Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

by William Bryant Logan

The cambium can make from scratch any part of the tree it needs, roots included.

We are planting out every stick somewhere in New York. How many will take and grow? We have no idea, but I bet at least 5 percent. That means maybe five or six new willows per year. Keep your eyes open. Maybe you

This unlikely monument was older than Big Ben. It was older than Westminster Abbey, older than London Bridge, older than the Roman baths at Bath. It was a tree that had been cut and allowed to sprout again for about two thousand years. When it had been a seedling, Jesus had been teaching in Galilee.

It remembers the long age when such self-renewing wood was the foundation of cultures

coppice

pollard.

I say the words with love and reverence: coppice and pollard. My listeners, whether they be students, clients, friends, or strangers, say, “What are you talking about?” From ten millennia to about two hundred years ago, every person in every forested part of the world would have known exactly what I meant. Indeed,...

The old Indo-European word for tree, varna, also means “to cut.” This language was spoken in the seventh millennium BC, and already embodied the idea that trees are to cut. In Europe, the cutting came to be called coppice—from Old French meaning to chop, that is, to cut with a blow.

At left, a coppice stool, cut near the base. At right, a pollard tree, cut at about six-foot height on the trunk. In each drawing, from left to right, are new-cut, one-year-old, and five-year-old stems.

For ten thousand years, trees were our companions and our teachers. They brought us this far, and perhaps they will carry us on. The only trouble is that we have forgotten almost everything they taught us.

But people lived in nature in a way that now we seldom do. Harmony is not the right word to describe it. A better phrase is creative engagement.

When growing populations overwhelmed the land in the nineteenth century, it was the destruction of pollard systems in places like Norway that brought so many immigrants to the United States.

In England, the enclosures despoiled commoners of their common lands, parts of which had been in coppice or pollard. The rich began to make parks. Majestic, untouched trees were prized along the long vistas of these naturalistic forest and meadow confections.

ha-ha,

They had to respect and respond to each other. In the new picturesque landscape, man became the spectator of an idea of nature that he himself had made in the image of a primordium that had never existed.

wrote that every species of the higher plants can grow in only one of twenty-three different patterns. (They have since added one more.)

Dryad’s Saddle. The tree’s solid circulation system resolves

branching is one of the generative ideas by which the world goes on.

Trees are among the most creative creatures on Earth. What we do with words in language—making infinite combinations out of finite structures and finite parts—trees do with their branches out of their flesh. Their creativity is intrinsic, ours is extrinsic.

Archaeologists called the ancient world the Stone Age, but that is because the rocks were all that had survived, rather than because they had been the primary products of those cultures. The Levels showed that that time might better have been called the Wood Age.

Whether or not a living hedge is cheaper or lasts longer than a wire fence, whether the creatures living in the hedge are on balance better or worse for the crops in the field, whether diversity is better in itself or not. . . . Perhaps these nicely weighed matters of debate miss the point. The making, the maintenance, and the use of a living hedge require attention and response. A good hedge layer like Clive Leake has an intelligence focused not strictly on innovation but on seeing what is before his eyes clearly and responding in a way that helps it to go on. The phrase to “size up” in fact comes from hedge laying, for when it is time to re-lay an aging hedge, the skill of the maker is in choosing which stems to eliminate, which to choose as his new pleachers, and how low to cut them.

In the twelfth century, long long before that, and all the way until the end of the nineteenth, people in the more settled lands around the world did not walk out of their houses and into a forbidding forest, but into woods that were worked and managed, places they knew as intimately as they knew one another. They were the source of fuel, food, building material, fertilizer, medicine, musical instruments. There, they formed an active, millennial relationship to nature that was not destructive but regenerative. It was good both for the people and the trees.

Along a road lined for more than a quarter mile with ancient pollards of oak, beech, and chestnut.

You can even plant them under things like utility lines, without having to disfigure their branches to keep them out of the wires.

What if new life does not come only from the centers of power, wealth, resource gathering, and exchange? What if it comes too from the margins, the extremities, the growing tips, the sprout lands?