Trees in England: Management and disease since 1600

There is currently much concern about our trees and woodlands. The terrible toll taken by Dutch elm disease has been followed by a string of further epidemics, most worryingly ash chalara – and there are more threats on the horizon.

There is also a widely shared belief that our woods have been steadily disappearing over recent decades, either replanted with alien conifers or destroyed entirely in order to make way for farmland or development.

But the present state of our trees needs to be examined critically, and from an historical as much as from a scientific perspective.

For English tree populations have long been highly unnatural in character, shaped by economic and social as much as by environmental factors.