ to make sure that they grow tall and straight. All the trees that we plant in plastic tree tubes have no choice but to grow upwards in a straight line for the first several years of their lives. 

Because it is missing from our memories, we don’t think twice about how entangled and interesting a woodland might once have been. In many woodlands its quite a challenge to find a tree which is wonky, or wibbly or just downright wild. Personally I love these trees – trees which have, against all the odds of animals browsing, people chopping, winds blowing, squirrels gnawing, and all sorts of other things assailing them - found a way to survive, and thrive, and live to old age, albeit with a few scars and one or two limbs missing. 

There is a quirky, irreverent and sculpturesque quality to them which appeases my eye and my soul when set against a landscape of neatness and tidiness. And each one of these unfeasible trees has a story to tell about how it came to be so sculpted – sometimes we may be able to hear that story, and other stories are lost in the mists of time. Was this tree once felled by a beaver before they became extinct in Britain? Was it planted as a seed in a burial chamber which grew around its obstructions towards the light bursting forth into the fresh air? Or did it cling to a rocky crevice until the rocks fell and threw it tumbling downwards into a previously unforeseen abode? 

These trees are wonderful to me. They have grown belligerently, as they wish, for decades if not centuries. Some grow at right angles where once they were caught under another tree branch, other trees ‘kiss’ and become enmeshed with each other, with separate species merging into one tree as bark swallows bark. They mark for me, places where the human hand has still not quite touched everything, whilst simultaneously creating a myriad of little niches for a multitude of species which would otherwise not be able to survive on our neater trees. 

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to bring these Transformational Trees back into our woodlands and landscapes. To create wilder spaces where we relinquish our need for orderliness, and allow nature to be as free form and creative as she wishes to be. If it works, then some time in the future the trees that you might see will be breathtaking in their wilful abandonment of human order and refreshing in their incredibly natural ‘tree-ness’.

Image: copyright Susie @ the_gardeners_cottage

The Language of the Land

We live in a loquacious world. New words are created almost every day, and the breadth and diversity of the language(s) that we can use is breathtaking. The Lost Words by Rob Macfarlane and Jackie Morris also tells us about Dandelion, Otter, Bramble and Acorn - words describing our natural world which have fallen out of the dictionary, and therefore out of our awareness. Indigenous languages and the innate knowledge of the natural world that they hold disappear on a regular basis.

In our culture, if there is no language to describe something, then to some extent it ceases to exist and is forgotten. Conversely, you can often hear us say words without truly considering what their meaning is. This is worrying to someone who notices what is missing, or who knows that we have forgotten much in relation to our own relationship to nature.

Within the world of wildlife conservation there are everyday terms we use to describe our interactions with the natural world, which are loaded with assumption. The word conservation itself implies a kind of preservation in aspic of nature, which is both impossible and unfeasible – it gives no scope for a landscape to be adaptable over time and according to changing circumstance.

There is also an embedded language that the environmental sector uses on a daily basis, which seriously limits our ability to look beyond the normal, and to challenge the boundaries of the mundane. One example of this might be our reliance of describing a piece of land according to the man-made boundaries around it. Because we use these words, fields, with fences, ditches, walls and straight lines therefore define the shape of our landscape without us realizing that there might be an alternative. The advice that we give about nature religiously revolves around human boundaries and sticks within their limits. For me it is time to consider what might happen to wildlife if we removed some of the straight lines and fences, and started to allow a much freer and more natural evolution of natural boundaries. If we take the fence away from the edge of the woodland, it will take a much more natural shape and form, with much better habitat for wildlife.

Likewise when we want to restore woodlands, we revert automatically to conversations around planting trees, complete with imported seeds, soils and plastic tubes – rather than thinking about a more natural way to restore a healthy and resilient woodland, through natural regeneration and allowing the trees to choose where they want to grow.

I find it bemusing that the environmental NGOs still ubiquitously write ‘management plans’ for their nature reserves – and that we have not yet graduated to the creation of ‘natural landscape’ or ‘self willed wildlife’ visions. And within these ‘plans’ we often speak of ‘clearing out ditches' or water level management – not considering that perhaps it might be better for wildlife to restore the natural hydrology which came before the ditches, pumps and drains. A hedge is often described as being overgrown and in need of trimming – not considering that the natural outward expansion of a hedgerow actually creates prime edge habitat for wildlife.

And then there are the weeds – even some of our rarest arable plants are still described as arable weeds. But a weed is merely a plant in a place that a human doesn’t want it to be – they are all providing wildlife habitat, many have medicinal properties or provide food and forage, but our description of them as weeds implies an implicit need to remove them from our world, or to only conserve them as an act of tolerance.

Similarly, a piece of land which is neither farmed nor built on is often described as abandoned, wasteland or unproductive (farm)land - forgetting that these pieces of land are often some of the most productive in terms of wildlife and the natural services such as pollination which are essential for human survival. Only recently have we truly started to consider naming them as something else like wildland or natural capital.

The natural process of a beaver, deer or pig browsing or digging in the land are still so often called damage, even by the environmental sector. Flooding is always described as catastrophic damage, whereas in the right place it is fertilization of prime agricultural land, natural soil creation, natural water storage, water cleansing, habitat for wildlife and a great deal more. Many of these natural processes that we unwittingly still think of as damage, are in fact intrinsic to the creation of a wildlife diverse landscape, which is healthy both for people and wildlife.

I for one am increasingly trying to think about the words I say to describe the natural world and our interactions with it. On a daily basis I speak to landowners about enhancing their land for wildlife, and the language that I use will be passed on and used by them – it is a responsibility as well as an opportunity for a new environmental type of creativity.

In a world which is inundated by emoji’s, texts, emails, podcasts, tweets, blogs, chats, posts, etc, it is hard to even want to hear the language of the natural world around us, particularly when it doesn’t speak clearly in words. Thankfully, Rewilding and other more nature-led conservation approaches are challenging our daily use of language and the assumptions about our natural landscapes that go with it. Although it is a challenge to find the language for the unknown emergent properties which may emerge from rewilding, it is important that we try to (re)find them, and with them we may finally find a place for nature in our societies.

A new kind of environmental eloquence seems to be emerging which is both exciting and essential. A conversation and a language based around the needs and shapes of nature, where humans are a species embedded in the ecosystem rather than a species which dominates and often misinterprets it.

First published for Sussex Wildlife Trust in July 2019