Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 122

This book was conceived originally to help students of arboriculture and urban forestry to understand more about the history of British urban trees. It provides an enthusiastic and entertaining history of the subject by one of the leading modern British and international urban arboriculturists arguing persuasively that tree professionals and communities must understand more about the role of trees in the formation of urban landscapes to understand the reasons for their characteristics and make informed decisions concerning future planning and management. The book is organized around a series of thematic chapters which broadly follow a chronological pattern and utilize material drawn from across more than a thousand years of history. The relationship between forestry and urban arboriculture, and between town and countryside, is well delineated whilst examples draw as much from the activities of ‘working people’ as from the gardens and estates of the rich and powerful. Of course, it greatly helps that the author has had a distinguished career as an arboriculturist, practitioner of urban forestry and tutor, was the first British individual to be honoured with the Award of Merit by the International Society of Arboriculture, and has therefore helped to make the history that he has written about. Having worked as a local government tree officer, a consultant and a government adviser, and helped to create and teach the first British Master’s qualification in urban forestry at Myerscough College in Lancashire, Johnston is able to supply insights concerning the history of the subject unavailable to most others. An entertaining and talented public speaker, something of the excitement of Johnston’s lectures and conversation is captured by the book too.

Trees in towns and cities investigates the history of British urban trees from Roman antiquity to the present although most of the book concentrates on the early modern period to the present. The first chapter examines the rise of professional forestry including arboricultural education and training, exploring the development of arboriculture as a profession and emphasizing the interface between European, North American and British practices. This section introduces some of the major developments in urban forestry, particularly over the past three centuries, such as the creation and impact of formal arboricultural qualifications and the publication of the first textbooks on the subject. It is followed by an analysis of the governance of urban trees which explains how local government and national government bodies came to assume direction and control over urban forestry, including the provision of legislation to protect trees.

Various kinds of threats to urban trees loom large in the third chapter including the impact of smoke, the provision of utilities, building and construction, urban density, pests and diseases such as deadly fungal and insect infestations. The ways in which public parks and other green spaces helped to introduce so many urban trees between the eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries is explained in the fourth chapter, including the great Victorian public parks and more specialist public urban arboretums with their significant, and sometimes systematic, labelled tree collections. Private gardens are also rightly seen as having been major repositories and nurturers of urban trees from the great wooded green spaces of large villas and mansions to smaller suburban gardens. Other significant tree-laden urban green spaces also receive some treatment in the book including cemeteries, botanical gardens and golf courses, whilst twentieth-century developments such as the roof garden are noted.

One of the most fascinating chapters covers the subject of street trees which tended to be frowned upon at first but brought rich greenery to everyday mundanity and were systematically planted from the later Victorian and Edwardian periods onwards as municipal authorities and parks departments assumed control of the process. Beginning tentatively, the planters of street trees had to face difficulties including dust pollution, constrained space, traffic and the provision of utilities, as well as their poor knowledge. However, a range of techniques were developed to counter these problems, such as adapting the methods of forestry, selecting the most hardy types, developing the use of equipment such as tree guards, and using municipal nurseries to promote large-scale trees production and inculcation of knowledge. A final chapter on visions of urban green considers the role of trees in specially planned industrial towns and villages, resort centres, and the garden cities and new towns of the twentieth century. As Johnston demonstrates, although he did not write much about them, trees were central to Ebenezer Howard’s vision and also to Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin’s plans for garden cities and suburbs such as Letchworth and Wythenshawe with their provision of green spaces, avenues and US-style planted parkways whose attractions have increased as their trees have matured. As Johnston ably shows, these innovations were hastened and supported by the development of urban arboriculture as a profession with its own training and qualifications, forms of equipment and the growing protection provided by national legislation and local government regulations.

The book is illustrated with some shrewdly selected illustrations which take advantage of the author’s professional knowledge and experience. The picture of litter and tin cans carelessly crammed into a wire tree guard beside a tender street sapling from the 1970s (p. 83), bricked up tree cavity (p. 95), fungi-sprouting abandoned tree stump (p. 58) or the protruding shafts of savagely pruned roadside planes in Hampstead each say more than a thousand words could. With decades of experience and an immersion in the history of the subject, Johnston has provided much more than a history of urban arboriculture. Trees in town and cities is a general history of urban forestry and arboriculture in which these are not considered in isolation but placed into their social, political and economic contexts. The book provides a fascinating tour of an apparently specialized subject yet one that touches upon the lives of every urban citizen or visitor who enjoys the plantations of gardens, cemeteries or golf courses, takes grateful shelter under the cool shade of a majestic street plane on a hot day or finds solace in a sea of summer green within a great Victorian park. This thought-provoking study by an enthusiastic and experienced urban forester will long remain an authoritative introduction to a fascinating subject.