Trees can also die of sunburn. Close to the great beech at Ashridge, another beech is dying because a vast branch of another tree fell nearby, exposing this tree to the sun. Beech has thin bark and, just like a pale-skinned human, if it has grown up protected from the sun and is suddenly exposed, it burns horribly. Gray squirrels stripping bark is an increasing problem: Holes in the bark allow fungal diseases in, which can weaken a tree and finally cause it to fall over. Fungal diseases introduced by squirrels also stain the quality beech wood that the Chilterns is renowned for, making it commercially worthless.
“It’s a serious economic and ecological issue. It’s a total disaster,” Muelaner said.
Ancient trees are not merely great statues to biodiversity, they document human history; they have a social and cultural significance, as well as an ecological one. Some ancient trunks bear the scars of decades of graffiti.
“It is vandalism but then it becomes historic,” he said.
During the second world war, US soldiers shot deer, chased local women and prepared for war in the woods at Ashridge. On May 4, 1944, a few weeks before D-Day, when many young men would perish, a group of GIs carved a “V” for victory and the names of their home states — from Texas to South Dakota — into the trunk of another Chiltern beech nearby. It is still there, a memorial in bark, the carving slowly fattening as the tree grows so you can rest a finger in the V now.
CATALOGUE
Muelaner, whose post has been funded for three years by the Cadbury family, will accelerate the process of logging our ancient trees. So far, the Woodland Trust has logged 38,000 ancient trees through the work of ecologists and ordinary members of the public, who can record trees at ancient-tree-hunt.org.uk.
The UK’s great wealth of ancient trees may not remain unknown for much longer, but they are still relatively unprotected. Other countries preserve ancient trees by listing them like an old house or ancient monument. In the UK, the only protection is a tree preservation order, which can be circumvented by developers if it is proved trees are dead, dying or dangerous (and most ancient trees, by definition, are dying: It just takes them three centuries).
Muelaner points to the enormous beech at Ashridge.
“If France, Germany or the Scandinavian countries had a tree like that, there would be plaques everywhere and it would be a national monument,” he said.
As well as better protection, he believes ancient tree-like habitats need to be created by planting young trees such as birches that age quickly and provide dead wood or by deliberately maiming some trees to create hollows and dead areas so beloved of smaller living things.
“The speed of our societies nowadays mean that trees are that much more important to us as places where we are grounded and are at peace,” Muelaner said. “We need them now more than we ever needed them before.”
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