Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 268

While trees have always captured the popular imagination, the same has not always been true of the attention of British historians and historical geographers. If trees played an important part in foundational works of landscape history by such scholars as H. C. Darby and W. G. Hoskins, the spur to take trees seriously as objects of historical study came not from not from history but ecology and environmental change. In particular, the early work of the late Oliver Rackham proved pivotal, his Trees and woodland in the British landscape (1976), Ancient woodland. Its history, vegetation and uses in England (1980), and The history of the countryside (1986) all now recognized as pioneering, classic works. In turn, historians and historical geographers were inspired to turn to trees, to head to the woods and forests, both as objects and spaces of interest in their own right but also a way of thinking through wider questions in social and cultural history. Today, such studies are many, the foci and approaches diverse, but – until now – there has not been a study that has brought together these interdisciplinary advances. Charles Watkins’s excellent Trees, woods and forests is the study this recent blossoming of research deserves and the field of woodland and forest research needed, and Watkins the scholar uniquely qualified to deliver.

Both an act of synthesis and based on considerable new archival material, Watkins’ latest book is of great value in drawing much recent work together whilst at the same time suggesting important new directions for research. Indeed, the subtitle A social and cultural history does the book few favours, for it is far more than just concerned with the social and cultural, much of the material rooted in economic, environmental and ecological approaches too. It is also important to note that while much of the analysis in Trees relates to Great Britain – for instance, Sherwood Forest is the sole focus of chapter six – the book is global in scope, the tenth and final chapter a return to Watkins’s long-standing interests in the ‘semi-natural’ woodlands of Liguria, Italy. Much of the analysis also speaks to the fact that while trees are materially rooted in place, not only are seeds and saplings highly mobile but knowledge pertaining to tree-management practices (and fashions) has a long history of being truly globally networked. Nor is Trees a study bound only to one period, for while the analysis of the modern predominates the first substantive chapter considers ‘ancient’ tree management practices and chapter two the ways in which European forests were created, managed and represented as spaces of spectacle and display in the classical and middle ages.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Watkins’s recent excellent biography of Uvedale Price (2012) and (with Paul Elliott and Stephen Daniels) his illuminating study of the science and culture of the arboretum in nineteenth-century Britain (2011), Trees is arguably at its very best in making connections between the emergence and diffusion of new ways of thinking and changing practices of planting and managing trees. Thus we learn that celebrated Arts and Crafts designer William Morris advocated allowing pollarded hornbeams in Epping Forest to return ‘to nature’, something changing middle class sensibilities – informed by ‘aesthetic tastes and scientific principles which were national or international rather than local’ (p.138) – supported. Similarly, the famed Beech Avenue of Sherwood Forest is shown to have survived two world wars and colliery development due to the persistence of picturesque values, but ultimately fell foul to quasi-commercial replanting, disrepair and storm damage, eventually being felled in the 1970s (pp.160, 169, 171).

If human enrollments of trees in cultural and economic circuits necessarily dominates the analysis, there is also a sense in which the love of trees (arborphilia), something that richly saturates the book, gets us closer to thinking of trees as (after Donna Haraway) companion species. For instance, Watkins relates that the American actor Kim Novak was so attached to the redwoods in the grove in which Alfred Hitchcock filmed her for his classic Vertigo (1958) that the trees became fellow actors (pp. 224–5). Better known was John Ruskin’s love, he feeling a ‘boundless affection and admiration’ for trees, an emotional state that he believed was ‘nearly [a] perfect test of our being in the right temper of mind and way of life’ (p. 202). If the lone tree or avenue was, as Watkins’s analysis shows, so often the subject of a more-than-human love, this is not to say that copses, coppices, coverts, plantations, woods and forests were not also subject to affection. But commercial, military and other political impulses often rode roughshod over picturesque sentiment and arborphilia, while other tree spaces that have become defining features of the landscape were often the result of sporting and recreational imperatives.

Trees establishes – if it were in any doubt – Watkins as the bard of all things bosky. This is a beautifully written book, one that never gets lost in the detail, the narrative skipping along from one place and time to another with grace and ease. It is also richly illustrated, much of the credit for which must go to publishers Reaktion who continue to set the standard for sensibly priced accessible books with high production values. What of niggles? One might argue that orchards and fruit trees do not get the prominence they deserve, though this is perhaps a reflection on the relative paucity of recent academic work on the history of orchards, and to the pride of place given to woods and forests in the book. Similarly, foresters themselves might revel in the details of woodland management related but see little about their forebears who laboured managing woods and forests and otherwise found employ in woodland crafts (for which see Mairi Stewart’s Voices of the forest. A social history of Scottish forestry in the twentieth century (2016)). This is small beer. Trees, woods and forests is a splendid, timely book that will no doubt become a standard work of reference for all interested in the history of that which singularly unites all countries and all times – trees.