Public and private life of trees

The chief, undeniable feature of our walk so far has been trees. How many days - how many photos? - have featured a long track through arching branches. The tracks have been chalk, or sand, or mud, or leaves, or paving; but the trees remain. The branches were bare when we set out and now their buds are breaking to reveal the first green haze of spring.

So many trees: the forests of southern Picardy are vast. Once again familiarity is helping us learn different ways to understand what is around us. Yes, we know that the general shape and character of a beech tree is different to that of an oak or a birch tree. But now we see that between two oaks or birches the differences are even greater. Where has the tree split, where have new branches joined it? What patterns do its arms make? Is it strong and healthy or old and failing? These things we note and weigh rapidly as we pass.

Each tree writes its own story on its skin. They have a resilient force that would leave me unsurprised, now, to see one move across my path, walking. Blight bulges and torments with growth under the bark and the smooth outer cannot bear the writhing. Sometimes the bark splits open under the pressure. Or barbed wire wounds constrict and deform the tree. Yet we have seen trees that have joined together to become one new tree. Others that are slowly consuming their surroundings, digesting metal notices pinned to them, absorbing them into themselves.

Trees are part of French history. These swathes of forest in Picardy belonged to the vast empire of the tree that covered northern Europe. Bit by bit they were cleared and cut down, creating gaps for humans to live in, to grow crops in, to travel through, build homes and wage wars in. By the time the Romans came there was already open land enough for important orchards and vineyards to be planted. Forests became the hunting preserve of the feudal lords of the Dark Ages, symbols of their power and wealth even though trees were essential to all to build and to heat.

By the Middle Ages, deforestation and the consumption of trees for war and for iron foundaries had created shortages that influenced the development of the famous great churches of Normandy and Picardy. The Romanesque churches had solid wooden roofs upheld by large beamed heavy wood frames. These were prone to catch fire, taking the stone walls with them. The ending of the feudal wars brought a period of prosperity and population growth; and the churches needed to be rebuilt to house ever greater numbers of faithful.The master craftsmen turned their minds towards stone. Rib-vaulting, lauded as a way of opening up the walls to light, also paid off in the lighter need for trees.

Northern France's large forests were snatched early by the new kings of France as hunting grounds and pleasure grounds. Over time, they cut the networks of wide straight alleys and rides that are today still marked by pretty white signposts. The gift of the right to hunt in the forests became one of the ways the kings asserted their dominion. Of course, such arrogance hurt the poor and the peasants, excluded from the natural wealth. One of the first laws passed at the Revolution was to make the Royal forests into a national property, owned by all.

But revolutionaries don't always make good woodsmen. In some forests, like La Hallotière, the planting of vast areas of the same tree - beech - left the forest vulnerable to blight and storms. Today, France's Office National des Forêts prides itself on managing the forests sustainably. They produce wood for commercial use, certainly, but they are careful to implement a rolling pattern of harvesting and replanting. As they point out to the public taking their Sunday walks, it takes seven generations of woodsmen and women to bring an oak tree to harvest.

The ONF needs to show this example. In the face of rising fuel oil prices more and more French people are turning back to trees to heat their houses. All over the forests are sections cleared for timber and people with trees on their property cut them down. Some mourn the loss of trees; but the announcer on the local news beams as she tells of a new move to bring private wood-sellers more profits. No Normandy house was complete without its wall of cut logs stretching for meters along the property ready for a hard winter. Les Sources Bleues, where we stayed, boasted a central heating system fed by steam from a vast water trough hanging over a permanent log fire in the kitchen.

For now, the forests remain a much-valued public good for leisure and health. Each weekend we are shaken from our solitude by dozens of walkers, cyclists, hunters or flower-pickers. Around May Day, we're told, the woods will be full of lilies of the valley and people will pick bunches to sell as love tokens by the roadside. It is the one thing, on the one day of the year, that a French person can sell without paying taxes.

24 February 2008