A stay of execution
Adam Nicolson
WOODLANDS by Oliver Rackham
Collins, £25, pp. 609, ISBN 0007202431
✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the interaction of organisms in the world. Trees are as much the actors as any woodsman, forester or conservationist. And where the idea of the environment is essentially simple — how does man either destroy or preserve what surrounds him the idea of ecology is essentially complicated and even incomprehensible. Every detail counts, every relationship, however hidden, affects every other. Every theory, simply because it is a theory and has involved a level of abstraction and generalisation at its birth, is wrong.
This is the Rackham credo: be modest; don’t play God; confess your ignorance; attend to details; theories invented elsewhere and imposed here are usually no good; what was true a while ago might not be true now; what might be true now won’t be true soon. This great book on woodlands is in fact an enormous polemic on behalf of reticence, respect, care, attention and patience. Don’t prod lazy landowners into doing something about their woods. They might like to fence them off from the deer (‘Eat Bambi’ is the Rackham injunction) and they might like to coppice them and heat their houses with the product. Otherwise let the other actors play their part.
He is often very funny. His illustration of the cost of underwood in the 16th century is the bill for the faggots that burned Archbishop Cranmer in 1553. The nature of the woodpasture he loves — trees in grassland, long horizontal branches — is illustrated by the story of Absalom who came to a sticky end when leaving a battlefield by catching his head in the boughs of a low oak ‘and the mule that was under him went away’. That wouldn’t have happened in a wood no horizontal branches and he couldn’t have gone fast enough — but it nearly did, apparently, to the author in the savannas of the Wild West. All distinguished scientists should take this as their model. It is a return, somehow, to the style of 17th-century science: half-mad compendiumitis (one learns that in decaying modern buildings loos are the last things to go), characteristically sharp with misguided theorists, past and present (‘Exhorting people to plant trees to sequester carbon dioxide is like telling them to drink more water to hold down rising sea level’), cynically knowledgable about the ways of the world (‘Housing developments tend to be named after what they destroy’) and driven by a sense of profound delight and wonder at the workings of nature: one third of a wood’s flora may be waiting hidden underground for the moment of fire, coppice or felling when the seeds of foxgloves, rushes, ragged robin and woodspurges all suddenly erupt into the light. How though? How, in the dark underground, do they understand that the trees around them have been cut down? No one knows.
This bright and irreverent conversation with the reader is set in the context of Rackham’s unremitting war on factoids and canards. Mediaeval England was thick with the enormous forest in which Robin Hood and his like used to hide. No. England passed through the stage of being half woodland some time in the Bronze Age. Mediaeval trees were vast. No. Most mediaeval oaks were smaller than most oaks now. The great cathedral roofs were the largest timber structures ever built in Britain. No. Those were the gigantic Anglo-Saxon fish traps in the Suffolk and Essex estuaries. Mediaeval kings spent most of their time hunting. No. It was done for them by professionals. The great woods of England were destroyed by the industrial revolution. No: ‘wherever there remains a big concentration of woodland, there is an industrial or urban use to account for its preservation.’ We will never recover the ancient landscape. No. One quarter of the woods mentioned in AngloSaxon perambulations are still there. Those woods were fragments of the ancient primitive wildwood. No. ‘Most of the big and some smaller wooded areas of mediaeval England contain evidence of Roman or earlier settlement and cultivation.’ Scarcely stated here, but powerful on every page, is the underlying fact that this is an account of Rackham’s triumph. The long swing of post-Enlightenment forestry, which reached its apogee in what Rackham calls ‘the great onslaught’ or ‘the years that the locust hath eaten’ between 1950 and 1975, has now been turned back. The passion for replacing woods with plantations, and woodmanship with forestry is now over and recognised as a failure. Oliver Rackham and a few like him stood up for woods in those years of destruction and finally won the argument. Look at almost any Forestry Commission guidance note nowadays and the authority most quoted is O. Rackham. Rather disgracefully he was awarded the OBE last year. If this country can’t knight Oliver Rackham, what can it do?
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