The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

tree to get going, after which it sped up mightily. Even in the mature part of the tree not every ring announces itself clearly. There are good years and bad: the summers of 1974 and 1975 were droughts, and the growth rings would have been minimal. Skilled dendrochronologists can ‘read’ tree rings as a diary of climatic variation extending over centuries, but my skills do not extend that far. However, in older trees most of the rings add about three to four millimetres to the radius every year, and these can be counted easily enough. I eventually reach a consensus with my own scientific conscience. Several trees come out with eighty rings, more or less, possibly as many as eighty-five. Jackie provides a second pair of unbiased and independent eyes and tots up a similar figure. These are from trunks ranging in diameter from twenty-seven to fifty centimetres; and another trunk of forty-three-centimetre diameter has just under sixty rings. I cannot prove that the former come from higher in a tree that might have had a more impressive base. What I can say, with confidence, is that a number of beeches in Lambridge Wood grew from seedlings around 1930, and are now fine, big trees.

      It is easy enough to convert diameters into circumferences, and with my very own trees the latter is what I record at shoulder-height with my tape measure. I can prove that many of the standing beeches are of similar size to those sitting on the log pile. It is actually rather easy to show this without wielding the tape, by using that alternative, hippy measurement – ‘the hug’. Trees with a fifty-centimetre diameter can be comfortably hugged, with hands meeting around their girth. There are an equal number of trees that are just too big to hug, although they do decrease in diameter to become huggable towards the canopy. And then there are the real giant trees, like the King Tree and the Queen Tree, and one I call the Elephant, with circumferences up to 250 centimetres. Surely these are much older than eighty years. If I assume that they continue to grow by adding a three-to-four-millimetre ring every year, it is not unreasonable to arrive at an age of 140 to 180 years. There are perhaps a dozen of these trees scattered through our wood. Their bark eventually loses the smoothness of the younger trees to become lightly scarred, as if daubed with vertical stretch-marks. Since there are certainly no trees still more antique, I conclude that these fine examples have been responsible for seeding some of their younger companions. They have been left alone. A great felling must have occurred about eighty years ago – and selective felling probably continued for another twenty years or so until Sir Thomas Barlow’s ownership, when we know that little happened in our part of the wood. The somewhat ‘unhuggables’ may well record regrowth after another, earlier phase of beech harvesting. There is no doubt at all that the whole wood has been replaced, thinned, sawn and regenerated. Its history is written in the tree rings. This is the same wood that John Stuart Mill walked through in 1828. Only the trees have changed.

      Like those of many wind-pollinated species, beech flowers are unspectacular. I already noticed brown bunches of fallen stamens from the male flowers in May, while the separate female components now sit above, waiting to mature into three-sided beechnuts, which will eventually fall to the ground in October. The most beautiful and accurate drawings I know of living twigs are by Sarah Simblet in The New Sylva,2 which is a large, luxurious, even sumptuous tribute to John Evelyn’s original, and about as appropriate for taking into a real wood as The Oxford English Dictionary. Last year’s beechnuts germinate as early as April, and the seedlings can be told from all others by their pale-green seed leaves (cotyledons), which resemble the blades of two inch-wide ping-pong bats placed side by side. Before the canopy has opened out, optimistic seedlings can come up almost anywhere in the beech litter, and are not short of light. A tender shoot then appears between the two seed leaves and starts to put out regular leaves. By now in June it is already clear that most of these young plants are doomed; they lack enough light to make further progress, as the canopy sucks it all up to feed the crowns of the trees. The babies yellow and fade. Only those seedlings close to a clearing can put on the vital first inches of growth that will give them a chance to mature into a giant. That is where a dozen or so small beech trees not much taller than I am vie to be first to fill the gap in the sky. At some stage I will have to pick a winner and thin out the rest. If I fail to do so the surviving trees will become too crowded and grow all spindly.

      Squirrels

      I am sitting in contemplative mood on a beech log left behind by cousin John when the bombardment begins. I cannot work it out at first. Bits of hard stuff are falling from the sky, and some of them are hitting me. Then I catch a piece as it lands: it’s a fragment of beech bark, more than a quarter of an inch thick. I am being pelted with beech bark! Protecting my eyes with spread fingers I look for the source of the onslaught. Perhaps forty feet above me a horizontal beech branch leans out from the nearest trunk. I catch a glimpse of something grey and fuzzy moving about on top of the branch. Then a squirrel peeps momentarily over the edge and identifies itself; it is not worried for its safety – it is only concerned about lunch. It is obviously not eating the beech bark; it is throwing it at me instead. He is after the sugary spring sap still flowing beneath the bark. Like one of the regulars in the Maltsters Arms, he is having a liquid lunch. The bark is stripped and the layer underneath it licked clean. It is obviously damaging to the tree. Now I notice that the bole of a nearby beech – and not a small one, either – displays a raw wound. A patch of bark has been removed, and the sapwood is on display, all yellow and unnaturally bright. Several other trees around me show the same feature, always close to the roots. In my absence, the squirrels have been picnicking al fresco.

      This arboreal dining habit explains a feature I have noticed on fallen beech branches. Many of them have the bark stripped from the upper side; this is less obvious than on new wounds because the colour contrast has dulled with the passage of time. Bark on the undersides of the branches is protected from squirrel activity, so seen from the ground branches high above look just fine. In fact, many are damaged on top, and perhaps this encourages them to fall before their time.

      Another chip of bark whizzes past my ear. I could almost hear a snicker from far above. Re-examining the chewed boles of the beech trees I see yet more evidence of old scars. Fortunately there is enough bark left to allow the big trees to survive. Nor is all well with some of my young beeches. Many of those with trunks thicker than my arm have been mutilated in a similar way. A few trees of middling size – forty years old perhaps – have become grotesquely distorted, their crowns twisting like corkscrews, branches all whiskery and set akimbo like broken limbs. I had not known what to make of them before. Squirrel damage has stunted and deformed them. ‘Little bastards,’ I growl, but that hardly seems adequate for an animal that may be affecting beech regeneration that has hitherto endured in the Chiltern Hills for a thousand years.

      There are always grey squirrels somewhere in the wood. They skitter acrobatically along branches and leap effortlessly through the canopy; it is their realm. They build untidy drays high in the trees in which they can raise two litters a year. They have abundantly fluffy tails. They are, of course, invaders from North America. They were released on a few English estates in the nineteenth century for aesthetic reasons, and then stayed on and prospered. They pushed out the red squirrels from most of England, and continue to expand their range northwards into Scotland today: they are bolder animals, faster breeders and generally more robust. They carry a lethal pox virus to which their red cousin has not yet acquired immunity. There is nothing new about worrying about the invader. A wartime Surrey Mirror exclaimed in 1942 that to eradicate this pest ‘all possible steps such as shooting and trapping must be taken. The national interest demands it.’ Never mind Hitler: the nation might be brought down by a climbing rodent! When I was a youngster there was a bounty of sixpence on every grey-squirrel tail. Neither threats nor inducements have worked: the cheeky grey squirrel dances nimbly onwards.

      It has been claimed that red squirrels are better adapted to conifer woods and that greys outcompete them only elsewhere – though I know plenty of conifer plantations with greys in command. I try very hard to banish Beatrix Potter’s charming Tale of Squirrel Nutkin from my mind, since her drawings provide such effective propaganda for the red species. Some ecologists even challenge the notion of ‘native’ species at all, when so much British wildlife has come from elsewhere. They are probably right that it is foolish to think of restoring some