Showing posts with label Urban drought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Urban drought. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Remembering a Tree Book from 2007 which should not be forgotten in a drought: Wildwood, by Roger Deakin

Here's a word list specially for tree-lovers. They're not much heard in this era of mechanized household gardening using a plethora of electrical equipment, but in his splendid 2007 title Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, Roger Deakin discusses the following:

"plashing" and "pleaching" (hedges), "pollarding" and "coppicing," (trees, making a coppice wood); also: spinney, greengage, sward, scrump, scion, holloway, bole, spar, and brorch. (How many of these words did you know?)

Deakin packs fact into a long lyrical narrative appreciation of trees in England and Australia, Poland and the Urals. Have you ever wondered where apples came from (where they are "native" to)? Kyrgyzstan. An Oxford professor establishes that fact using DNA profiling, so Deakin goes off to the land of Apple Genesis. We can thank the horses transporting goods along the silk road trails over the centuries: the ancient apple seed is toughly coated enough to withstand the equine digestive tract, and fell to ground all over Europe within its own bed of compost. Now Britain has 6000 varieties. But even in the ancient stone age civilizations people knew how to plant seeds and cross-breed - we know that from the records and pictograms they kept. Human history is tree history, and Deakin walks us through much of it -- it's also the history of soil, flowers, insects, bees, cattle and sheep whose flavourful varieties of cheese and honey come from plants and their sap ("a tree is a river of sap" says Deakin).

And water: the minerals in soil which micro-organisms make available to roots are dissolved in water. Water cycles as vapour from leaves to sky, from clouds to soil and back into roots. How much less water is in a city as it is increasingly paved? Is there a formula for measuring that?

Grass helps: its underground tangles of roots hold water (and the fungi, filaments and micro-organisms that make minerals bio-available), and leaves of grass send off oxygen and moisture into the air. Unless, that is, its water supply is shut off during a dry season with no sprinkler use. "Water conservation" may "save" water, but for what? Household and industrial use?

Diverting water from plants makes natural landscape die off, and banishing grass with its underlying microbe-civilization makes soil erode away. Do we still want our gardens? And the young trees that will replace Victoria's aging public tree population? It is something to think about, when water use is being debated.