Shades of Green: An Environmental and Cultural History of Sitka Spruce

393 Pages·2016·23.228 MB·English

by  Ruth Tittensor

Shades of Green
An Environmental and Cultural History
of Sitka Spruce
Ruth Tittensor
Ceremonial Potlatch Hat woven of Sitka spruce roots in the traditional Haida style
by Debbie Young-Canaday of Juneau, Alaska. Photo: Marilyn Holmes
They that plant trees love others besides themselves.
Adapted from Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
For Isabelle, Sebastian and Sylvie
Windgather Press is an imprint of Oxbow Books
Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
OXBOW BOOKS
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and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
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© Windgather Press and R. Tittensor 2016
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-909686-77-9
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-909686-78-6
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Cover design by Susan Anderson, Eikon Design
Contents
Foreword by Richard Oram vii
Foreword by Richard Carstensen ix
Geography xi
Acknowledgements xiv
1. The Most Hated Tree? 1
2. ‘The Tree From Sitka’ 14
3. Origin, Migration and Survival on the Edge 28
4. At Home in North American Rainforests 40
5. Sitka Spruce in the Lives of First Nations 58
6. Prehistoric Lives and Woodlands in Britain and Ireland 75
7. Woodland History and Britain’s Need for Sitka Spruce 93
8. Realisation: New Trees for New Woodlands 109
9. Ships, Surveyors, Scurvy and Spruces 122
10. Journeys and Experiments for Seeds and People 136
11. From Rare Ornamental to Upland Carpet 159
12. Peat: The Final Frontier 188
13. Perceptions 216
14. Contribution to Modern Societies 241
15. Plantation Ecology: Plants and Animals Re-assemble 267
16. Sustainability in North America 288
17. New Temperate Rainforests: Futures in Ireland and Britain 307
Bibliography 331
Glossary 349
Latin Names 355
Index 361

Foreword
Richard Oram
Professor of Environmental and Medieval History, Centre for Environment,
Heritage and Policy, University of Stirling, Scotland
In the intersecting fields of cultural and environmental history, the focus of
scholarly study has been animal species, mineral commodities and rivers: cod
and herring, salt and coal, the Forth and Severn, to name but a few.
Oddly, while trees and woodland generally have long been subjects of
research, there has been no single tree species that has been treated to such
close-focus research as a cultural entity around which a complex human system
operates, rather than solely a living organism in a complex ecosystem. Given the
English fixation with the oak as the symbol of everything from enduring royalty
to the virility of their fighting men and as an essential element in everything
from furniture-making and leather-tanning to the construction of warships –
and to a lesser extent the elm and the yew – it is remarkable that there has
been no study that has tried to draw these two strands – the cultural and the
environmental – together in a truly interdisciplinary exploration. It is rather
ironic, then, that the species which should be the subject of such a treatment
is one whose very presence in these islands has been the focus of both censure
and celebration since it was first planted on a large scale a century ago: Picea
sitchensis – the Sitka spruce.
How can a tree that on one side of the globe was valued for its intrinsic
worth as a bountiful source of manifold and versatile materials, and treated
with spiritual reverence by the native peoples of America’s Pacific North-West,
become one of the most loathed and reviled organisms to so many people on
the other? Known to Europeans since the later eighteenth century and grown
as specimen trees in British arboreta, it burst into public awareness in the mid-
twentieth century when vast swathes of Britain and Ireland’s largely tree-less
northern and western uplands began to be submerged beneath a tidal wave of
dark-green saplings. It was loved by foresters and government planners who
saw in this fast-growing and resilient species a strategic resource that could
provide these islands with a secure, home-grown supply of commodities
as diverse as timber and wood-spirit for future wars. Large-scale planting
coincided with more intensive ecological study of the land on which they
were planted, land long seen as almost valueless, and the intensification of an
environmental consciousness that awakened the wider public to the destructive
viii Foreword
impact of humanity on the world around them. To many, however, it was the
visual impact that was most harmful in a culturally transformative way: the
distinct character of Britain’s anthropogenic landscapes that had been shaped
over millennia of human intervention into something familiar and loved, and
around which so many aspects of rural life revolved, seemed to be swept away
by something visually jarring and, simply, foreign.
For Sitka spruce the result was a popular loathing that was at once an
ill-informed reaction to the shock-of-the-new usually associated with purely
man-made features like electricity pylons or dams, reinforced by opponents of
large-scale forestry planting. Often dismissed as alien vermin, the Sitka spruce
plantations have been portrayed as the coniferous equivalent of the Dark
Satanic Mills that scarred the face of Blake’s green and pleasant land. Yet, like
the output of those reviled mills, the products of the plantations have delivered
to successive generations commodities upon which they depend.
It remains the most widely-planted tree species in these islands, but greater
care is taken through strategic intermingling with stands of trees of other species
– producing variation in height, colour, shape and texture.
In many ways, these opposed responses, of antipathy and dependence, of
rejection and integration, reflect, often disturbingly, public attitudes to the
presence of other exotica like roads, airports or foreigners. And it is here, in
its exploration of the cultural significance of the tree in both its ‘home’ and its
‘host’ lands, that Ruth Tittensor’s study of this quite remarkable tree transcends
the traditional nature/culture opposition still found in so many natural or
environmental history books. In her discussion of still deeply-entrenched public
attitudes towards the Sitka spruce she holds up a mirror in which modern
society in these islands can reflect upon itself.
Foreword
Richard Carstensen
Naturalist, Discovery Southeast, Juneau, Alaska
On the phone, just now (June 2015), Ruth Tittensor and I compared the
summer weather outside our homes on far sides of the world. Quite the same,
we concluded – cool, grey and moist. No surprise; that’s partly why we were
talking in the first place.
An American coastal tree, evolved to thrive in my well-watered, fire-free
climate, has eagerly galloped over the moistly moderate UK and Republic
of Ireland. Roughly contemporaneous with the British invasion of American
rock music, Sitka spruce executed a counter-coup. Esteemed and groomed by
European silviculturalists, the spruce plantations, and more feral, tree-by-tree
advances into moor and sheep pasture, are less welcomed by lovers of open,
rural landscapes. Social tension and ecological conquest make a potent mix in
the hands of a good story-teller like Ruth Tittensor.
Another way in which I feel connected to Ruth is in our cross-disciplinary
approaches to study of natural and cultural history. We’ve each tried to ‘lean
back’ a bit, to admire the wild and unforeseeable sweep of evolution, succession,
and cultural metamorphosis. From that perspective, the entrenched debate
over what is ‘natural, traditional, indigenous’, or ‘alien, aggressive, weedy’, can
seem a bit parochial. Aesthetics aside, what have been the deeper ecological
implications of the spread of Sitka spruce into Britain and Ireland or of the
massive loss of old-growth spruce forest in my (western) hemisphere? When we
learn to ‘turn on the projector’ – to visualise changes in landform, demography,
forest structure, species range – the concepts of ‘native’ and ‘newcomer’ relax
into relativity.
That said, I agree with ecologist Dan Simberloff that invasive species should
be held ‘guilty until proven innocent’. Nor should we ever deem ‘proof’
absolute. Here in Alaska, a few dispersed patches of ornamental Japanese and
Bohemian knotweed (Fallopia japonica/F. japonica x F. sachalinensis) could be
found in yards and gardens when I arrived about 40 years ago – innocently
minding their own business, I thought. We might then, with enough foresight,
have eradicated it. Now, as any British naturalist could have warned us, it will be
much harder. Sitka spruce has been present in Britain and Ireland for almost as
long as Brazilian pepper-tree (Schinus terebinthifolius) has grown in Florida. For
most of that time, few in Florida suspected the innocuous pepper-tree would