pumpkinstrokemarrow

It turns out that Rackham is an authority on the history of woods. Which turns out to be far more complicated than I had thought. So, for example, there does not appear to be agreement on the nature or extent of woodland cover in England in pre-historic times or when that cover was removed - although much of the removal appears to have been pre-Roman. He rather debunks the idea of there being such a thing as natural wood, wood untouched by human hand. No such thing exists in England (apart from anything else, we have been around for about as long as the trees. That is to say, since the end of the last ice age) and he is rather doubtful about how much of it there is elsewhere. With the result that restoring woodland to its natural state is rather like restoring Stonehenge to its proper state - there never having been a time when Stonehenge stood integral and entire. The thing was a process rather than a product.

Plenty of woody factlets.

So, for example, many trees live in symbiosis with specialised fungi which live in and around their roots and which serve to move matter between the roots and the surrounding soil. The fungi do a rather better job than root hairs and if, for some reason, the fungi get sick or go missing, the trees are apt to get sick and go missing.

That roots are not necessarily deep. He alleges that the roots of many big trees are surprisingly shallow, with most of them within a couple of feet or so of the surface. Perhaps that is where most of the grub is.

Some trees will evolve very slowly compared with small animals. They might live for a long time, they might reproduce vegetatively and only reproduce sexually rarely, if at all. So evolution is going to proceed at a very leisurely pace.

He is clearly very fond of Hayley Wood in Cambridgeshire, a place turned over to the naturalists when I was a child and which we used to visit occasionally on Sundays. At that time, before nature had been properly invented, we usually had the place to ourselves.

Hazel seems to have been a very important tree in the past. Which makes me wonder what a big hazel tree would look like? Do they get big? I have only seem them up to maybe 12 feet high, and then, only because of careful pruning of the many shootings from the stool. The biggest in our garden is maybe 8 feet high, having been cut to the ground some 5-10 years ago.

A red herring was the notion, introduced by the BH when she was turning the pages, that the word conifer comes from conys or rabbits, via the tendency of pine trees to grow on abandoned rabbit warrens, which had a tendency to be located on sandy ground which was too dry for broadleaved trees. OED suggests that this is twaddle, with conifer being derived in a much simpler way from cone. Failed to track down this herring through the index, which seemed to be fairly inaccurate.

Which brings me onto the quality of the book as a whole, marred to my mind by poor book design. Quite a fat book at getting on for 500 pages. Four fat clumps of photographic illustrations arranged evenly through it. But with the illustrations being detached from the relevant text so one does not get much value from them, despite their quality and interest. The thing would have done better in a larger format with pictures integrated into the text, after the fashion, say, of a Thames & Hudson picture book. The tables have all been relegated to the back of the book, so again, one does not get much value from them.

Then while Rackham is clearly immensely knowledgeable about woods and trees, his narrative ranges far and wide. Leaving me with the impression that it must be full of all kinds of errors. One person cannot be that accurate or balanced over such a broad field.

And the book is a bit disorganised and repetitive. So, all in all, an almost endeavour. There is so much here, but which would have so much benefited from a stronger grip. Perhaps a younger collaborator or a stronger editor. But maybe this past master of Corpus Christi is far too big a cheese to get a grip on. So he was allowed to go his own way.