I've stumbled on a book which is messing with my sense of the history of humans and trees - in a good way! I mean, how could I not appreciate a book which picks up on a line in the Book of Job?
the way trees sprouted when cut gave people an intimation of immortality. When Isaiah envisioned the coming kingdom, he sang that no child would die or old person not live out their days; rather, each would have the life of a tree. Job too saw it plainly: in chapter 14, as he demanded that God tell him why He had broken him, he complained that death simply puts an end to men. He wished he might have been a plant: "For a tree there is hope, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again and that its tender shoots whill not cease. Even though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the dust, yet at the first whiff of water, it may flourish again and put forth branches like a young plant." (25)
The central claim of the book, William Bryant Logan's Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees (Norton, 2019) is that the way human beings lived with trees, from ten thousand years ago until two hundred years ago, was by cutting them to stumps to let them regrow. (pic) This process, known as "coppice," and supplemented by "pollarding," coppicing at at a point up the trunk of a tree above the reach of hungry animals, supplied the wide range of supplies of wood on which human socieities relied. A single stump can produce many shoots. Ttrees are in fact designed to keep sprouting, and a coppiced tree can in principle live forever, as its branches are always young.) Inspired, perhaps, by the rebounding of trees munched by megafauna and taken especially under wing by the emintently coppiceable hazel, early and later humans were by this method able to produce reliable crops of logs and poles of all strengths and girths as well as softer sprouts for fences and baskets and weirs - and nuts and fruit, too.
Since it took several years for trees to produce the desired sprouts, woodlands were subdivided into many areas coppiced at staggered times, making for dynamic and incredibly diverse ecosystems. Logan describes one such area (known as a fell or hagg or cant) which had been coppiced every 12-15 years since the 12th century - until the 1960s and now restored. Worth quoting from at length (87-90):
A fell was between half an acre and five acres in size. When first cut, it looked stone dead, littered with tumps. The shade-loving, four-eaved woodlant plant called herb Paris had bruned tips. A few sedges bravely tried to poke up their heads. ...
In the first three years following the cut, the sunlit dirt bloomed. At Queens Wood in London the gardeners counted 39 plant species in a hagg whe they coppiced it in 2009. Three years later, the same cre had added 156 more. Most of them had waited dormant for ht years sine the last cut. ... Most of the plants had done the same decade by decade for more than a thousand years. ...
In the fourth year after the cut, the young poles of the resprouting coppice began to shadow the ground. Life changed in their shade. The bramble and raspberry that had sprouted with the sun-loving flowers ... suddenly covdred every bit of open ground. By year's end, the meadowy landscape had become a thicket. All the other flowers had retreated to the edges or dropped their seed to wait for a change of days. No new species were added at this stage. Not a square inch of ground could be seen. Two more years passed, the poles growing taller and speading wider, the spiny shrubs rambling over everything beneath them.
By about the seventh year after the cut, the spreading tops of the coppice trees first closed the canopy. They quickly shaded out both raspberyy and branple. The two disappeared ebem ore quickly than they had come. Under this canopy, the ground opneed again and the shade dwellers emerged. Some fhese, like herb Paris and daffodils, wrre the same as had grown at first, but now they were joined by bluebells, dog mercury, wood anemones, ivy, and an occasional insistent bramble. ...
At Bradfield Wood there were only about seventy plant species in the closed coppice wood, a third of those that had grown in the sun. Under the regime of the closed canopy, these plants would grow on until the coppice was felled again, somewhere between the fifteenth and twentieth year.
Each coppice cant is a woodland history in miniature, repeated again and again as the cycle of cuting comes round. If there are fifteen cants in a given woods, though, it is only one scene in the performance. The art was to mix all of the stages in a way that could help the whole to thrive. The annual rhythm of cutting might move in a round, from one cant to the next in space. This brought beter light to the young panels, but it also helped the animals that preferred a given stage to stay with it.
In short,
A coppice wood is not a single being, but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participation is the key. Far more species of plants, insects, birds, and other creatures inhabit such a mixed landscape than would live in an untouched woodland. (86)
It's a marvelous vision of a recently lost way of living in temporal and spatial harmony - and interaction - with the natural world! It puts paid to modern images of trees with clean lines and single tall trunks, rising insouciantly above us, a vision of higher things or invitation to ponder them. Those are not the trees with whom human beings lived, shared, celebrated, cared. Those are not, in the terms Robin Wall Kimmerer (who blurbed the book) taught us, tree peoples. (I'm put in mind of the chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass which describes the harvesting of tree bark for basketry, and how the careful selection of - and thanks to - trees increases the flourishing of those species.)
Coppice may not have been quite as widespread as Logan implies (it doesn't seem to be the case, for instance, that the old Indo-European word for "tree" also means "cut," as he asserts, 10) but it's still nourishing food for thought. Controlled burns make sense as "fire coppice" (213), a stretch but arguably a really helpful one. It helps undo the pernicious idea of "wilderness" which bedevils our imagining healthy relationships with communities of plant peoples, and might point to some of the contingent causes; coppice was abandoned just as the Anthropocene got going in Europe. What will I do with it in "Religion of Trees"? We'll see... !
Pollareded beeches, Gorbea Natural Park, Basque Country, in Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: Illustrated Edition, trans. Jane Billinghirst (Greystone Books, 2018), 30-31
