A tale of two rows of trees

There is no more depressing sight to a tree officer than a line of dead young trees. Actually there is something more depressing than that: a bundle of ‘evidence’ from an insurance company that one of your trees is causing tiny cracks in a house, and will you therefore be so good as to cut it down. But yesterday I was deeply frustrated to see a line of trees I ordered planted last winter – a feature that I had been particularly proud of – standing all crispy and brown in a row. I cursed all the contractors, both for the parks and the tree team, who had ignored the signs of early stress, had not bothered to report anything to me. You can outsource your work to another company but you can’t outsource care. While some staff for the outsourced companies will make an effort, whether or not they do is pot luck. A lot of the time you’ll get people who just want to do their hours, or make their target. This row of dead trees, it seemed to me, was a testament to the idiocy of the crass belief in the profit motive as a solver of problems. I mourned the sheer wastage: of plants and resources and a year of time in which the trees could have thrived.

This morning I felt a little calmer about it. It will cost a couple of thousand to replace the dead trees but in public budget terms that is less than a gnat bite. We will manage it. I walked up an informal avenue in one of our larger parks, dappled sunlight playing on the ground around me, trees leaning in a little on either side, and I thought about the different circumstances in which these had been planted. Most of the trees in the avenue are probably about eighty years old, planted perhaps between the wars. At that time there would have been a permanent staff, a proper park keeper for each park, sweepers and rose pruners and who knows who else. It’s difficult to imagine trees dying of simple neglect under such care.

Perhaps this is simple nostalgia for a time I never saw. Have we gained anything in the time since? Perhaps somewhat higher wages, if now undermined by the housing crisis. From the point of view of the trees the rise in the cost of labour – which is to say, a rise in the standard of living for the majority – has been a mixed blessing. The reaction against increased equality led to outsourcing, largely an attempt to undermine our living standards once more. As a result of both higher wages and companies that don’t care, the trees in our parks undoubtedly get less attention than they used to. But this does have an accidental good side: once established the trees often prefer to be left alone. Certainly no-one is micro-managing them now.

Whether the final outcome for this avenue of trees is negative or positive, the older trees will outlive the current fashion for employing people who aren’t interested in them. They will look on in amusement as some other way of organising their care comes in fashion, and will largely be just fine. The young trees, on the other hand, might prefer change sooner rather than later. If the change starts to come, I will give it an encouraging shove with both hands.

Looking for less

A recent trip to a part of the UK where trees grow poorly or not at all – Cursed! Cursed soil! – led me to thinking about nature as an experience, and how it plays a part in modern life. Often when wandering around the British countryside I am mostly paying attention to the trees. Having some expertise in large woody structures, I peruse them with a connoisseur’s eye and feel I am among a world I understand – at least in part. Walking through treeless meadows and heathery hills I found myself more focussed on the generality of the natural world. Here I was toddling through a (relatively) wild landscape. Why? Wouldn’t a walk along the Thames have done the same?

The term ‘mother nature’ is much overused. It usually refers to nature’s role in the reproduction of life itself. But another role that mothers often play is that of modulating their child’s mood. Fathers too, but they tend to have less social training in it. Mothers spend much time soothing ther children, reassuring them that the world is okay really despite the minor tortures arising from hunger, falls or strangers’ faces. Nature, it seems to me, plays this same role very strongly with certain adults, or at least, that is how we use nature. It is what draws many people out of the cities of a weekend, or leads them to flee altogether to a remote cottage.

Not everyone is soothed by nature, or not everyone wants to be. I’m not sure there’s anything to be proud of in calming ourselves in nature: it may well be a marker of how screwed up we are. We may simply be afflicted by more stress than other people. For some, that stress is externally imposed by a job or life difficulties. For others, stress and tension grows internally with the ordinary twists and turns of life. Perhaps our mothers did not soothe us enough, being distracted by their other children, or their projects, or their ADHD. So we go searching for another calming influence. And nature works, like a drug, often better than those offered by big pharma or the alcohol industry.

Why exactly nature is so soothing to so many of us is something of a mystery. We could speculate about the role of evolution, but the world doesn’t need more amateur evolutionary psychology. I suspect anyway that it is more cultural than that. Nature mostly moves slowly. It is dependable, as well as beautiful. It encourages us to stop and stare. Life in the city is immediately quicker, a rush of activity and being busy. Yet perhaps we know on some level that the busyness amounts to very little. We want to flee it for wilder spaces, even when our job consists of looking at trees. Perhaps we want, after all our struggles to see more of the human world, to see less of it.

They live

I have had a few weeks of stress and tiredness. As a result the working day has been completed on autopilot. Tree, not falling over = fine. Next tree – annoying somebody => prune. And suddenly without realising it you are seeing trees as mere objects. Lampposts with a head of green hair. That’s in the wrong place. That one can be pruned and stay healthy. In this weather THAT ONE NEEDS WATER – oh, how annoying.

Last night I slept well, and this morning I went out for a short run. In the local park I found myself weaving between the mature planes. On the route I was running I couldn’t help noticing them, they intruded on my consciousness, huge and unmissable. And then suddenly, they didn’t notice me back exactly, but they did seem to suddenly come alive. I was running between pillars not of stone or metal, but living tissue, as old as my grandparents would be. All my grandparents are dead, but these beasts are still thriving. Through them runs water, energy, fungi, bacteria. Not only do they live, but they are part of extensive living systems around themselves. We are connected through occupying the same ecosystem.

Once you are in the right headspace to notice the living trees it becomes easier to do so again. I returned from work after a half-day and sat in the armchair that looks out the window. The ash just outside – lightly pruned by myself from time to time to allow more light to the windows – seemed like a green fountain bursting from the ground. Two coal tits hopped between its fronds, living things on a living thing, and all part of each other. For a second, I felt part of them too.

This is all, apart from anything else, a reminder to myself to ensure I am well rested. To work with living beings is much more satisfying than to work with objects.

Fickle seasons

Of late the seasons have been stoking my trust issues. As someone who works outside I know that climatically the south east of England is not very rainy, even in winter (check it out compared to parts of Europe we associate with better weather: we are grey, yes, rainy, no). I often tell people I don’t get rained on much while out looking at trees. This winter has been different, it has let me down. It has felt very rainy, or even snowy, though the statistics suggest it didn’t deviate much from the average. Perhaps there was more rain in work hours than usual, or perhaps I just tried to go tree surveying at the wrong times.

Now spring is here, or is it? Is it summer? Is it winter? Can we trust the sun to stay? With such a changeable spring only the most naive of people would trust the weather at this point. If the weather were behind me I’d keep looking round. If it were round the corner I’d put a CCTV camera on it, just to be sure.

It’s easy to speak lightly about it now, but as I get older and know myself better I realise my mood is affected by the weather. Perhaps my dislike of offices that led me to tree work in the first place is because I am sensitive to how much light I get. It’s difficult to be scientific about it, but I often feel better when the sun is out. I love to see the leaves bursting out all around, and suddenly remember why I work with trees.

Today I sat out in the park for lunch and looked up at a hornbeam spreading over me, its leaves fully out at last. If it rains I can now take shelter. I’ve spent so much time indoors over the winter that I feel I have to re-establish my relationship with the trees, even though it wasn’t them that let me down. The trees are more trustworthy than the weather, and I’m sure we’ll soon get used to each other again. We just need to spend a bit more time together.

Why I work with trees – Part 3

Trees in cities incite strong feelings both for and against them. They offer endless inconvenience as well as ageless beauty, and a tree officer becomes the arbiter in disputes. As a public servant, I perhaps shouldn’t feel part of this conflict between nature and humans, I should remain neutral, refuse to take sides. In practice I often find myself on the side of the tree. When I see a tree behaving as humans think it shouldn’t, I admire it. A false acacia reaches up from a tree pit and out across a pavement to tickle someone’s window.  The resident is annoyed, but I am impressed that the tree is growing so rapidly, has fought upwards against gravity in such poor conditions to tap on a second floor window. A leaf is such a delicate thing, and it takes the tree so far; it is a disposable, bio-degradable machine for making sugars, not a mere ornament for our benefit. How can I blame it when it tries to optimise its sugar production?

Not all trees can adapt to the harsh conditions of a London street. It is rare to see oak trees in a tree pit for example; they tend to decline quickly if so constrained. But the range of trees that can survive, even flourish, in pavement tree pits is impressive. Planes and limes are the masters of urban survival, but cherries, liquidambars, ornamental pears, elms, horse chestnuts, cherry plums, maples, hornbeams, birches, magnolias, ashes, and Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh And All can be found around the country thriving in the frankly atrocious conditions of pavement tree pits. When one of them succumbs to disease and an upset resident rings to ask why we are cutting it down, I try to convey that we should not be surprised that the tree was weak enough to give way to fungi or disease. Given the difference between their preferred natural environment and a tree pit, it is amazing that any of them survive at all.

I love being part of this magnificent and resilient urban forest, but to me it is not simply about trees. In medieval Britain the term ‘forest’ did not refer specifically to woodland. It meant any large area of hunting land with its own laws, often with some rights available to surrounding commoners. Much of a forest area would include trees but it might also include clearings, lakes, villages, heathland and fields. Forest law could be harsh and was often disliked by the poor. In 1217 the Charter of the Forest, a complementary document to Magna Carta, returned more rights at least to those who weren’t serfs. It abolished the death penalty for killing deer, returned power to ‘verderers’ – the local stewards of the forests – and declared:

“Henceforth every freeman, in his wood or on his land that he has in the forest, may with impunity make a mill, fish-preserve, pond, marl-pit, ditch, or arable in cultivated land outside coverts, provided that no injury is thereby given to any neighbour.”

When I talk of the urban forest I refer also to this older form of forest, more multifaceted than the trees alone. It isn’t that I have a particular desire to create fish-preserves or marl-pits. I am lamentably ignorant of the methods of medieval industry and wouldn’t know what to do with either. But I find it impossible to consider urban trees without speaking of the broader physical and social environment of the city, without understanding that the trees are part of the city, that the city is part of the trees. It is in this expansive urban forest, full of human animals, tarmac deserts and concrete cliffs, that I chose to work. I still choose it, and the urban forest feels like home.

Why I work with trees – Part 2

The first trees that provided sustained comfort to me were Leyland cypresses. To those who work with trees or have ever had one in their garden this will seem a perverse choice. But the problem with most Leyland cypresses is that they are planted in the wrong place. These were planted in the right place. We had a large garden, at the limit of what my parents could afford, and next to us was a car repair garage. These cypresses had been planted as a screen between our front garden and the garage. They did their job of hiding the ugly neighbouring property admirably, but they also had another feature: a small boy could creep inside their crowns to find a dark and comforting space, and there be invisible.

A boy with introverted tendencies from a large family beset with anger and frustration issues needs a place to go. Only later in life would that boy discover he very much enjoys the company of people; it will take encounters with those very different from his family and their friends to reveal this to him. Even then, he will still need moments of quiet to himself. When the clamour of my five brothers and sisters and various houseguests became too much, I would push past the outstretched fronds, at a place I knew well, where a gap between two major branches allowed me to reach into the heart of the high hedge. A couple of the limbs swept low along the ground, providing benches to sit on. In a minute my eyes would adjust, able to see in the light filtering between the branches. It was possible too to peer out and see what was going on, perhaps people arriving or leaving from the cars parked in the driveway. But nobody could see in. I was alone, but for the occasional bird hopping from branch to branch. Birds, who are not as prejudiced against foreigners as people think, like Leyland cypresses for the dense cover they provide. We had something in common.

Skip forward two decades, and I sit on a bench in the park to eat lunch, glad to be out the battery farm of the office, and notice the cherry tree leaning inquisitively over my shoulder, offering its leaves to me. Cherries are everywhere in cities, which means it is easy not to notice them except when in flower. I inspect the particular venation pattern of its leaves, a fingerprint written in fibrous cells and chlorophyll, each leaf unique yet characteristic. I examine the bud, a perfectly shaped, tightly wound fragment of the tree’s future. I run my finger over the twig, feeling the roughness of the lenticels through which the tree breathes. The detail of one tiny part of the tree is so intricate, has so many unique features, that I have the sense of examining a fractal drawing in which the closer I look the more detail I will see. Mentally I zoom in to the level of the cells, the building blocks of the whole structure. The intricacy of its survival systems reminds me that my body too holds this almost magical level of detail. We are distant relatives, the tree and I. That feeling of commonality always returns to me, when I take the time to dwell on it.

So it was that I chose urban tree care, arboriculture, as my escape route from an office-bound life. I did time as a tree surveyor for a consultancy, surveying trees on a large scale, in their thousands, tens of thousands. I graduated from that to become a tree officer for a local authority, my task to nurture public and protect private trees.

Why I work with trees – Part 1

Trees hold, at least in theory, an important place in British culture. They are much romanticised in word and art, mostly as part of the countryside: our ancient woodlands and wood pastures and hedgerows. Trees in cities are regarded much more functionally. Sometimes you would barely know that trees in city streets are the same creatures as their country cousins. When people hear that I work with trees in London some even comment to me that the city doesn’t have many trees. In fact London is more densely treed than much of the countryside. It takes open eyes, an open mind and taking a little time out of a busy day to see the urban forest. Once you do, there is a constant joy to be had in the havens of life brightening the gloomiest of street scenes, the marching avenues, the flowering gems, the soaring natural sculptures that catch the eye upward towards elevated greenery that often dominates the sky.

In my former life cooped up in an office five days a week, I spent many hours considering possible escape routes. I knew that I had to work at least partly outdoors; offices, I had decided, were inhumane. Having always loved trees and woodlands, I briefly considered becoming a forester. But I do not live in the countryside, I live in a big city. Thankfully I have never considered city trees to be inferior versions of their forest counterparts. Even on a rational level one could argue that they must do a lot more work than their country cousins: they clean the air; they beautify largely grey concrete and tarmac spaces; they provide shade and shelter without prejudice or sending invoices.

But even that is a description of their function, the ideas we use to sell trees to bureaucrats who only understand measurable outputs. My real love for trees is expressed differently. They are an invasion of wildness in carefully shaped urban landscapes, they sneak into the city something it has tried to leave behind: the apparent battle between humans and the natural world, in which we have illusory moments of victory, followed always by a reminder – a huge tree laid out across the road by last night’s storms or a sapling shooting through six inches of concrete – that we can never quite win, that trying to triumph over nature is our most foolhardy endeavour. Trees recall us to our peasant and worker forebears, for whom trees were a resource in manifold forms. They remind us too that it is not we, humans, who keep the atmosphere on the planet breathable. Both our history and our future are intertwined with trees.

The trees are not panicking

It’s easy to be gloomy about the future of trees. Disease upon disease upon pest seem to descend upon us. It’s hard to think of a major tree species in the UK not affected by some plague, or not in danger of being so (Hornbeam! Okay, there are some). But two days ago I was walking around a patch of countryside not particularly known for its trees, somewhere in the south of England, and I was amazed by the sheer number of impressive trees, huge trees, ancient trees. If we stand and gaze at them we remember that this is not even the first phase of globalisation they have encountered, and that the problems that seem bad on a human life-scale probably seem laughable to trees that have survived millions of years.

It is the loss of landscapes we love that upsets us, and so it should. There’s no doubt we should re-examine our desperate need to move crap around the world in the pretence that this improves our quality of life. At the same time, panic is also not useful, and it is good to remember that new landscapes will emerge over time. Elms, it is likely, disappeared from the UK once before, then made a comeback. The trees will always make a comeback, in some form or other. If they weren’t so resilient, they would hardly be with us still. The trees, you will note, are not panicking.

Feelgood rain

There was a light smattering of rain as I cycled into work today. Sometimes this would ruin my mood, but today I quite liked it. Perhaps it was because the sheen of water on the road wasn’t quite enough to leap up from my tyres into my shoes. Few everyday physical discomforts are more misery-inducing than wet feet. So today the rain simply made me feel hyper-aware of the natural world. I was, in both a literal and metaphorical way, cycling through nature in the big city. The rain was here to feed the grass and the trees, and the trees provided a moment’s respite from the rain as I cycled beneath their canopies. There was a sense of harmony to it all that meant I didn’t mind the dampness in the least.

The day at work itself has been very humdrum. Someone rang up to ask us to fell a street tree because another (private) tree in the street fell down. I had to explain there was no relationship between the two that would increase the risk to the street tree. But there was something very relaxing and reassuring about the morning’s ride that has stayed with me.

Life in the cemetery

I have spent much of the day looking at cemetery trees. In accessible graveyards trees have a kind of double meaning: they act as living memorials but also provide a green landscape through which people walk for the sake of the life they see there, not the dead. But this cemetery is not much used by the public, being next to a far superior public open space. This means that the trees are there mostly for the dead and their mourners. They also provide a home, appropriately, to crows, and to jackdaws. But their main purpose is as monuments to the dead, gaining some of their sustenance from those they celebrate.

The interesting thing about this particular cemetery is that the trees have been ignored for twenty years. Many are in poor condition, some are dead. But to my knowledge the mourners and carers-of-graves rarely raise the matter with the management. If anything what is passed on to me are complaints, mostly about roots lifting gravestones (I give any tree that cares to permission to lift my gravestone). One can only hope the departed were loved more than the trees are loved now.

The effect of all this is that, while I want to improve the tree population of the cemetery, I feel it is mostly for the dead and for myself. This is a luxury for a tree officer, for we spend much of our time trying to anticipate the wishes of others, trying to avoid conflicts between trees and humans. Here it feels like the main human to consider is myself, and perhaps some future version of myself that in a hundred years time will be caring for the trees I plant. I’ll try to give them a treat.