The Man Who Didn't Plant Trees

My earliest practical conservation activity was tree planting - Rother Valley Country Park, a former opencast coal mine in South Yorkshire, as a schoolboy of maybe 12 or 13. I have a certificate somewhere to prove it. And I suspect it's the same story for a lot of people; tree planting will have been their first - and in many cases last - experience of practical conservation work. And after all, why not? What could be better than getting out in the fresh air and doing something positive for the environment? And besides, tree planting has a kind of glamour about it, a whiff of folk-heroism, conjuring up images of Johnny Appleseed and Elzéard Bouffier, the subject of Jean Giono's charming novella The Man Who Planted Trees.

But let's take a closer look at that last example. A man takes it upon himself to 're-forest' a 'desolate' valley in Provence, where only wild lavender grows. But hang on a minute - one man's desolate valley is another man's herb rich calcareous grassland. And why was it 'desolate' in the first place (assuming, for a moment, that we equate a lack of trees with desolation)? The guy's a shepherd; I have a sneaking suspicion that it was his own livestock that were maintaining its treeless state, preventing scrub encroachment and allowing open grassland species like the lavender to survive. It may even be that, left to its own devices, the landscape would - like most of temperate-zone Europe - have reverted to woodland anyway.

(As a literary aside, an ecologist friend of mine gets very agitated about The Lord of the Rings, in which the Barrow-downs continue to support treeless turf long after the men of Arnor - and presumably their grazing livestock - have succumbed to the Witchking of Angmar. That's maybe taking scientific veracity a bit too far...)

Lavender - quick, plant some trees on it!

But that wouldn't have made so charming a story; 'The Man Who Did Bugger All, But Let Natural Succession Take Its Course' is not as snappy a title. And it's not just that; a lack of action is perceived as a negative thing, an abandonment of responsibility. Also, crucially, a lack of direct action is a devilishly difficult thing to fund, particularly in these days of bureaucratic overkill. So we plant trees, because we can fill out the form saying we will buy 2000 whips of the following species, and this is how much they will cost, and this is how many days of volunteer labour input in kind will be involved in the planting, and our measurable output will be lots of little saplings sticking out of the ground in their serried rows, demonstrably there for all - particularly the funders - to see.

Which is why we have a whole green industry in this country devoted to servicing our moral imperative to do something for the environment, to plant 2000 trees for the new millennium or 60 trees for the Queen's Jubilee or whatever the current funder-friendly gimmick happens to be. And it is this need for trees that has driven the trade in cheap imports from Europe. As we are starting to realise to our cost, moving trees around the globe brings its own problems.

I worry that the most recent addition to our fungal pest flora - Chalara fraxinea, the causative agent of Ash Disease - will provoke a fresh flurry of tree planting. People like to help; it's like the decline of the honey bee. The most common reaction to news stories about Colony Collapse Disorder was to rush out and buy a bee hive and some bees, which is why London now has hive densities as high as 220 colonies per km2 and honey yields are down 78% on last year. It's well-meaning, but it's misguided.

Grass vetchling

I had an email from a client recently for whom I carried out a habitat survey; she's lucky enough to own what turned out to be quite a nice meadow. Maybe not SSSI standard, but certainly a meadow, with more Grass vetchling than I've ever seen in one place before. Her email was inviting me to a tree-planting event on the site. I replied asking her to think very carefully before she went ahead; the site is in a heavily wooded area, whereas good meadows are like hen's teeth. She reassured me that it was okay - the tree planting would only be around the edges.

I can't help but think that that's what Elzéard Bouffier probably said...

I doubt anything I say here will make any difference - people will always want to be seen to be doing something. But sometimes I wonder what the state of the UK would be if every penny that has been spent on tree planting had instead been spent on some other form of conservation action - appropriate management of our existing prime wildlife sites, or the joining together of such sites through land acquisition or management agreements, as the Wildlife Trusts are attempting though their Living Landscapes programme. But I don't speculate for too long; that way madness lies...