Of all the ideas that are so deep-rooted in us that they are almost impossible to shift, one of the most tenacious is that planting trees is a Good Thing. The very act seems self-evidently benevolent. Trees provide shade and shelter, wood for building, homes for wildlife; often of great beauty themselves, they give us the oxygen we need to breathe, and - of increasing importance - they soak up the carbon dioxide from our industry and motor vehicles that is causing the climate to change. And those are just the rational reasons. We also like them a lot. (Know anyone who actually dislikes trees?) But if we can agree that in general terms planting them is all to the good, experience has taught us that we should none the less add a caveat: it depends on which trees are planted, where.
Perhaps a major reason we are drawn to trees is the idea of their apotheosis, forest. In the human imagination a forest has long been a special place, mysterious and secret, and as its more frightening associations have receded, as both belief in monsters and the great forest beasts themselves, the bears and the wolves, have died out, the idea of forest has become a hugely attractive one. In Britain our template is the ancient wildwood: great oaks towering over dappled light and shade where badgers play and deer graze. In the tropics, we think of the rainforest, dense and species-rich, studded with dazzling birds and insects, and every time the loggers move in we mourn the devastation of such a treasure-trove. We cherish a forest as a world apart, where the riches of nature are especially concentrated, on hand, all around.
Yet in the 20th century in Britain, starting just after the First World War, a new and entirely alien type of forest began to be planted in the uplands, a forest which nobody loved and which many people eventually came to hate, yet which for 70 years carried all before it. It strode over the hills in knife-edged straight lines, ignoring the contours of the earth, wiping out the singularity and variation of the landscape with great regimented, geometrical blocks. The trees, all conifers, came from abroad. They were all identical, same type, same shape, same size, and they were squeezed together like passengers on the London Underground in the rush hour, packed so tightly that little light penetrated between them: there was no dappled shade, no wildflowers on the forest floor, just darkness and sterility. It seemed unstoppable. The dark green army marched on and on, decade after decade, and it was not until a myriad special places had been lost under it and the area of Britain covered by trees had increased by a hundred per cent that at long last it went too far, and it met its Waterloo.
The story of the great 20th-century conifer afforestation of Britain is rarely told, but it was one of the biggest changes ever to the look of our landscape. It was extraordinary for the way in which the giant process proceeded unquestioned for so long, and even more for the dramatic way in which it ended, with the bitterest battle over conservation Britain has ever seen. When it was done the country's main wildlife watchdog body had been dismembered in what many saw as an act of sheer political spite, and much wonderful wildlife habitat had been destroyed; but the new forestry had at last been tamed.
It came out of the Great War, and the critical need for wooden pit props to keep the coal mines going, at a time when Britain ran on coal; we could not produce enough of our own, and the German submarine blockade of 1917 very nearly choked off imports. Never again, said the Government when hostilities finished: we will create a strategic reserve of timber for pit props and other essential uses; and in 1919 the Forestry Commission was born.
The new quango was to build up a major British timber resource as quickly and as cheaply as possible. But to do this it was not possible to renew the native forest of oak and ash and all the other shady, whispering broadleaved trees that had been familiar and beloved for centuries. They grew far too slowly and too irregularly. What was needed were trees that would grow fast and straight in poor soils, and for this the Commission turned to conifers.
Britain's one native conifer suitable for commercial forestry, the Scots pine, was too slow-growing and dependent on dry earth. For trees that were faster growers in the damp climate of the uplands, where most of the new afforestation was taking place, the Commission looked to the conifers of the northern Pacific coast of the USA and lighted on three: the Douglas fir, the lodgepole pine and above all, the Sitka spruce.
The Sitka spruces and their fellows did indeed push up quick and straight, and they made possible a forestry of an entirely new sort, industrial in style and scale. It was anything but a recreation of the diverse natural woodland Britain had known before. Rather, it was intensive tree farming, using alien trees. The foresters were not charged with respecting the natural form of the landscape or the nature conservation value of potential planting sites. They had a simple economic objective - to produce lots of timber, quickly. And so over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled f conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after World War Two: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value then unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time, no matter that sites of great landscape and conservation value were being swamped - the dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Great Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5 per cent of the land surface, had reached over 2m hectares, and had doubled. And then it hit the Flow Country.
Of all the candidates for Britain's most extraordinary landscape, the Flow Country, the peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, must be near the top of the list. This is a region beyond the Highlands, both geographically and in spirit, a true wilderness: a vast open plain of quivering peat bog, dotted with thousands of dark pools (dubh lochans in Gaelic), whose nearest equivalent is the Arctic tundra. Stretching out for miles in every direction, it seems empty for seven or eight months of each year, but in spring it explodes into a short season of vivid life: flowers cover the peatlands, and a great pulse of millions of hatching insects draws in for nesting the most remarkable upland bird fauna in all of the British Isles.
Greenshanks, dunlins, golden plovers; black-throated and red-throated divers; scoters and skuas, eagles, harriers and falcons; curlews and snipe; oystercatchers and sandpipers; wigeon and red-breasted mergansers, wheatears and ring ouzels, with meadow pipits and skylarks in their thousands: this list is a litany of rarity, beauty and diversity that is matched nowhere else. And when the tide of Sitka spruce eventually got to the top of Scotland, it ran smack into this amazing aggregation of birds, and started to destroy their moorland nesting sites.
It was not directly the Forestry Commission's doing. Private companies had come on the scene, attracted by the realisation that investors in forestry could claim not only planting grants but also substantial tax reliefs, at a time when personal tax levels were much higher than now. These forestry management companies bought and planted forest blocks on behalf of investors who never saw the trees, but merely took advantage of the reliefs. One of them, Fountain Forestry based in Perth, realised in the late 1970s that it could buy up large parts of the Flow Country very cheaply - as the land was no good for agriculture - and turn it into tax-break-driven spruce forest.
No trees grow naturally on the Flows: in the nutrient-poor waterlogged peat, tree roots cannot establish themselves. But advances in technology changed things. Foresters had discovered that if you ploughed the peat deeply - and new wide-tracked ploughs made this possible - you could, with liberal use of fertiliser, get trees established in the plough "throw", the peat thrown up to the side of the furrow, and you could then help them on by draining the peat with a network of ditches.
Fountain Forestry turned out to be a particularly assertive company, and what brought on the crisis of the Flow Country was the speed with which it moved, once it decided to begin afforestation. Between 1979 and 1985 it bought and planted, mainly with Sitka spruce, no less than 40,000 hectares - that's more than 100,000 acres in Imperial measure - of prime peatland.
This was a gigantic estate in the Flow Country's very heart, and the effect on the breeding birds was immediate: their moorland nest sites started going under the plough and the planting. When the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) eventually raised the alarm - in a short, dramatic study saying that 593 breeding pairs of golden plover, 433 pairs of dunlin and 147 pairs of greenshank had already been lost, and warning that "very substantial proportions of the UK population of all three species are at risk," with many other species in similar danger - conservationists were outraged, and battle began.
It was a deeply acrimonious fight, making newspaper headlines regularly for three years, and enlivened by the revelation that some of Fountain Forestry's wealthy tax-break clients were famous names - Terry Wogan, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins. It was intensified by the feeling of Scottish politicians that this was an unjustified interference by English busybodies in Scottish affairs. That came to a head in 1987 when the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), the Government's UK-wide wildlife watchdog, published its own report entitled Birds, Bogs and Forestry, which criticised the foresters in unusually outspoken terms for an official body (and was launched in London rather than Edinburgh). The Scottish establishment was deeply angered and prevailed upon the Tory Government in 1989 to break up the NCC, so Scotland could get a wildlife agency all its own that would supposedly be more sensitive to Scottish interests.
But by then the battle had been won. The row was so big that it rammed home to the Government the fact that a tax break for rich investors which had the effect of major damage to wildlife was a classic example of f a perverse subsidy, and was anyway terrible publicity; and in his 1988 budget the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, scrapped the forestry tax reliefs. That halted the planting. The Forestry Commission, for its part, and to its credit, began to see that conservation could no longer be sidelined in forestry, and started to turn to a much broader approach which encompassed Britain's own broadleaved and ancient woodlands, and which began to respect the lie of the landscape when forests were laid out. The days of the rampant unthinking coniferisation of Britain came to an end.
But what of the Flow Country itself, where the issue was decided?
Journey north, far past Inverness, up the long narrow Strath of Kildonan deep into Sutherland, until you come to Forsinard with its tiny railway station, then venture boldly off the road: you will see one of the strangest sights of your life. Around you are millions of chopped-down young trees, lying where they have fallen in the long straight plough furrows which form vast grids across the naked land.
This is not a harvesting, as the trees are far too immature to harvest; this is destruction, probably the biggest deliberate destruction of trees Britain has ever seen. They are mostly Sitka spruces, Christmas-tree size or a bit bigger; now their greenness has all gone and they are fusing into each other as a knee-high thick mix of dead branches and needles and thin bony trunks which has a name of its own ("brash") and covers the landscape in a great sad ash-grey littering.
"It's not pretty," murmurs Norrie Russell, who has supervised the destruction. "You would never call it pretty."
But it is strangely moving. The RSPB is trying to put things right. It has taken the lead in safeguarding the Flow Country for the future, creating at Forsinard in its centre a giant nature reserve of near 16,000 hectares, its biggest; and it has gone further. It has refused to take the 1980s afforestation as a fait accompli, and helped by EU money, in a partnership that involves Scottish Natural Heritage, the wildflower charity Plantlife, and yes, the Forestry Commission - that's how far things have changed - it has bought and is removing more than 2,000 hectares of Fountain Forestry's unhappy plantings and trying to restore the underlying peat bog to what it was. It is trying to put wilderness back.
More than four million trees have come down, but the restoration isn't easy or quick. Experiments showed that the best way of removing the spruces was to fell them into the plough furrows and let them rot down (the wood has no commercial value, and anyway to try and remove them would be damaging). But the process will take decades.
"How long will it take till it's an active bog?" muses Norrie, the RSPB's Forsinard site manager, heading up the restoration. "It could take 30 to 100 years. It's quite hard to predict. When people plant an oak seedling they don't expect an oak forest for centuries. But as long as the climate remains the same, this landscape wants to be covered in an open bog, it doesn't want to be a forest. It will happen."
Destroying young trees by the million wouldn't often seem right, but two considerations alter your feelings looking at it up above Forsinard. One is knowing what went before, the long saga of imposing an alien forestry on the British uplands; the fallen spruces seem like the dead on the final battlefield, in a fight that was worth winning.
The other is to walk out with Norrie on to the still untouched peatlands, where the flowers are starting to bloom, the cottongrass, the sundew, the bog asphodel; the gaze stretches away unimpeded to the far horizons, and suddenly a greenshank takes flight, the elegant, nervy wader, seeming to embody in its melancholy call the very essence of wildness.
Planting trees is only a Good Thing, sometimes.
Of all the ideas that are so deep-rooted in us that they are almost impossible to shift, one of the most tenacious is that planting trees is a Good Thing. The very act seems self-evidently benevolent. Trees provide shade and shelter, wood for building, homes for wildlife; often of great beauty themselves, they give us the oxygen we need to breathe, and - of increasing importance - they soak up the carbon dioxide from our industry and motor vehicles that is causing the climate to change. And those are just the rational reasons. We also like them a lot. (Know anyone who actually dislikes trees?) But if we can agree that in general terms planting them is all to the good, experience has taught us that we should none the less add a caveat: it depends on which trees are planted, where.
Perhaps a major reason we are drawn to trees is the idea of their apotheosis, forest. In the human imagination a forest has long been a special place, mysterious and secret, and as its more frightening associations have receded, as both belief in monsters and the great forest beasts themselves, the bears and the wolves, have died out, the idea of forest has become a hugely attractive one. In Britain our template is the ancient wildwood: great oaks towering over dappled light and shade where badgers play and deer graze. In the tropics, we think of the rainforest, dense and species-rich, studded with dazzling birds and insects, and every time the loggers move in we mourn the devastation of such a treasure-trove. We cherish a forest as a world apart, where the riches of nature are especially concentrated, on hand, all around.
Yet in the 20th century in Britain, starting just after the First World War, a new and entirely alien type of forest began to be planted in the uplands, a forest which nobody loved and which many people eventually came to hate, yet which for 70 years carried all before it. It strode over the hills in knife-edged straight lines, ignoring the contours of the earth, wiping out the singularity and variation of the landscape with great regimented, geometrical blocks. The trees, all conifers, came from abroad. They were all identical, same type, same shape, same size, and they were squeezed together like passengers on the London Underground in the rush hour, packed so tightly that little light penetrated between them: there was no dappled shade, no wildflowers on the forest floor, just darkness and sterility. It seemed unstoppable. The dark green army marched on and on, decade after decade, and it was not until a myriad special places had been lost under it and the area of Britain covered by trees had increased by a hundred per cent that at long last it went too far, and it met its Waterloo.
The story of the great 20th-century conifer afforestation of Britain is rarely told, but it was one of the biggest changes ever to the look of our landscape. It was extraordinary for the way in which the giant process proceeded unquestioned for so long, and even more for the dramatic way in which it ended, with the bitterest battle over conservation Britain has ever seen. When it was done the country's main wildlife watchdog body had been dismembered in what many saw as an act of sheer political spite, and much wonderful wildlife habitat had been destroyed; but the new forestry had at last been tamed.
It came out of the Great War, and the critical need for wooden pit props to keep the coal mines going, at a time when Britain ran on coal; we could not produce enough of our own, and the German submarine blockade of 1917 very nearly choked off imports. Never again, said the Government when hostilities finished: we will create a strategic reserve of timber for pit props and other essential uses; and in 1919 the Forestry Commission was born.
The new quango was to build up a major British timber resource as quickly and as cheaply as possible. But to do this it was not possible to renew the native forest of oak and ash and all the other shady, whispering broadleaved trees that had been familiar and beloved for centuries. They grew far too slowly and too irregularly. What was needed were trees that would grow fast and straight in poor soils, and for this the Commission turned to conifers.
Britain's one native conifer suitable for commercial forestry, the Scots pine, was too slow-growing and dependent on dry earth. For trees that were faster growers in the damp climate of the uplands, where most of the new afforestation was taking place, the Commission looked to the conifers of the northern Pacific coast of the USA and lighted on three: the Douglas fir, the lodgepole pine and above all, the Sitka spruce.
The Sitka spruces and their fellows did indeed push up quick and straight, and they made possible a forestry of an entirely new sort, industrial in style and scale. It was anything but a recreation of the diverse natural woodland Britain had known before. Rather, it was intensive tree farming, using alien trees. The foresters were not charged with respecting the natural form of the landscape or the nature conservation value of potential planting sites. They had a simple economic objective - to produce lots of timber, quickly. And so over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled f conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after World War Two: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value then unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time, no matter that sites of great landscape and conservation value were being swamped - the dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Great Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5 per cent of the land surface, had reached over 2m hectares, and had doubled. And then it hit the Flow Country.
Of all the candidates for Britain's most extraordinary landscape, the Flow Country, the peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, must be near the top of the list. This is a region beyond the Highlands, both geographically and in spirit, a true wilderness: a vast open plain of quivering peat bog, dotted with thousands of dark pools (dubh lochans in Gaelic), whose nearest equivalent is the Arctic tundra. Stretching out for miles in every direction, it seems empty for seven or eight months of each year, but in spring it explodes into a short season of vivid life: flowers cover the peatlands, and a great pulse of millions of hatching insects draws in for nesting the most remarkable upland bird fauna in all of the British Isles.
Greenshanks, dunlins, golden plovers; black-throated and red-throated divers; scoters and skuas, eagles, harriers and falcons; curlews and snipe; oystercatchers and sandpipers; wigeon and red-breasted mergansers, wheatears and ring ouzels, with meadow pipits and skylarks in their thousands: this list is a litany of rarity, beauty and diversity that is matched nowhere else. And when the tide of Sitka spruce eventually got to the top of Scotland, it ran smack into this amazing aggregation of birds, and started to destroy their moorland nesting sites.
It was not directly the Forestry Commission's doing. Private companies had come on the scene, attracted by the realisation that investors in forestry could claim not only planting grants but also substantial tax reliefs, at a time when personal tax levels were much higher than now. These forestry management companies bought and planted forest blocks on behalf of investors who never saw the trees, but merely took advantage of the reliefs. One of them, Fountain Forestry based in Perth, realised in the late 1970s that it could buy up large parts of the Flow Country very cheaply - as the land was no good for agriculture - and turn it into tax-break-driven spruce forest.
No trees grow naturally on the Flows: in the nutrient-poor waterlogged peat, tree roots cannot establish themselves. But advances in technology changed things. Foresters had discovered that if you ploughed the peat deeply - and new wide-tracked ploughs made this possible - you could, with liberal use of fertiliser, get trees established in the plough "throw", the peat thrown up to the side of the furrow, and you could then help them on by draining the peat with a network of ditches.
Fountain Forestry turned out to be a particularly assertive company, and what brought on the crisis of the Flow Country was the speed with which it moved, once it decided to begin afforestation. Between 1979 and 1985 it bought and planted, mainly with Sitka spruce, no less than 40,000 hectares - that's more than 100,000 acres in Imperial measure - of prime peatland.
This was a gigantic estate in the Flow Country's very heart, and the effect on the breeding birds was immediate: their moorland nest sites started going under the plough and the planting. When the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) eventually raised the alarm - in a short, dramatic study saying that 593 breeding pairs of golden plover, 433 pairs of dunlin and 147 pairs of greenshank had already been lost, and warning that "very substantial proportions of the UK population of all three species are at risk," with many other species in similar danger - conservationists were outraged, and battle began.
It was a deeply acrimonious fight, making newspaper headlines regularly for three years, and enlivened by the revelation that some of Fountain Forestry's wealthy tax-break clients were famous names - Terry Wogan, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins. It was intensified by the feeling of Scottish politicians that this was an unjustified interference by English busybodies in Scottish affairs. That came to a head in 1987 when the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), the Government's UK-wide wildlife watchdog, published its own report entitled Birds, Bogs and Forestry, which criticised the foresters in unusually outspoken terms for an official body (and was launched in London rather than Edinburgh). The Scottish establishment was deeply angered and prevailed upon the Tory Government in 1989 to break up the NCC, so Scotland could get a wildlife agency all its own that would supposedly be more sensitive to Scottish interests.
But by then the battle had been won. The row was so big that it rammed home to the Government the fact that a tax break for rich investors which had the effect of major damage to wildlife was a classic example of f a perverse subsidy, and was anyway terrible publicity; and in his 1988 budget the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, scrapped the forestry tax reliefs. That halted the planting. The Forestry Commission, for its part, and to its credit, began to see that conservation could no longer be sidelined in forestry, and started to turn to a much broader approach which encompassed Britain's own broadleaved and ancient woodlands, and which began to respect the lie of the landscape when forests were laid out. The days of the rampant unthinking coniferisation of Britain came to an end.
But what of the Flow Country itself, where the issue was decided?
Journey north, far past Inverness, up the long narrow Strath of Kildonan deep into Sutherland, until you come to Forsinard with its tiny railway station, then venture boldly off the road: you will see one of the strangest sights of your life. Around you are millions of chopped-down young trees, lying where they have fallen in the long straight plough furrows which form vast grids across the naked land.
This is not a harvesting, as the trees are far too immature to harvest; this is destruction, probably the biggest deliberate destruction of trees Britain has ever seen. They are mostly Sitka spruces, Christmas-tree size or a bit bigger; now their greenness has all gone and they are fusing into each other as a knee-high thick mix of dead branches and needles and thin bony trunks which has a name of its own ("brash") and covers the landscape in a great sad ash-grey littering.
"It's not pretty," murmurs Norrie Russell, who has supervised the destruction. "You would never call it pretty."
But it is strangely moving. The RSPB is trying to put things right. It has taken the lead in safeguarding the Flow Country for the future, creating at Forsinard in its centre a giant nature reserve of near 16,000 hectares, its biggest; and it has gone further. It has refused to take the 1980s afforestation as a fait accompli, and helped by EU money, in a partnership that involves Scottish Natural Heritage, the wildflower charity Plantlife, and yes, the Forestry Commission - that's how far things have changed - it has bought and is removing more than 2,000 hectares of Fountain Forestry's unhappy plantings and trying to restore the underlying peat bog to what it was. It is trying to put wilderness back.
More than four million trees have come down, but the restoration isn't easy or quick. Experiments showed that the best way of removing the spruces was to fell them into the plough furrows and let them rot down (the wood has no commercial value, and anyway to try and remove them would be damaging). But the process will take decades.
"How long will it take till it's an active bog?" muses Norrie, the RSPB's Forsinard site manager, heading up the restoration. "It could take 30 to 100 years. It's quite hard to predict. When people plant an oak seedling they don't expect an oak forest for centuries. But as long as the climate remains the same, this landscape wants to be covered in an open bog, it doesn't want to be a forest. It will happen."
Destroying young trees by the million wouldn't often seem right, but two considerations alter your feelings looking at it up above Forsinard. One is knowing what went before, the long saga of imposing an alien forestry on the British uplands; the fallen spruces seem like the dead on the final battlefield, in a fight that was worth winning.
The other is to walk out with Norrie on to the still untouched peatlands, where the flowers are starting to bloom, the cottongrass, the sundew, the bog asphodel; the gaze stretches away unimpeded to the far horizons, and suddenly a greenshank takes flight, the elegant, nervy wader, seeming to embody in its melancholy call the very essence of wildness.
Planting trees is only a Good Thing, sometimes.The Independent
