heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees > Status Update

" Contrary to conventional forestry wisdom, great age and internal rottenness don't make trees vulnerable, but actively protect them. Most of the Windsor veterans [oak pollards] were squat and hollow, with small branch areas and low centres of gravity, which made them very stable in high winds."

"Naturalness is whatever occurs between human interventions."

"... the way trees exhibit and then respond to stress is entirely different from other living things. It's a protracted and permanent expression, frozen into the hard forms of wood."

biomechanical key-term: the axiom of uniform stress

of beauty for the Picturesque mvt. & Uvedale Price's writings: "... [what he saw as natural beauty was] diversity, intricacy, accident, weathering, light and shade, fractal surface, decaying wood ... above all the connectivity of features in a natural landscape.." (Mabey's own emphasis)

[this being] "also a fair précis of the criteria by which scientists evaluate the ecological richness of natural systems."

On the romantic shift in perception surfacing with the early 19th century planting movement; trees as individuals, not of the communities of the wild:

" A known tree is a solid link with the past, an embodiment of continuity. [...] It could be appropriated as a trophy [...] When the idea of 'heritage' began to take on its shape characterful trees slippedfeasily into the mould, as a species of cultural property."

"The funda,emta; grammar of our relationship with trees changed. [...} In the forest-speak of the Enlightenment, 'growing' was a transitive verb. We were the subjects and trees the object. ..."