Tag Archives: forestry

The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of British woodland

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Reading Ancient by Luke Barley for the Spectator, 3 March 2026

You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a footing on slick limbs. From the top of the canopy, the land turns to sea, and glades appear as “oceans between continents of trees.” A ghostly armada of dead oaks lies becalmed in a clearing: a bleached collection of hulks left from a fire decades ago.

Like the titular character of Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book The Lorax, Luke Barley speaks for the trees, and his not-so-secret ambition is to make armchair woodlanders of us all. Ancient is his history of British woodlands, which turn out to be a lot more ancient, and a lot less wild, than the neophyte reader might expect.

And if the history doesn’t grab you, there’s always the memoir; Luke Barley’s account of his years as a ranger are beautifully turned. What’s not to enjoy about lying face down with your cheek against rough bark, staring into a forest of oak twigs just a few centimetres tall, steeped in miniature groves of sporophytes and haunted by scurrying woodlice?

Barley was studying American history and literature at university when he got caught up with activists and loggers in California, fell in love with redwoods, and decided to pursue conservation. Back in Britain he’s learned the traditional craft of coppicing at Spring Park, a fragment of hazel coppice perched on a gravel ridge between Bromley and Croydon. He’s pruned ancient oak pollards at Ashtead Common, managed Dodgson Wood — a temperate rainforest in the Lake District — and fought ash dieback in the White Peak. Barley’s account of himself would have us believe he’s a perpetual apprentice confronting one desperately steep learning curve after another, before huddling up with fellow rangers and contractors to drink tea from a dented flask in the pouring rain. Even his chainsaw’s a charmer, the smell of oak dust pluming from its teeth “pungent and sharp, but not unpleasant to anyone who appreciates builder’s tea or an earthy red wine”. Sampled like this, the prose is a bit fulsome, I suppose; in context it’s mesmerising.

Before the arrival of humans, ancient British “wildwood” was never tangled, tall and dark; it was a kind of savannah, “crashed around, broken and browsed by… super-elephants, super-rhinoceroses and super-horses”, says Barley, channeling the prose of his hero, the ecological historian Oliver Rackham.

As a consequence, most of our native tree species, once felled, are able to spring back to life from dormant buds beneath the bark of the stump. If you want to keep a tree producing wood in perpetuity — for firewood, charcoal, fencing, furniture, plates, bowls, boxes, you-name-it — simply chop it at ground level (coppicing) or at head height (pollarding). There’s almost no ancient tree, even in pockets of supposed wildwood, that hasn’t been harvested for its wood at some time or other, and this industrial but sustainable system, says Barley, had the unintentional side-effect of replicating conditions between 65 and 10 million years ago, when British flora and fauna evolved. Such is the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of British woodland, it’s at its healthiest and most diverse when managed, but loses all charm, health and variety when left alone.

That “leaving alone” — neglect would be a better word — began with acts of enclosure, which by physically separating the population from the land, caused British “wood culture” to collapse.
Post-war “scientific forestry” replaced complex native woods with monocultures of non-native conifers like Sitka spruce precisely because they were uniform and required less skill and fine judgement to harvest than the idiosyncratic native trees. Farmers and landowners, focused on intensive food production, came to view woodland as “waste”. Coppiced woods grew dark and uniform, and ancient pollards at places like Ashtead became top-heavy and prone to collapse because the cycle of cutting them was broken in the nineteenth century.

At his bleakest, Barley conceives of contemporary rural Britain as a “binary landscape” of dark woods and open fields, managed by a society suffering from a uniquely severe disconnection from nature.

What can be done? Where most authors escape into well-meaning generalities, Barley brings real heft to a vision of Britain reawakened to wood. Working healthy savannah-like wood-pasture produces small, crooked, or irregular timber that today is often only sold as firewood. Advances in processing, though, allow strips of this smaller wood to be glued together into laminates that are incredibly strong. The Black & White Building in East London uses a frame of laminated beech that is stronger than steel, while the Sheffield Winter Garden uses curved beams of laminated larch. By turning low-quality wood into high-quality structural components, engineered timber provides a financial incentive for landowners to manage woods that might otherwise be too expensive to maintain.

Barley the memoirist, meanwhile, is by his own admission a melancholy chap, “off on my self-absorbed spiritual quest.” But he’s only teasing. Ancient is imbued with a powerful sense of community. Britain’s woods are for people — because people, whether they know it or not — are the woods’ life-blood.

You wouldn’t stop here for gas

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Reading Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in the Woods for the Telegraph, 12 July 2022

Worldwide, the illegal timber trade is worth around 157 billion dollars a year. According to oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon, thirty per cent of the world’s wood trade is illegal, and around 80 per cent of all Amazonian wood harvested today is “poached” (a strange term to apply to timber, which would struggle to fit into the largest poche or pocket — but evocative nonetheless). $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly in North America.

Bourgon focuses her account on thefts from public lands and forest parks of the Pacific North-West. There are giants here, and Methuselahs. “Old-growth” trees, more than two hundred years old, are intagliated with each others’ root systems, with fungal hyphae and with other soil systems we’ve barely begun to understand. Entire ecosystems may stand or fall on the survival of a single 800-year-old red cedar — an organism so huge it may take weeks or months to saw up and remove from the forest, leaving a trail of sawdust, felling wedges and abandoned equipment.

That the trade in such timber was not sustainable has never been a secret, and to save some of the world’s oldest and biggest trees, the Redwood National Park was established in 1968.

But while the corporations received compensation for their lost profits, the promised direct government relief for workers never materialised. “Do you know what it’s like to work 20 years, then sleep in a pick-up truck?” asked Seattle’s archbishop Thomas Murphy, at a 1994 summit attended by the new president, Bill Clinton; “A way of life is dying.”

North America’s oldest timber companies were founded near the town of Orick, on the banks of the Redwood Creek in Humboldt County, California. Orick’s first commercial sawmill opened in 1908. Orick is now home to just under 400 people. You wouldn’t stop here for gas on your way to a luxury cabin on US Forest Service land, or a heated yurt by Park Canada.

To live in Orick is to feel the walls closing in: one woodsman turned poacher, Danny Garcia, likens the sensation “to having your car break down in the middle of nowhere — you’ve no cash to fix it and no way out.”

This, says Garcia, is where his “tree troubles” started, but he wasn’t the first to go sawing chunks out of giants. His partner in crime Chris Guffie says: “I’ve been at it for so doggone long. It’s like Yogi Bear and the park ranger.”

“To begin to understand the sadness and violence of poaching,” says Bourgon, “we need to consider how a tree became something that could be stolen in the first place.” Like it or not, conservation has patrician roots: in the 1890s, organisations like the New York Sportsmen’s Club lobbied to ensure access to game and fish for its members. Dedicated hunting and fishing seasons suited their sporting clientele, but as a letter to a Wyoming paper put it: “When you say to a ranchman, ‘You can’t eat game, except in season,’ you make him a poacher, because he is neither going hungry himself nor have his family do so…”

Remove land from a community, Bourgon argues, and you make poaching “a deed of necessity”. So why not buy the land and give it back to its people, along with the tools to protect and manage it. Going by the experiences of the 59 community forests that now dot the province of British Columbia, community forests create twice as many jobs as those run by independent industry.

Of necessity, however, Bourgon spends more pages explaining the workings of a solution more palatable to central authority: an ever-more interconnected system of police surveillance, involving cameras, magnetic plates, LIDAR and, most recently, genetic testing. Even as Bourgon wrote this book, a genetic map was being assembled to make wood products, at least in the Pacific North-West, traceable to their original growing locations. The brilliance of this effort, spearheaded by Rich Cronn at the Oregon State University at Corvallis, cannot hide the fact that it is facilitating an age-old mistake: substituting enforcement for engagement.

Bourgon gives a voice both to the rangers risking their lives to save some of the planet’s oldest trees, and to poachers like Danny Garcia whose original sin was his unwillingness to leave the home of his ancestors. Full of the most varied testimonies, and by no mean fudging the issue that timber poaching is a crime and an environmental violation, Tree Thieves nonetheless testifies to the love of the woodsman for the wood. Drive through Orick sometime, and you will discover that communities are an ecology, too, and one worthy of care.