On the Fall and Rise of British Woodland in the Last Hundred Years

The Major Oak, Sherwood Forest

Photo: FLPA / Rex Features

Sir Clifford Chatterley was very proud of the fine (if somewhat melancholy) park and woodland - a remnant of Sherwood Forest - that belonged to the Wragby estate; "he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world." 

His father, however, Sir Geoffrey, had been rather less proud and protective of the ancient oaks. In fact, he was more than willing to chop them down for timber during the War. Blinded by patriotism and "so divorced from the England that was really England", he failed to see the difference between Lloyd George and St. George.  

Thus it was that, post-War, when Clifford inherited the estate, there were large clearings in the wood, "where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless."

Standing on the crown of the knoll where the oaks had once been, you could look over to the colliery and the railway and the sordid-looking houses of the ever-expanding town with their smoking chimneys. It felt exposed and strangely forlorn; "a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood", that revealed the industrial world triumphant: 

"This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey."

This hatred of his father and his father's generation for their wilful destruction of the heart and soul of England, makes me rather love Clifford - even though, of course, his dream of securing such is in vain and he ultimately proves himself more concerned with modernising his coal mines than he does with replanting trees and preserving the natural world. 

Thus, there's not only a certain pathos to his words, but falseness and perhaps a degree of self-delusion. The wood, as Lawrence notes, "still had some mystery of the wild, old England", but the War had had a truly devastating effect and exposed forever the lie of England as a green and pleasant land entrusted to the care of a benevolent ruling class.

For if truth be told, in 1920 - the year when Sir Clifford and his wife Constance enter into their married life at Wragby Hall - the amount of land covered by trees in Britain stood at less than 5%. This is an outrageously low figure, particularly when recalling that the entire country was originally (and is potentially) one huge forest thanks to ideal conditions for tree growth, including relatively mild winters, plenty of rain, and fertile soil.

The good news is that in the hundred years since, things have significantly improved and, today, about 12% of land surface is wooded, with plans to increase this figure to 15% by 2060. However, before getting too excited about this, it's sobering to recall that other European countries already average between 25-37%. France and Germany, for example, both possess almost three times the number of trees that England has.

Further, whilst the planting of young trees is to be welcomed, the real issue is preserving what remains of the UK's ancient woodland - defined as woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 in England and Wales and 1750 in Scotland; i.e. long enough to develop incredibly rich, complex, and irreplaceable ecosystems.

It is ancient woodland that provides home to more rare and threatened species of flora and fauna in the UK than any other type of habitat. But presently just 2% of land is covered with ancient woodland, which means there are very few oaks still standing as majestic as the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest; a thousand-year-old tree which is said to have provided a safe haven for Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men.

In sum: there is cause for celebration; British woodland has returned to the levels of the 1750s, with tree cover having more than doubled since Lawrence's day. But it would be foolish to become complacent on this issue and not acknowledge that there is still much that needs to be done (the present government is already falling well below its own target for reforestation - a target that one might argue was insufficient in the first place). 

Like Lawrence, I adore the stillness of trees, "with their crinkly, innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken". And I marvel at how gaily the birds and forest creatures and lovers move among them.  

See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Lines quoted are from Chapters 1 and 5. 

This post is dedicated to David Brock; an Englishman with a heart of oak.