Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 68

Through the forest canopy move troops of long-tailed tits, goldcrests,
nuthatches and treecreepers. Walking up Cwm Nantgobaith one
autumn day, I noticed something unmistakable, but so unfamiliar that
it took me a moment to process it. It shone like a gold sovereign
against the brown oak leaves on the path. I picked it up.
It was a leaf of Tilia cordata , the small-leaved lime. Daffodil yellow,
onion-shaped, it filled only the indentation in my palm. I looked up
the path and saw another, then another. I followed the trail to two
great trunks, forking from one stool and twisting up into the canopy
above the path. I had walked beneath them many times but never
noticed them: swaddled in deep moss, the trunks were indistinguish-
able from those of the oaks, and the leaves appeared only far above
my head. Since then I have found several more limes in the gorge. This
is a tree of the ancient wildwood which is now rare in Wales. Its pres-
ence there suggests that this fragment of rainforest might have grown
without interruption since prehistoric times.
Heather, which many nature-lovers in Britain cherish, is typical of
the hardy, shrubby plants which colonize deforested land. I have seen
similar landscapes of low scrub in Brazil, Indonesia and Africa, where
logging, burning and shifting cultivation have depleted the soil. I do
not see heather moor as an indicator of the health of the upland envir-
onment, as many do, but as a product of ecological destruction. The
rough grasslands which replace it when grazing pressure further
intensifies, and which are also treasured by some naturalists, are strik-
ingly similar to those whose presence we lament where cattle ranching
has replaced rainforests in the tropics. I find these double standards
hard to explain. I wonder whether our campaigns against deforest-
ation elsewhere in the world, commendable as they may be, are a way
of not seeing what has happened in our own country.
This is not to say that there was no open land. In some places the
soil was too poor or wet for trees to grow. On the tops of the highest
mountains the weather was too cold and harsh. But these open habi-
tats were small and occasional, by comparison to the great tracts of
wildwood which covered most of the hills. 5 Nor is this to suggest that
if human beings and their domestic animals were suddenly to vanish
from Britain, our ecosystems would soon revert to those that pre-
vailed in the Mesolithic. The uplands have been so depleted of