Woodlands
The 100th volume of the prestigious New Naturalist series, written by one of Britain's best-known naturalists, explores the significance and history of woodlands on the British landscape‘Trees are wildlife just as deer or primroses are wildlife. Each species has its own agenda and its own interactions with human activities…’This 100th volume of the New Naturalist series presents a landmark in natural history publishing. Looking at such diverse evidence as the woods used in buildings and ships, and how woodland has been portrayed in pictures and photographs, Rackham reconstructs British woodland through the ages.Aimed at the non-specialist, ‘New Naturalist Woodlands’ investigates what woods are and how they function. In lively style, Rackham takes us through:• How woods evolved and how they are managed,• The basic botany (understanding roots, partnerships, longevity, tree-rings),• Outline of woodland history,• Pollen analysis and wildwood,• Archives of woodland and how to study them,• Different types of woodland,• The rise and fall of modern forestry.Illustrated with beautiful colour photographs throughout, this New Naturalist is set to be a classic for collectors and general readers alike.
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The New Naturalist Library
100
Woodlands
Oliver Rackham
SARAH A. CORBET, ScD
PROF. RICHARD WEST, SCD, FRS, FGS
DAVID STREETER, FIBIOL
The aim of this series is to interest the general
reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists.
The editors believe that the natural pride of
the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.
Table of Contents
In Memory of Stuart Max Walters 1920-2005
Authorâs Foreword and Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1 The Constant Spring: What Trees and Woods Are and How They Behave
CHAPTER 3 Outline of Woodland History
CHAPTER 4 Pollen Analysis and Wildwood
CHAPTER 5 Wildwood into Woodland
CHAPTER 6 Of Wood-Pasture and Savanna
CHAPTER 7 Archives of Woodland and How to Study Them
CHAPTER 8 Archaeology and Land-Forms of Woodland and Wood-Pasture
CHAPTER 9 Pictures and Photographs
CHAPTER 10 Woodland in the Field: Evidence of Present Soils, Trees and Vegetation
CHAPTER 11 Uses of Wood and Timber: Reconstructing the Woods from Buildings, Hurdles and Ships
CHAPTER 12 Ancient-Woodland Plants and Other Creatures
CHAPTER 13 Wild and Planted Trees
CHAPTER 14 Some Types of Woodland: Lowland Zone
CHAPTER 15 Some Types of Woodland: Highland Zone and Ireland
CHAPTER 16 Caledonian Pinewood?
CHAPTER 17 Environment, Pathology and Ecology: Damage, Disease, Defoliation
CHAPTER 18 Modern Forestry: its Rise and Fall
CHAPTER 19 Modern Forestry: its Legacy. Plantations as Ecosystems
CHAPTER 20 On Investigating a Wooded Forest: Blackmoor
CHAPTER 21 Experiments and Long-Term Observations
CHAPTER 22 The Recent Past and the Future
For sixty years Max Walters was a pillar of the New Naturalist series. He was author with John Gilmour of Wild Flowers, no. 5 (1954) and with John Raven of Mountain Flowers, no. 33 (1955), and sole author of Wild & Garden Plants, no. 80 (1993). He served on the Editorial Board from 1981 until 2005.
He is the begetter of this book, first by being my teacher and lifelong friend, then by inspiring me to write earlier books beginning with Hayley Wood in 1975, and finally by persuading me over many years to write this one. He saw many of the draft chapters. One of the last things he did was to invite me to his home and put before me the cutting-edge articles on ant dispersal (p.330), published in obscure Swedish and German journals between 1896 and 1924; the sort of information that he loved to have at his fingertips. I am sad that he did not quite live to see it published.
He came from Yorkshire but lived most of his life in Cambridge. He was Keeper of Cambridge University Herbarium (1949â73), Director of the Botanic Garden (1973â83) and Fellow of St Johnâs College and then (from 1964) of Kingâs College. In retirement, Darwin-like, he kept and studied his own little botanic garden at Grantchester. One of his last projects was to re-establish the botanic garden at Sarajevo after the tragedy that ravaged his beloved Yugoslavia.
Max began as an experimental taxonomist. He became famous for the mighty works of reference that he organised and edited: the Atlas of the British Flora (with Franklyn Perring, 1962), Flora Europaea (1964â80) and The European Garden Flora (with James Cullen, 2000). Flora Europaea was perhaps his greatest achievement: nothing less than a complete Flora of a then battered and divided continent from the Azores to the Urals. Somehow he contrived to get the enthusiastic support of botanists in every country and province, and even to extract plant records from the prison-state of Albania.
He introduced me to the Mediterranean through field trips to south-east France, Slovenia and Croatia in the 1960s, when such excursions were more adventurous than they are now. (But was not every field trip with Max an adventure?) His interests, however, were not just continent-wide: he published three books concerned with Cambridgeshire botany and botanists, and in his later years he made Grantchester churchyard his field of study.
Max was a leading conservationist, especially in his work at the Botanic Garden. As a founder of Cambridgeshire & Isle of Ely Naturalistsâ Trust, he saw to the acquisition of Hayley Wood, the Trustâs first big nature reserve, in 1962. Seven years later, he put his weight behind the campaign to prevent the destruction of the Bradfield Woods, Suffolk. Both events were turning-points in woodland conservation; had they gone the other way, this book might not have been written.
As another of his old students has said, âone of Maxâs greatest gifts was to inspire others to action, to reach heights of achievement they had not dared to contemplateâ. He was a devout Christian; an embodiment of all that was good in old-fashioned socialism; a pacifist; he was upheld over 57 years by his wife Lorna. Like myself, he refused to recognise the distinction between amateur and professional: the
