Glimmerings

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May 9, 2010

BBC News - The tree that shaped Britain

When it was gone; the oak forests of England were on the floor. Four thousand had fallen in the New Forest alone; another 3,000 in the Forest of Dean. And John Evelyn, the Fellow of the Royal Society, whose great book Silva or a Discourse on Forest-Trees, first published in 1664, had done the most to make the connection between the oak woods and England's fortunes, stared in heartsick disbelief at the devastation.

He had spent so much of his life and effort persuading the government and great landowners not to destroy woodlands for farmland; to create protective nurseries fenced against the grazing of deer until the trees were mature enough to thrive unguarded. Not to wreck the plantation of the nation's future for quick profits in the iron forges.

Slowly Evelyn had made his case. And now he stared at the wreckage, the disheartening spectacle. It had happened at the worst time. The country was at war, fending off, as Evelyn saw it, the Catholic absolutism of Louis XIV.

Without oak for the hulls of the Navy's ships of the line, what would become of fortress England? "Sure I am," Evelyn wrote a little later, with only a year of his life remaining "that I still feel the dismal groans of our forests, that late hurricane having subverted so many thousands of goodly oaks, prostrating the trees, laying them in ghastly postures like whole regiments fallen in battle by the sword of the Conqueror.."

But if John Evelyn died thinking he had lost a battle against ferocious weather, his campaign for the oak would win a longer war. During the 18th Century, driven by the hunger for naval timber, planting began in earnest. Book after book urged landowners to do the patriotic - and profitable thing.

The very idea of Britain - a new idea - was planted with the acorns. In 1763 a disciple of Evelyn's, Roger Fisher, published Heart of Oak, The British Bulwark, in which he argued empires rose or fell depending on their abundance or dearth of the sovereign hardwood.

BBC News - The tree that shaped Britain

Posted by thdyck on May 9, 2010

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