If we save our trees, we save our souls

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/save-trees-souls-british-identify-ash

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Today, as over 1.35 million people have done this year, I will take a stroll around Kew Gardens. Kew may be a global tourist magnet, but it started life as an idyllic escape, a hunting park from which Henry VII's court could escape the festering capital. George III's parents, Prince Frederick and Princess Augusta, began a garden around Kew Palace. Under Queen Victoria's patronage, Kew became integral to the expanding empire, supplying seeds, crops, personnel and horticultural lessons to the globe.

Britain may no longer rule the world, but these Royal Botanic Gardens remain a powerhouse for botanical scientific research, plant conservation and cataloguing. There is barely a conservation project on the planet that does not depend upon its 253 years of investigation.

Still, for my money, one goes to Kew for the trees: over 14,000 across its 132 hectares. Some walkers favour the lavish excesses of summer, all dappled light on a sea of green. However, deep December holds its charms, not least for being able to see the shape of matters, the wood from the trees, revelling in the beauties of bark and bud.

The American poet Joyce Kilmer's much-parodied 1913 lyric Trees ("I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree") was a winter creation, inspired by hibernal boughs: "Upon whose bosom snow has lain; / Who intimately lives with rain." And there is a pleasing solidarity between the winter walker – ruddy-cheeked, bitten fingered – and these giants of landscape, stalwart where all other vegetation lays low.

Perhaps this is why we Brits identify so fundamentally with trees: witness the collective horror over <em>Chalara fraxinea</em>, which causes ash dieback, discovered in woods in East Anglia in October. In a form of arboreal anthropomorphism, trees remind us of ourselves – and our best selves at that: our robust, blitz-spirited, stoutly virtuous guise. We like to imagine ourselves as being solid as oak, that it takes much to fell us.

Britain's 80m-strong ash population has previously proved no less doughty. Ash is our third most commercial wood, a robust coppice species, the best furnace material, a straight, hardwood perfect for making tools, plough and plank. Ash supplied the arrows of Agincourt, the first furnaces of the industrial revolution. And it is beautiful, of course.

Long before hippies were deemed "tree-huggers", ashes bewitched us. Sick children were passed through its clefts, saints' staffs morphing miraculously into ash trees. As every schoolchild knows, the ash supports complex ecosystems. However, it no less supports humans, in spirit as much as oxygen emissions.

Today, as I admire the stately ashes of Kew's Princess Walk, I will do so while undertaking a series of resolutions. I am not merely going to wring my hands over dieback, I will campaign for commercial import bans as advocated by historical ecologist Professor Oliver Rackham. I will respect the fact that, in the same way that hunting created many of our forests, so it conserves them (my arboriculturalist brother, like many tree specialists, is also a qualified deer stalker – to save trees, one must manage deer).

I will engage charitably by joining the Woodland Trust, Royal Forestry Society, Trees for Cities and, of course, Kew. I will visit some of Britain's 5,500 woods, and the parklands of London, Birmingham and Sheffield (which boasts the highest number of trees per head in Europe). For the first time in 30 years, I will go about with a spotter's guide in my pocket. And I will hope that ash dieback will prove a spur for all of us to think more deeply about trees, because somewhere I maintain a lingering pagan intuition that, if we save our trees, we save our souls.