Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 1 (2018), p. 158

The author is an ecologist known for her pioneering studies on the historical management and exploitation of Loch Lomond oaks, and more recently for a remarkable oral history of the Sitka spruce forest at Whitelee in Ayrshire. She returns here with a book that aims to do two things: to tell the story of Sitka spruce in its widest context in North America and Great Britain and Ireland, and implicitly to cast doubt on the usefulness of categories like ‘naturalness’ for setting conservation priorities.

This explains the structure of the book. It begins with five chapters telling the ecological history of Sitka spruce in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska, and its cultural history in relation to the uses that the First Peoples made (and still make) of it. There is much fascinating detail. For instance the discovery of a 6000-year old basket, made of Sitka roots, which is virtually identical in preparation and weaving techniques to those still used by indigenous Alaskans. Sitka in western North America grows into mighty trees, an essential component of the temperate rain forest that clothes the islands and the coastal plain. All parts of it, roots, shoots, bark, the great trunks and branches themselves, have their traditional uses for the First Peoples, ranging from totem poles and boats to fish traps and food.

The next three chapters have nothing at all to do with Sitka, but provide a hasty tour of British woodland history from Mesolithic tinkering with the wilderness, to Tudor ship-building and Georgian planting and wood management, but not saying much about some topics, like the charcoal iron industry. The purpose of this seems to be to demonstrate that human exploitation has left its mark on woodland at every stage, so what we take to be natural wilderness is nothing of the sort. It is also to show how all-enveloping and critical has been the need for timber products, and how ultimately inadequate was the supply of native trees to meet these needs.

The rest of the book returns to its main theme, firstly with the discovery of Sitka spruce by British sailors and explorers on the Pacific coast of North America who used the foliage to make beer as a remedy for scurvy and came to appreciate the tall straight trunks for replacement masts.

Alerted to its potential, the estate gardener David Douglas was sent from Scotland to explore the area’s botanical riches, and returned with the first Sitka seeds to Britain in the 1830s. Wealthy sponsors planted the seeds on their estates; some of the first are now magnificent specimens in Scottish arboreta. Nevertheless, it took the best part of a century for foresters to appreciate fully the remarkable combination of lightness and strength in the timber, and rather longer for them to work out how best to grow it on wet and cold British uplands. Meanwhile when the Forestry Commission came into being in 1919, ‘the new commissioners and other significant landowners fell over themselves to get their own property sold and afforested’, finding a welcome chance to make money from their worst land at a time when estates were under pressure – an interesting observation from Tittensor. These included the duke of Northumberland, who sold off his least profitable moors at Kielder to enable the Commission to make the biggest forest in England, now the haunt of merlin, goshawk, osprey and red squirrel.

The first to appreciate Sitka as the tree of the future in Britain was W. D. Crozier in an article of 1910. The first time it caught the public imagination was as the timber for early aircraft in the First World War (not for nothing is Boeing located in Seattle). The first person to find seed of the best provenance to grow in Scotland, and the right method for planting it on a large scale on bad land, was Sir John Stirling Maxwell on his estate at Corrour, amid the utter bleakness of Rannoch Moor. After the Second World War, with the invention of powerful moorland ploughs, Sitka came to dominate new planting in Britain and Ireland, covering hillsides with dark blankets of close-planted, short-rotation trees and bringing about the biggest change in land use in Scotland since the Clearances. Protests followed. Meanwhile in North America logging companies made havoc in the old growth forests, coming into conflict with both the First Peoples and with nature conservationists before some kind of compromise was worked out.

Ruth Tittensor dwells on the richness of lichen, bryophyte and fungal diversity in the British plantations, and stresses the ecological interest of these new habitats. She herself is very indignant about the indignation that many felt over afforestation: what right had people like Marion Shoard to protest about Sitka when even the paper her protests were published upon were made from Sitka? What was all this about beauty and nature conservation when beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there is no such thing as naturalness? Her arguments here begin to come off the rails a little. No ecologist or historian argues that Britain has ‘natural’ habitat: the term used is ‘semi-natural’, which recognizes the cultural history embedded in, for instance, the Loch Lomond oak-woods. Scientists perforce concentrated their research on semi-natural habitats not because they did not recognize Sitka spruce plantations as habitat but because the Nature Conservancy and its successors who employed them were charged with mitigating threats to less common species, and most of those that were endangered lived in semi-natural habitats threatened by drainage, chemical agriculture or mono-cultural afforestation. In any case, there was substantially more scientific effort put into understanding the new forests than Tittensor suggests: she makes no mention, for example, of Morton Boyd’s move from heading the Nature Conservancy Council in Scotland to advising the Forestry Commission, or of the work of Mark Avery and Roderick Leslie, with its very balanced conclusions.

This is a book of striking perspectives and feisty opinions, but perhaps not, to this reviewer, of entirely convincing conclusions.