Academic literature on the topic 'Coast redwood forest'

The forest was small by American standards, perhaps fifty or sixty acres, but in the rolling Devon countryside with its parceled fields and narrow, hedge-enclosed lanes, it felt appropriately spacious. I was enjoying the guided tour in one of my favorite parts of the world. The light rain and chilly July breezes felt right; the English ivy carpeting the ground seemed right; the leafy hardwoods looked right (although I didn’t know the species and could easily have been fooled); and the probably medieval bank and ditch running through the woods at right angles to the path gave everything an impressive air of authenticity. The path turned. As we rounded the corner, I saw ahead the darker shade of conifers. Soon we were in the midst of a grove of youthful but already towering California-coast redwoods. A deep silence hung like a benediction over the dark wood, but it was quickly shattered. “I’d give anything to be allowed to cut them down,” said our guide, Stephan, in an angry voice. This incident passed out of my thoughts until weeks later back in New Jersey, when I was reading the chapter on conservation in Oliver Rack-ham’s The History of the Countryside, an account of the origins of Britain’s landscapes, flora, and fauna. The British landscape of the late twentieth century, Rack-ham wrote, is suffering from an acute loss of meaning—the unique messages once conveyed by many historic woodlands, witness to millennia of slow and painstaking change, have been garbled beyond recognition in five or six decades of modern planting, “restoration,” development, and agriculture. The more I read in this remarkable book, surely one of the most profound and eloquent descriptions of people and nature ever written, the more I understood Stephan’s feeling that his Devon woodland had been desecrated by the planting of those redwoods. I also began to understand how little I knew about the long discourse between people and trees in Britain, where the history of the relationship is probably as well documented as in any place on earth.