More than 30 years ago, two hundred trees—cottonwoods, mainly, with some horse chestnuts and hackberries—were cut down behind Lane Technical High School, and only arborist Robert Wulkowicz was there to mourn them.
Well, that’s not completely correct. I was there as a Chicago Tribune reporter, and, for all my journalistic objectivity, I was sad to see the trees slaughtered to clear a spot for debris from a nearby highway project. And even sadder when one of the workers dismissed them as “rag trees…just wild trees that grow anywhere.”
The scene came back to me as I read Charles Watkins’s Trees Ancient and Modern: Woodland Cultures and Conservation, published by the London-based Reaktion Books and distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press.
For the past four decades, Watkins, a professor of rural geography at the University of Nottingham, has traveled the world and his native United Kingdom to study trees, not just as woody plants but also, maybe more, as cultural artifacts. His two earlier Reaktion books, also distributed by the U of C Press, are Trees, Woods and Forests: A Social and Cultural History (2014) and Trees in Art (2018).
The aim of his new book, he explains, is to explore “the diverse interactions between people and trees over time.” There is a particularly contemporary edge to these interactions, given the positive impact that trees can have on helping humans cope with climate change.
Myriad Perspectives
But Watkins looks at his subject from myriad perspectives, ranging far and wide through human history and political controversies, through the scientific literature and literature itself. For instance, Walt Whitman rhapsodized in 1876 about one of his favorite trees:
"How strong, vital, enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. It is, yet says nothing.”
“a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick in the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. It is, yet says nothing.”
Or consider the surprise destruction of several hundred trees in Kensington Gardens in 1880 and the reaction of one shocked letter-writer to the London Times, as Watkins relates:
There were “piles of timber trees for hundreds of yards towards the Round Pond.” The “formerly beautiful glade was like a wharfinger’s timber yard, with the addition of the ground being full of holes where the roots of the trees had been.” These “magnificent timber trees,” including “elm, beech and horse-chestnut…cannot be grown again under 100 years.
That’s one of the places in Trees Ancient and Modern that reminded me of the carnage behind Lane Tech.
Another was during Watkins’s discussion of the heavy use of herbicides from about 1950 through the early 1980s as a method of tree removal. In an echo of the “rag trees” comment I’d heard, Watkins reported that, during this period, woodland owners “were encouraged to use herbicides to kill a wide range of broad-leaved ‘weed’ trees including beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, field maple and hazel.”
There’s no question that Watkins is erudite and knows his subject deeply and widely and, even more, sensitively. Reading Trees Ancient and Modern is like going on a walk with Watkins and finding him doling out fascinating insights and understandings at every turn. Quite a companionable experience.
In a chapter on the felling of trees, Watkins mentions in passing that certain aspens are able to propagate to the point of creating, if not stopped, entirely new forests, and he writes:
Indeed, the closely related American aspen Populus tremuloides forms a very extensive clones, and one named Pando, in the Fishlake National Park, Utah, spreads over 106 acres, has over 40,000 trees and is thought to be “the largest, most dense organism ever found.”
He adds nothing more, but that was enough to get me looking for additional information and finding that those 40,000 trees aren’t actually individuals, but genetically identical parts of a single tree that may be 14,000 years old. Not at all a rag tree.
Speaking of felling trees, that was a great avocation for William E. Gladstone who, during a 60-year political career, served as UK prime minister four times for a total of twelve years. During one five-year period when he was in his late 60s, Gladstone and members of his family spent an average of 58 days a year, cutting down trees at his country estate and places he visited.
In fact, Gladstone was in the middle of tree felling when he received a telegram from Queen Victoria asking him to form a government. He kept at his work until the tree was down and met with the Queen the next day.
Watkins details the complex warp and woof of humans and trees, and one particularly interesting aspect is the tendency of people to give names—not just scientific names—to favorite or special trees.
For instance, one tree in the Sherwood Forest was known in 1799 as “the Duke’s walking-stick” because it was so tall and straight. Another in the Duchess’s flower garden was “called the Seven Sisters, from its having had seven stems or trunks issuing out of one stool.”
One ancient oak was called the Parliament-oak by “the common people” because of the idea that a meeting of Parliament was once held under it. There’s apparently no proof of that. However, in 1290, a Parliament was convened at a nearby palace.
Lonesome George
My favorite is the name that was given to one tree among hundreds marked to be taken down in the English city of Sheffield between 2012 and 2018, despite a great outcry from residents.
She and other opponents of the cut-downs were called “stupid cows” by one of the city workers, and their efforts didn’t save Lonesome George.
It was a large chestnut, and Elizabeth Gash-Wales, one of the protestors, called it Lonesome George.
She thought of it as “my tree…How could they take such a beautiful, healthy tree?” Her children had “grown up with that tree. It’s been a source of fascination and fun for years.” Indeed, she wrote that “Lonesome George was one of the first things” her daughter saw when she was born.”
She and other opponents of the cut-downs were called “stupid cows” by one of the city workers, and their efforts didn’t save Lonesome George.
“ day we all stood, watching my tree being cut down so brutally (and with glee by certain ) remains with me today. I cried as people drifted away and sobbed later on my own.”
Lonesome George was no rag tree.
Trees Ancient and Modern, published by Reaktion Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press, is available at bookstores and through the University of Chicago website.
