(^120) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
in Wiltshire, and the two million planted at Holkham in Norfolk between
1782 and 1805.^24 Old-enclosed ‘woodland’ areas, in contrast, generally
witnessed less new planting.
Tree planting was intimately connected with the rise of great estates
because only those owning extensive properties could afford to put hundreds
of acres out of agricultural production, foregoing immediate for medium- or
long-term financial benefit. The new climate of political stability was also
important, for only those who expected to pass on land to their children and
grandchildren would plant over it.^25 The enclosure of heaths and moors was
a further encouragement, for forestry made good economic use of the more
marginal land. But landowners were also fired up by patriotism and by the
writings of John Evelyn, whose book Sylva, or a Discourse on Forest Trees
of 1664 was followed by a rash of similar texts, including Stephen Switzer’s
Ichnographica Rustica of 1718.^26 People believed that wood and timber
supplies were running low, Batty Langley in 1728, for example, stating that
‘our nation will be entirely exhausted of building timber before sixty years
are ended’. Men like Phillip Miller (1731), James Wheeler (1747), Edmund
Wade (1755) and William Hanbury (1758) were also concerned about the
military implications of a timber shortage, and throughout the century the
government worried about how to provide the vast quantities of timber
required by the Royal Navy dockyards.^27 Yet landowners also planted
simply to beautify their estates, and to demonstrate their extent, as well as
to provide cover for game.^28
Most of these new woods were plantations, consisting entirely of
timber trees and without a coppiced understorey, a reflection in part of
the declining value of underwood in many, although not all, parts of the
country as industrialization proceeded. Deciduous species – particularly
oak, sweet chestnut and beech – were mixed with a rather larger number
of conifer ‘nurses’, usually Scots pine, spruce and larch. In the words of
Nathaniel Kent, they comprised ‘Great bodies of firs, intermixed with a
lesser number of forest trees’^29 Because it was difficult to deal with weeds,
and also because significant losses were anticipated from the depredations
of rabbits and other animals, the trees were usually planted more closely
than would be the case today, often at a density of nearly two per square
metre. They were then progressively thinned, starting with the conifers:
a process which began when the plantation was 10 years old, sometimes
earlier.^30 Plantations thus became, over time, less coniferous and more
deciduous in character, and also less densely timbered. In most cases, the
final timber crop was itself only thinned, so that the plantation lived on in
the landscape. In some contexts, however, plantations of pure conifer – larch
and Scots pine – were planted, entirely for commercial purposes. Already
there were critics of the effect these had upon the landscape, although
less to the establishment of plantations on moors and heaths than to their
impact on more domesticated terrain. As Wordsworth put it, describing
such plantations in the Lake District:
elle
(Elle)
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