Sylvan Cities E-Book

Helen Babbs

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Sylvan City is a potted-journey through our cities' woody places and a literary hunt for where their wild things are. Reviews for Sylvan Cities: 'Clever, pretty, fun and informative - what more can a reader ask for?' Sara Maitland, author of Gossip From the Forest 'Full of gems; a manifesto for green cities. Babbs will turn us all into urban rangers, an unquiet army of neighbourhood watchers.' Max Adams, author of Wisdom of Trees An intricately illustrated journey into the urban forest, Sylvan City is both a practical guide to identifying twenty of the most common trees standing sentry on our street corners, and a lyrical, anecdotal treasure trove of facts and history, culture and leafy lore. It's certainly possible to appreciate a tree for its beauty, its shade and its shelter without knowing whether it's an alder, an elder, a lime or a beech. But look harder, and we begin to see the beauty beneath the bark - the tales of how trees are integral to medicine and art as they are furniture and firewood; the stories of why wild figs grow on the banks of Sheffield's rivers and why the ash tree is touched with magic and mischief.

Leseprobe

SYLVAN CITIES

Also by Helen Babbs

Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways

My Garden, My City, and Me: Rooftop Adventures in the Wilds of London

SYLVAN CITIES

An urban tree guide

HELEN BABBS

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Helen Babbs, 2019

Illustrations © Carmen R. Balit, 2019

The moral right of Helen Babbs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

‘Alder’, from The Tree House (2004) by Jamie, Kathleen.Preproduced by permission of Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd, through PLSclear.

‘Ludwig van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna’, from Sonata Mulattica: Poems by Rita Dove. Copyright © 2009 by Rita Dove.Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

‘The White Bird’, from The Sense of Sight © John Berger 1985, and John Berger Estate. Reproduced by permission of Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-364-4E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-365-1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

sylva / n. (also silva) (pl. sylvae /-vi:/ or sylvas)1 the trees of a region, epoch, or environment.2 a treatise on or a list of such trees. [Latin silva ‘a wood’]sylvan / adj. (also silvan) esp. poet.1 a of the woods. b having woods; wooded.

Oxford English Dictionary

Contents

Beginning

Trees and cities

Ending

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Beginning

When I first moved to London, aged eighteen, nature wasn’t the thing that drew me in. But eighteen years later it has, strangely, become one of the things that has made me stay. I live on a boat, and the daily dramas played out by our local gulls, coots and geese are absorbing. I’m delighted that a grey wagtail visits me at home every late afternoon and, keen to know what’s going on beyond the boat, I insist my partner tells me about the fox that’s a regular at the pub where he drinks after work. I can even get excited about lichen. Each species has distinct preferences, which means their presence tells a story about the environment in which they grow. The acidic bark of a cherry tree, for instance, might have no lichen growing on it at all, except for a crust of green-grey Phaeophyscia orbicularis in the nitrogen-rich area around the base, where local dogs like to mark their territory. While nitrogen-loving lichens are a common sight, there are rarities here too, and I’ve found the joy of seeing something like a kingfisher is only made greater by the fact that it’s hunting along an urban canal in the middle of the English capital. The juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial is what intensifies the pleasure, as is the sense that if these things can survive here, then so can I. The rare kingfisher, like the common lichen, shows that there’s more to the inner city than just the human-made; that humans and wildlife can coexist and commingle.

Trees especially are reminders that the world is not ours alone. They’re some of the most obvious examples of what’s wild in the city, and some of the world’s oldest and largest living organisms. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that London has so many of them: 8.4 million, to be precise. Massive but static, they line the streets I walk, overspill from the gardens I pass, sprout up along my rail routes and cycle paths, and furnish the parks and squares where I sometimes eat my lunch. They’re what I stare at through the office window. In a hermetically sealed workplace, watching the way leaves brighten, darken and dance about helps bring the outside in.

For a long time I welcomed the presence of these quiet colossi into my life without knowing most of them by name. Did that matter? It’s certainly possible to appreciate a tree’s beauty, shade and shelter without knowing whether it’s an alder, an elder, a lime or a beech. But, as with human relationships, an unnamed tree essentially remains a stranger. A name is the first step towards intimacy, so were I to make the effort to know their names, perhaps it would bring me closer to the trees.

This book germinated in 2016 and matured in 2018. In 2017 it grew and grew, rootling its way into almost everything I did. The result is a tree guide filtered through cities, as well as a city book filtered through trees, and it assumes that, when you’re a beginner like me, and there are more than 60,000 species of tree in the world – including 500 different types of oak, 100 of pine and sixty of birch – simply knowing the family that a tree belongs to can sometimes be enough.

The sylvan city isn’t one place, but several. While I did a lot of writing and research from home in London, I also travelled across the UK in search of stories about trees. I met Bournemouth’s pines, Leeds’ hazel woods and Milton Keynes’ midsummer planes. I came across trees named after cities, such as the Bristol whitebeam and the Manchester poplar, as well as individuals that have become famous in their own right, like Glasgow’s Argyle Street ash. I learned that alder and birch are true urban heroes, and I discovered how trees are as important for food and medicine as they are for furniture and firewood. I spent time with people who commute out of town and into the woods to work, and sought out inspiring tree-planters from the past. As well as being an illustrated guide that will help you identify some of the species you see around town every day, this is also the story of our cities’ woody places and a search for where their wild things are.

It would be fair to think that the idea of the urban forest is a romantic one, a turn of phrase rather than a statement of fact, and it’s true that the term ‘sylvan city’ is my attempt to sprinkle town trees with some fairy dust. But there is more to it than that.

Let’s start 200 years ago, or thereabouts. That’s not to say there weren’t trees growing in towns before then, but 1800 was the beginning of the end of something. At that point our planet was, in general, a rural kind of place, with just two million people worldwide thought to be living in cities. Fast-forward a hundred years and that number had increased to thirty million. In Britain, three-quarters of people were town dwellers by the end of the 1800s, with one in five living in London. Conditions could be desperate and squalid, with uncertain employment and high rates of poverty, homelessness, disease and crime. In ‘Winter Notes on Summer Impressions’, an essay published after a trip to London in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky described a place as ‘vast as an ocean’, characterized, among other things, by ‘terrifying districts such as Whitechapel with its half-naked, savage and hungry population’, while social reformer Charles Booth’s 1889 poverty map of the city marked out concentrations of people described as ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ and those who were suffering from ‘chronic want’.

When you found yourself in a city, it was traditional to spend your days in mourning, plotting your escape. ‘Thou hast pined and hungered after Nature, many a year, In the great City pent,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a poem addressed to the essayist Charles Lamb in 1797, as if the metropolis were a prison and his city-dwelling friend an inmate. Eighty years later, the author of Our British Trees and How to Know Them, Francis George Heath, wrote that it wasn’t until he moved to London that his ‘latent love of nature was developed with full force, and became a passion’. Heath says, ‘The absence of woods and fields gave rise to a painful longing to renew acquaintance with them on every possible occasion’, suggesting that it was only through privation that he came to understand quite how much he loved the country. The urban was the hell that made the diminishing rural heavenly.

But as cities mushroomed and the Industrial Revolution roared, people living in them, and through it, became organized. In A History of Nature Conservation in Britain, David Evans describes protests about suffocating smogs and polluted watercourses, and dismay at the effluent filth of collieries and lead mines. Finally legislation was brought in to protect city dwellers. The 1863 Alkali Act started to control the heavy-chemicals industry, the Metropolitan Commons Act of 1866 protected all common land within twenty miles of large urban areas and guaranteed the general public the right to air and exercise, and a Public Health Act came into law in 1875. There was actually concern about urban pollution well before this. In 1664, John Evelyn, author of Sylva, A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, was already railing against a ‘Hellish and dismal Cloud of SEACOAL’ that was poisoning London. He included among his antidotes the planting of trees. Years later the Victorians seemed to agree with this prescription and became passionate city tree-planters. Some of our most handsome giants are with us today thanks to their efforts, including grand old horse chestnuts and soaring trees of heaven, as well as limes, poplars and planes. Many of our best-loved urban parks, such as Sefton Park in south Liverpool and Victoria Park in east London, opened around this time too.

Interest in, and concern for, urban nature wasn’t widespread, but it gradually started to grow. Author W. H. Hudson was seriously observing the wildlife that a city could support at the end of the nineteenth century, publishing Birds in London in 1898, while the first book written specifically about the UK’s city trees was published in 1910. Written by Angus Webster, it was called Town Planting, And the trees, shrubs and other plants that are best adapted for resisting smoke. But it was in the 1970s that urban conservation really took off in the UK, with organizations like Landlife in Liverpool taking concerted action on the ground. The urban nature-enthusiast’s bible – The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey – was published in 1973, the same year as the Tree Council’s ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’ campaign, which, among other things, was responsible for the crab-apple tree that grew in my grandparents’ east-London garden. There are now numerous urban wildlife organizations and initiatives working across the UK, including ones dedicated to trees.

In contemporary cities – where flooding becomes more common, air and water quality can be abysmal, and the heat-island effect grows ever stronger, meaning that urban areas are significantly warmer than those surrounding them – trees do an awful lot of good. They limit the impact of heavy weather, be it intense sun or torrential rain, reduce air and water pollution and improve the soil. Urban ecology has become an important discipline, and those that practise it are busy assessing the size, role and economic worth of city trees, in a bid to persuade developers and policymakers both to preserve the ones we already have and to consider planting many more.

There is also increasing evidence that regular access to nature – or a daily dose of ‘vitamin G[reen]’ – tangibly improves our physical and mental health, whether we purposely seek it out or swallow it up by accident. Natural England has published research which shows that taking part in nature-based activities can reduce anxiety, stress and depression, while the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Wildlife Trusts have called on politicians to introduce a Nature and Wellbeing Act that puts nature at the heart of how decisions are made about issues such as health, housing and education. Frances Kuo, a professor from the University of Illinois, has collated research that proves just how essential parks and other green spaces are for city communities. Kuo’s work shows that people from two of America’s poorest urban neighbourhoods were found to suffer less violence and crime if they were living somewhere that had trees and grass, in comparison with those living in areas that were barren. Today it’s widely agreed that the presence of trees makes towns and cities more habitable. As Charles Montgomery argues in his book Happy City, ‘biological density must be the prerequisite for architectural density’, if we’re to create sustainable cities where people want to live.

The term ‘urban forest’ was imported to Europe from the USA in the 1960s and started to take root in the UK in the 1980s. At first it referred specifically to woodland in and around urban areas, but it has since grown to encompass single trees, groups of trees and woody areas. While a forest in the traditional sense is a geographical entity, the urban forest is a patchwork of different, unconnected landscapes and individuals. Urban forestry is a concept as much as a physical thing, and it’s cultural as much as it is natural. It recognizes that trees have spiritual worth as well as practical value. And this is the key: urban forestry is about people as much as it’s about plants, and one of its main aims is the welfare of urban residents. Where trees in a conifer plantation have commercial worth, the trees in a city have amenity value. The point of them is to please you and me, to bring us joy and improve our quality of life. The urban forest is real and it is romantic. The two ways of seeing city trees are not at odds.

Trees and cities

THE ALDERS

Common alder | London, VeniceItalian alder

THE ASHES

Common ash | GlasgowRaywood ash

THE BEECHES AND A BEECH-LIKE TREE

Common beech | LondonCopper beechHornbeam

THE BIRCHES

Silver birch | Lancaster, LondonHimalayan birch

THE BUTTERFLY BUSHES AND ANOTHER URBAN UPSTART

Buddleja davidii | LondonLeyland cypress

THE CHERRIES AND ANOTHER FLOWERING FRUIT

Wild cherry | Hiroshima, LondonCrab apple

THE ELDERS AND OTHER TREES CELEBRATED BY HERBALISTS

Common elder | LondonLime and pine

THE ELMS

English elm | BrightonWych elm

THE FIGS AND ANOTHER FLESHY FRUIT

Common fig | SheffieldMulberry

THE HAZELS

Common hazel | LeedsTurkish hazel

THE HORSE CHESTNUTS

Horse chestnut | London, AmsterdamSweet chestnut

THE LIMES

Common lime | Berlin, ViennaSilver lime

THE MAIDENHAIRS AND ANOTHER BULLETPROOF TREE

Ginkgo biloba | London, Hiroshima, New YorkCaucasian wingnut

THE MAPLES

Sycamore | London, EdinburghNorway maple

THE OAKS

English oak | London, New YorkRed oak, holm oak and pin oak

THE PINES AND ANOTHER CONIFER

Maritime pine | BournemouthDawn redwood

THE PLANES AND ANOTHER TOUGH STREET TREE

London plane | London, Milton KeynesAmerican sweet gum

THE POPLARS

Black poplar | ManchesterLombardy poplar

THE TREES OF HEAVEN AND ANOTHER LARGE-LEAVED EXOTIC

Tree of heaven | New York, LondonIndian bean tree

THE WHITEBEAMS AND ANOTHER SORBUS

Bristol whitebeam | BristolRowan

THE YEWS AND ANOTHER MEDICALLY SIGNIFICANT TREE

English yewWillow

LEAF GUIDE

Common alder p.18

Common ash p.26

Common beech p.36

Silver birch p.46

Butterfly bush p.56

Wild cherry p.64

Common elder p.76

English elm p.88

Common fig p.98

Common hazel p.106

Horse chestnut p.116

Common lime p.126

Ginkgo p.134

Sycamore p.142

English oak p.152

Maritime pine p.164

London plane p.176

Black poplar p.186

Tree of heaven p.196

Bristol whitebeam p.204

English yew p.214

The alders

There are several different types of alder tree – around thirty – and all of them enhance soil fertility. They also all have catkins and small, woody, cone-like fruits, which together make alders easy to pick out from other trees, especially in winter when they have lost all their leaves.

COMMON ALDER

Alnus glutinosa

‘Alnus’ means red, which refers to the fact that alder wood ‘bleeds’ when cut, turning red on exposure to the air; ‘glutinosa’, meanwhile, reveals that this tree has buds and young leaves that are sticky.

Shape is slender and conical, becoming more straggled with age. (Fig. 1)

Leaves are dark green, round and leathery; never pointed, but sometimes indented at the tip. (Fig. 2)

Bark is grey-brown and finely fissured.

Flowers are drooping purplish catkins (male), erect green catkins (female), both on the same tree.

Fruit are small, woody cones stuffed with tiny seeds. (Fig. 3)

Found by water and marshy ground, as well as in landfill sites and reclamation projects.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

It’s winter in the sylvan city and most of the trees are bare. From afar they look gaunt, absent even – tree-shaped holes cut out of the greyscale sky. Up close, they’re as solid as ever, their dark trunks rimed with wet. Early, on the coldest mornings when your hands ache and your breath billows out of you like smoke, the trees’ high-up branches flash and crackle with frost. While this might not be the obvious season to begin a journey through the urban forest, some trees have traits at this time of year that set them apart from the rest. The alder is one of them.

It was a February afternoon of insistent drizzle when I first learned how to pick alder out from a crowd. The day was melancholy but mild, requiring wellington boots and waterproofs rather than gloves and a hat. I was walking in Wick Wood beside the canalized River Lea, on the outer edges of Hackney in east London. Once known as Wick Field, this was planted into a small community woodland in the late 1990s. I didn’t have a route mapped out around the wood. I’d exited my floating canal-boat home with no plan other than to stretch out my sea legs and unbend my body. It was dripping overhead and soft underfoot, and the air inside the wood seemed moister than outside it. There’s always white noise in a city – traffic, industry, people – but in Wick Wood it was quiet. Even without their leaves, the close-packed trees and shrubs formed a soundproof barrier between me and the world beyond.

Everything seemed dormant or dead, so it was a surprise when I came upon a tree that was free of leaves, but busy with birds. The birdwatcher camping out in an adjacent bush made sense, as there was plenty to see. He explained that the birds were siskins and the tree was an alder, a species beloved for the cone-like, seed-packed fruits it wears all through winter. Looking at the tree, I could see that it was indeed studded with tiny, woody cones and I knew this was unusual – as a rule, cones are found on conifers or cone-bearing firs, trees that tend to keep their leaves all year round. The naked alder was clearly not an evergreen, and so these cones were a feature that made it stand out.

The common alder is deciduous or broadleaved, which means it sheds its leaves in autumn and grows new ones in spring. Revisiting Wick Wood a few months later, I learned that alder leaves are distinctive: dark green, rounded, almost the shape of a tennis racket, sometimes with a gentle indent at the tip. But it’s definitely when the alder loses them that it is easiest to spot. Shaking off its leathery summer coat, the tree reveals that its branches have become covered in flowers. It’s not blossom, in the apple or cherry-tree sense, but rather that the tree is decked with drooping, purplish catkins and upright, green ones, which eventually ripen into those telltale dark-brown cones. Legend has it that Robin Hood’s camouflaging outfit was dyed using a green pigment made from these blooms. The drooping catkins are male, the upright ones female. Like many of the species we’ll meet in the urban forest, flowers of both sexes grow on the same tree, making the alder ‘monoecious’, or a hermaphrodite.

It’s neat that the alder sits at the beginning of this alphabetically organized book, because where it grows marks the start of a new story. It may be relatively short-lived – it averages about sixty years, where some trees, like the yew, can live for centuries – but it does a lot for us in its lifetime, and even after its death. Like all plants, alder photosynthesizes – this invisible process not only provides fuel for the plant, but is also responsible for the oxygen, food, fibres, medicines and timber that we need to live.

What makes the alder different is that it’s a pioneer, one of a small number of tree species that prepares the way for future forests. It uses the carbohydrates produced during photosynthesis in a very particular way – it provides its self-made sugars to bacteria that live on its roots. In turn, the bacteria absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and provide it to the tree. In this way, the alder and its ally feed each other, at the same time cleansing the air of pollutants and enriching the earth with nutrients, clearing the way for other varieties of tree to take root. The alder’s ability to improve air and soil quality in this way makes it an urban hero, and landscape architects call on it when they have contaminated land to reclaim. ‘Phytoremediation’ is a way of using plants to restore balance, and an abandoned site might be planted with alders as part of its transformation from industrial to recreational.

Alder has a close connection with water too, and the fact that I found my first one growing in the urban but also riparian Wick Wood makes a lot of sense. It’s able to grow close to watercourses and in waterlogged ground because, as well as hosting those special nitrogen-fixing bacteria, alder roots have a system of air ducts that allow oxygen to flow, even underwater. These roots can also act like underground scaffolding and prevent soil erosion, and water-tolerant alder is planted along with willow to help keep riverbanks intact. No wonder the poet Kathleen Jamie turns to the alder in an ‘age of rain’, seeking advice on ‘a way to live on this damp ambiguous earth’ in her poem named after the tree.

It’s not only in life that the alder is heroic – once it is felled for timber, alder wood is soft and porous, and is only durable when kept wet. Rather than rotting, this timber is most effective when it’s waterlogged, which is why much of Venice is built on alder piles cut from strong tree trunks. As Italo Calvino suggests in Invisible Cities, ‘Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests.’ Alder is part of Venice’s strength and support. It helps to hold the city in place.

ANOTHER ALDER WORTH KNOWING

In the Collins Tree Guide – an essential reference book for any tree-lover – dendrologist Owen Johnson describes the Italian alder (Alnus cordata) as ‘a plant with vigour and polish’. It’s fast-growing, capable of reaching twenty-five metres, where the common alder can usually achieve just twenty metres. It has conspicuous catkins in winter that can be up to ten centimetres long, and its large cones are red before they turn brown. The Italian alder also has glossy, heart-shaped leaves, smooth grey bark and a tidier, more slender shape. It comes into leaf early and loses that foliage late. It’s heat-, drought- and pollution-tolerant, making it a popular choice for urban streets, car parks and shelter belts.

The ashes

The ashes are a large, widespread group of trees – or ‘genus’ – possibly more than sixty members strong. Ash trees are usually male or female, but sometimes they swap sex or are both. All of them have compound leaves made up of leaflets arranged along a central stalk, and produce seeds enclosed inside a papery wing. These hang in bunches on the trees throughout winter, long after the leaves have been shed.

COMMON ASH

Fraxinus excelsior

Both ‘ash’ and ‘fraxinus’ stem from words meaning spear. This makes sense, as ash wood is strong and elastic, and was once an important material for making weaponry.

Shape is large but slender, with a rounded crown, a long, straight trunk and open, arching branches. (Fig. 4)

Leaves are compound, with elliptical, toothed leaflets arranged in opposite pairs along the leaf stem. (Fig. 5)

Bark is pale grey, darkening and splitting with age.

Flowers are sexually ambiguous; small purple and green tufts burst open at the tip of the twig.

Fruit are seeds enclosed inside a narrow wing, which ripens from green to light brown. (Fig. 6)

Found in parks and city streets, including in Glasgow.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

The first tree to lose its leaves in autumn and the last to re-clothe come spring, flowering before it does so, the common ash is easiest to identify in winter. Without foliage, the tree’s long, elegant trunk and loose, up-and-down arching branches with their silver-grey skin are most visible. But it is the tree’s fruit and next year’s buds that will help you single it out. Known as a ‘key’, each fruit looks like a papery, flattened pea pod. The seed is enclosed inside this casing, which is essentially a wing, aerodynamically designed to catch the wind and glide off to new ground. The ash keys ripen on the tree, turning from pale green to buff-brown, and hang in dense bunches throughout the colder months. As late winter melts into spring and other trees gradually come back into leaf, the ash remains resolute: bare, except for its bunches of keys and its increasingly succulent, matt-black buds.

Wistfully known as ‘Venus of the woods’ – that mystical, forested place where the oak is considered king and the beech, queen – ash is actually a tree of the city as much as the countryside. It’s currently facing two serious threats: one a microscopic fungus that causes a condition called ‘ash dieback’, first recorded in the UK in 2012; the other a destructive emerald ash-borer beetle from north-eastern Asia, which is yet to reach the UK, but has been causing havoc in the United States. Both could have a significant impact on the future shape of our urban forests: it’s thought that very few of the UK’s 128 million ash trees will be spared by the ash-dieback fungus. But, for now, the ash is a common sight, especially in Scotland’s biggest and busiest city.

Glasgow – or ‘glaschu’ in Gaelic, meaning ‘dear green place’ – is one of the most densely wooded urban centres in Britain, with 112 trees per hectare, almost twice the average sixty to be found in English cities and towns, and significantly more than in Edinburgh. If you were to stitch all of Glasgow’s trees’ foliage together into one giant leaf, its total area would be 112 square kilometres – roughly the size of Jersey. There are estimated to be 250,000 ash trees in the city, and when you walk through its parks and streets, the ash is the tree you’ll encounter most often.