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Kew magazine
Question:
What do gunpowder, single malt whisky, a long bow, a leather belt, the Mary Rose and a Bramley apple pie have in common?
Answer:
They’re all made with the help of British trees, which have contributed so much to the rich character of this country. And our native trees are explored in The Trees That Made Britain, a new BBC series presented by Kew’s Tony Kirkham and Jon Hammerton. Tony Kirkham takes us on location
It’s all too easy to overlook the impact that trees have on our lives. We take them for granted as we go about our daily routines, although they may have provided us with shelter or fire, transport or food, or helped us during times of war. In fact, you’d be surprised how much of our heritage and the progress we’ve made into the 21st century is down to the help we’ve had from our native trees.
Fortunately,
there are many individuals and organisations who strive to keep traditions
going and work hard to preserve the skills that, if lost, could result
in the loss of the trees themselves. Last September, I left Kew with
Jon Hammerton, my leading tree climber in the Tree Gang, and a three-man
team from BBC Wales. We travelled the length and breadth of England,
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to meet the people who work with
trees, preserve traditional woodland crafts, promote trees through conservation
awareness and, of course, to meet the trees themselves.
Our aim was to
make a television series featuring eight remarkable British trees – the
yew, oak, ash, alder, hawthorn, apple, pine and elm. We hope that the
eight-part series, on BBC2 from 15 September 2006, will remind
viewers that we need these trees and, more importantly, that these particular
trees need us if they’re to survive.
We have so many stories to tell about our meetings with trees and people during the filming of the series that it’s very difficult to single out just a few, but here are some that we both remember fondly. All these stories and many more are featured in the series.
Scotch whisky is Britain’s fifth biggest export commodity, and it can only be made with the help of the oak tree. To be termed ‘Scotch’ whisky, the amber nectar must be matured in oak casks for a minimum of three years, but extending the maturation increases the oak flavours. Jon and I were fortunate to be given the pleasure of working as apprentices for a day to Barry Taylor, the European champion cooper. Our task was to make a brand new barrel from scratch, albeit with American oak! It was the noisiest, dirtiest and hottest job we had done in years, but a dram of whisky has never tasted better with the knowledge of what goes into making a barrel.
We spent the following day with Alan Greg, the chief
taster at the Glenlivet Distillery on Speyside. Here we were given the
opportunity to open a cask of 32-year-old malt and taste the angel’s
share – the
drops that the taxman never sees – and how good it tasted! This
was followed by a visit to the library, where we were given a lesson
in the etiquette of tasting whisky – and the rest of the day is
a bit of a blur...
There is only one remaining leather tannery in Britain that still uses the bark of the oak tree to tan leather. It produces the best quality leather that money can buy for the top end of the shoe and equine market. The complete process takes 12 months, a long time when compared with chemical tanning, which takes less than a month, but loses the quality.
It is thought that Stone Age man realised the tanning properties of oak by accident when he left a raw hide by a pool under an oak tree. Today, the bark is stripped from trees up to 20 years old growing in coppiced oak woodland in Wales. These hold the best tannins. The bark is dried, shredded and mixed with water in 2m-deep pits, where the raw pelts are attached to ropes and dunked for the year until ready for drying. I can’t begin to describe the smells associated with the process, but the resulting leather cannot be bettered.
Trees have been used in warfare in many different
ways. As a result, they’ve had a huge bearing on our nationality
today. The Mary Rose and Victory were ships built from the timber of
the oak tree, and both vessels played their part in many battles. We
took a walk around the Queen’s Inclosure, part of the Forest of
Bere, near Portsmouth, with Chris Dobbs, one of the marine archaeologists
responsible for salvaging and recovering the Mary Rose from the bed of
the Solent.
Following a 1792 report on the state of woods and forests, the Queen’s Inclosure was fenced off as a timber reserve, because so many trees were being felled for ship building in the naval dockyard. Today, many of its 200-year-old trees are mature and ready to be used to build the next naval fleet. Chris, Jon and I were there to identify which part of an oak tree would have been used for making the keel of the Mary Rose.
More
than 137 longbows were recovered from Henry VIII’s flagship,
and the bow staves of these were made from the trunk of another great
British tree – the yew. Once seasoned, the trunk was cleft radially
into triangular billets, carefully retaining the heartwood and sapwood
so the bow benefits from the different properties of each – the
heartwood performing best under compression, the sapwood under tension.
One of the world authorities on the long-bow and yew is the actor Robert Hardy, alias Siegfried Farnon from the 1980s television series All Creatures Great and Small. We were lucky enough to spend a day with him making a longbow and then firing the arrows with Simon Stanley, the undisputed world champion for distance and accuracy.
Still on the war theme, one of the three main ingredients of gunpowder is carbon, which is produced from alder charcoal. Alders were grown as a coppiced tree in woodland in the wetter parts of the British Isles for the production of charcoal and its by-product carbon. Today the main use of charcoal is in air filters and barbecues. It’s still made in the traditional way, which Jon and I mastered in some alder woodland not far from Kew in the heart of Surrey.
And a Bramley apple pie? Well
that’s straight forward, but have
you ever been wassailing on Twelfth Night…?
Tony Kirkham is head of the Arboretum at Kew