Woodland Paradise

I once had the privilege of working with him for a couple of days, during which we explored Saint John’s Wood in Co Roscommon. At first I found him rather daunting. Prof Oliver Rackham OBE is every inch the Cambridge University don. But I soon discovered that the upper-class English mannerisms concealed a rather shy personality with massive enthusiasm for his subject, which was driven by incisive intelligence and an extraordinary breadth of knowledge.

Because of this I was quite excited when I heard he had published a new book called Woodlands that was said to be a compendium of all he had learned on the subject in a long life that had included much travelling to woodlands around the world.

At first sight the book is as daunting as the man because it’s large and dense and rather old-fashioned in its format. The illustrations are small and collected together in sections of ‘plates’ and the whole book is too heavy to hold in your hand for very long – you have to rest it on something.

It’s published as volume 100 in the Collins New Naturalist series. This series has probably done more for popular natural history over the past half a century or so than any other publishing venture. I have many of its volumes on my shelves and I use them every day. Oliver Rackham has been part of its editorial team.

When I started to read the book I wasn’t disappointed. Its density is offset by the fact that Rackham writes in clear, commonsense English that never descends into jargon or allows the meaning to be obscured by scientific terminology. The references are confined to footnotes, which you don’t have to read if you don’t want to, so you can just gallop through the book and enjoy it.

Before I read it I smugly thought that I knew quite a bit about trees and woodlands. I’ve studied the subject, in an amateurish sort of way, for most of my life and written quite a bit about it. But on practically every page I discovered some new fact, or found some old assumption challenged. I never imagined that England had less woodland in the Middle Ages than it has today, or that there was evidence that Field Maple was a native Irish species.

Although Rackham knows a huge amount about trees he is more interested in woodlands. In other words he is fascinated by the ecological relationships between different individual trees and between trees and the other living things in a wood. For example, he classifies tree species according to their ‘gregariousness’ – some species, like Scots pine, prefer to grow among other trees of the same species. They are gregarious. But others can’t stand to be anywhere near their own kind. Crab apple in the wild is an extreme example of an un-gregarious tree.

He discusses the role of animals and birds in woodlands. He certainly doesn’t like grey squirrels or any species of deer. But he devotes most space to discussing the animal with the most impact on woodlands – the human animal.

There is a huge amount of information on how management practices and different methods of timber harvesting have affected all woodlands in Britain and Ireland and most woodlands throughout the world. He is certainly no fan of the sort of forestry we became used to in Ireland in the 20th century. But he tends to dismiss it as irrelevant in landscape terms because he thinks it’s now totally obsolete.

He believes that since about 1980 it has become so obvious that this type of forestry plantation is totally uneconomic that the phenomenon will just wither away and the neglected trees will die of old age. He gives one nice example of the ludicrous nature of forestry economics. A plantation in England had to be abandoned because it could not be accessed by 38-ton lorries, which nobody imagined would ever exist when the trees were first planted. I wonder if these messages have been fully learned in Ireland?

He quotes an early Scottish writer who urged landowners to plant trees ‘for pleasure and profit’. Rackham’s implication is that most of these landowners probably derived a lot more pleasure than profit from their undertakings. I can certainly relate to this as far as my own modest tree planting exploits are concerned.

The only parts of the book that I found a little tedious were the sections where he deals in detail with the history and ecology of English woodlands that I’m not familiar with. But Rackham is a well travelled man who has also published work on the woodlands of Crete, Sardinia, Texas and Australia. He is also very familiar with Irish woodlands and has been here many times. He has some fascinating things to say about this country. One of them is to demolish the popular notion that the dominant tree of our ancient woodlands was the sessile oak. In early prehistoric times this was only true in limited parts of the west of the country and birch was dominant elsewhere. Later ash and wych elm took over on lime-rich soils, which account for well over half our land area.

There are specific references to a number of Irish woodlands, including Killarney, St John’s Wood, Kilteel Wood in Co Kildare, Portlaw Wood in Co Waterford, The Glen of the Downs in Wicklow, Charleville in Offaly and, rather surprisingly, the Burren.

This book is probably not for everyone. But if, like me, you’re a tree fanatic, if you love woodlands and are hungry to learn more about them, then I can’t recommend it highly enough.

It will undoubtedly become a natural history classic and the book Oliver Rackham will be remembered for.