Atlantic Forestry January 2024

Tree tour in the U.K. and Germany

by David Palmer

“It takes an English oak 300 years to grow, 300 years to live, and 300 years to die,” says my cousin Emma as we stroll through Bushy Park, a 445-hectare public green space that lies just north of a sharp bend in the Thames River upstream of London. The English or pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) supports more biodiversity than any other native tree in the U.K. – including more than 400 species of insect herbivores, which in turn attract scores of insect-eating birds.

The park abuts the quiet community of Teddington, and is close to the palatial Hampton Court, where an envious King Henry VIII ousted Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey from his splendid riverside castle. When Henry perceived that the Cardinal was dragging his feet on the King’s demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Wolsey only narrowly avoided beheading by falling ill and dying on his own account while hastening to London to answer charges of treason.

My cousin, who grew up in Teddington, remembers the 1987 hurricane that smashed into southern England and executed its own arboreal beheadings, topping many of the park’s ancient trees, particularly the weaker English lime trees – which are technically not limes at all, but lindens. Introduced from Europe, it’s the same tree that pervades many of our Maritime streetscapes, at least until recent storms such as Arthur and Fiona roughed them up. Today, when a branch falls in the park, or a tree topples, it is left to rot on site, providing damp, shady habitat for salamanders and their ilk.

Fallow and Red deer (some sporting giant racks) blithely roam the untended, unmowed parts of the urban park, unaware that the annual winter culling of the herd will soon begin. While the deer cull is relatively straightforward to carry out within the walled confines of the green area, it’s not so easy to control aerial newcomers such as the Ring-necked parakeet, which has found its way from Africa and is expanding its range into southern and central Europe. They chatter excitedly in small flocks as they bustle from treetop to treetop. While the birds delight some, they annoy others, who complain about their noisy behaviour and poor toilet habits.

Although the U.K. is only 13 percent forested overall, the general impression is that it is much more wooded than that. That’s because the hilltops (strangely referred to as Downs) are often cloaked with beech and oak, hedgerows are still common, and public places such as roads, lanes, villages, and towns are usually lined with trees. Churchyards – some of which date to the 12th century, such as the one in the tiny Welsh village of Tredunnock where another branch of the Palmer family dwells – are often the best places to view old trees, particularly yews, which were sometimes planted on the site of a mass burial, such as occurred during the bubonic plague years. While oaks can be old compared to humans, they are relative youngsters compared to the venerable yew (Taxus baccata), which isn’t even considered ancient until it’s at least 900 years old. Sometimes referred to as the “Death Tree,” it has toxic foliage that can kill you if ingested directly, but save you if ground up, distilled, and injected as the cancer-fighting drug called taxol. Its tough, supple limbs kept Robin Hood’s merry men in longbows, and the Sheriff of Nottingham on his toes.

As I depart London for the fabled Schwarzwald (Black Forest) of southwestern Germany, I say a silent prayer for the fair deciduous hills of South Wales, because a fierce gale (storm CiarЗn) is gathering strength and preparing to batter the region. It comes ashore a few days later with 100-mile-per-hour winds so strong that we feel its effect in Strasbourg as we hunker in the lee of buildings in a driving rain, with our umbrellas turned inside-out.

Nobody knows exactly how the Black Forest got its name. One theory expounded by our guide is that when the Romans came here in the first century and pushed out the Goths, the hills were cloaked with Silver fir (Abies alba), which despite its name was darker in colour than the oaks and pines that grew on the hills of Rome. More likely it was just a dark and dreary day, or the Romans had suffered another Goth ambush and were in a dour mood.

We leave our Viking Longship in the delightful small town of Breisach on the right (German) bank of the Rhine, and travel by bus through the small vineyard towns of Ihringen, Gottenheim, and BЪtzingen, then up a winding mountain road past verdant farms, ancient half-timbered houses, and tiny sawmills, to the popular tourist stop of Hofgut Sternen, where an arched railway trestle spans the canyon. You can visit a glass blower, a cuckoo clock maker, or a 1,000-year-old chapel, or take in a Black Forest cake-making demonstration, or simply embark on a guided stroll in the woods.

The Black Forest doesn’t look anything like I expected. I was anticipating row upon row of Norway spruce marching off to the horizon, and a forest floor devoid of woody debris. That may be the case in some areas farther north where the forest tumbles out of the mountains, but not in this part of the high woods. The trail ascends a lovely little stream that plunges down over the rocks. A few yellow leaves still cling to the hardwoods in the stream bottom, and fir and spruce stalk up the steep hillside. It could be anywhere in the Acadian forest in the fall, except the fir is Silver instead of Balsam, and the spruce is Norway instead of Red.

We abandon our guide, Nadine – who is knowledgeable about Marie Antoinette and old battles but doesn’t know much about trees – and piggyback onto another group led by Sylvia Eckhart, a student pursuing her PhD in environmental science at Freiburg University, who quickly straightens us out on our Black Forest species.

Once clothed in beech and fir, the Black Forest now largely comprises Norway spruce (Picea abies) at 28 percent, followed by Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) at 23 percent. Norway spruce is almost a miracle tree, able to withstand Arctic conditions where it grows up to 70 degrees north (like our White spruce), but also tolerant of hot, humid weather (unlike our White spruce). It has an outrageous growth rate, and comes with a host of uses besides lumber, such as tone wood, flavouring for spruce beer, vanillin for making artificial vanilla extract, and even Christmas trees, although Silver fir is the official Tannenbaum. The rest of the forest is made up of beech (16 percent), oak (nine percent), larch (three percent), Douglas fir (two percent), and Silver fir (two percent), with mixed hardwoods (ash, maple, sycamore, poplar, birch, and alder) comprising 17 percent.

Back on the Rhine and heading north, we admire the White willows (Salix alba) and Black poplar (Populus nigra) lining the riverbank. In the early November breeze, the pale undersides of the willows’ blue-green leaves create a striking offset to the golden yellow of the poplars that tower behind. In England, White willow is used to make cricket bats. Some of the poplars are festooned with mistletoe (viscum album), a hemiparasitic plant that produces some of its own food by photosynthesis, but also draws nutrients and water from its host, to which it attaches by a structure called the haustorium.

The Black poplar of Europe has a circular Canadian connection. A tree-loving French landowner was so impressed with Canada’s Eastern cottonwoods that he transplanted some to France, where they crossed naturally with the resident Black poplar to produce a new hybrid that eventually made its way back to eastern North America. The Carolina poplar, as it became known, is found all over the Maritimes, and is one of our largest and fastest-growing trees. In fact, a Carolina poplar in Grafton, N.B., was featured in the second edition of Great Trees of New Brunswick. At 36 metres in height and 204 centimetres in diameter, it was the second largest tree in the province.

At Bingen, gateway to the 65-kilometre Middle Rhine (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), some 40 castles cling to rocky crags on hillsides of beech and oak, and 1,000-year-old Riesling vineyards are chopped out of the steep slopes. In RЯdesheim, a town crew reduces ornamental plane trees (Platanus occidentalis) to stubby, cactus-like silhouettes, ostensibly to make them look good, according to the man in charge of the pruners. Another theory is that it reduces the canopy area (and the roost area), thereby minimizing the sidewalk cleanup problem created by a surfeit of avian guests. If left to its own devices, this robust and handsome but messy tree – a relative of the sycamore – can shoot up to 50 metres, so it’s likely that town planners just want to keep them to a manageable size.   

Not long after the Rhine gorge, the river empties into industrial flatlands, the high banks are replaced by dykes, and except for a few desultory willows, trees all but disappear from the landscape. The tour is over.