Planting on Barren Ground

What could be more Scottish than heather? Try pines, birches, willows, alders, elms, ashes, oaks . . .

I'm not accustomed to hacking away at icons. Especially defenseless, shrubby ones. With every halfhearted stab of the spade my enthusiasm fades. Heather is the consummate Highland symbol, the subject of countless Scottish ballads, and drop-dead beautiful when it bursts into bloom across the August moorlands. Cutting holes in it is a tad troubling.

I love heather. My wife, who grew up in these Calluna-clad hills, loves it even more. She stands nearby, on her own little heathery hummock, leans against her unused spade and shoots me one of those what-have-you-gotten-me-into stares. This was, after all, my idea. I give her an apologetic shrug and another feeble stab at the heather, breaking off woody stems and burgundy leaves, slowly clearing a small patch to bare ground. I push my blade into dark, peaty soil, pry open a hole, pull a bare-root seedling out of my bag, and slip my first Scots pine into the ground. We've come here from California to help restore the Highland's wild forest-but on this dreary April morning, still jet-lagged and disoriented, the thought of spending the next week hacking heather suddenly feels less like ecological atonement than petty vandalism.

After all, I once thought the Highlands were just fine the way they are. Most tourists and many Scots still do. When you're caught here between the wind and white water of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, between this crystalline sky and a land cluttered only in silence, it's easy to see why. The emptiness feels endemic. Away from Highland towns and villages, this northwest portion of Scotland holds little industry and few people (fewer in places than the most thinly settled parts of the American West). The Highlands seem primal, pristine. They are nothing of the kind.

As I slip another tree into the ground, I remind myself that we have joined the Scottish reforestation charity Trees for Life, and its small group of volunteers, to right some wrongs, many of them ancient. The Highlands were once covered by what the Romans called the Caledonian Forest, a vast mosaic of pine, birch, willow, alder, elm, ash, and oak. Within that forest lived a people with a reverence for trees. They taught their children the Gaelic alphabet using the names of trees. They built their homes, their boats, their lives from trees. But since those days, Scotland has been stripped of 99 percent of its wildwood (as they call it here) and most of its attendant flora and fauna.

The forests fell for all the familiar reasons: for firewood, timber, to clear land for crops, to graze animals, to build ships and cities, to fuel empire. They fell, too, because as Britain became a colonial power it soon saw wildwood - and anything untamed - as obstacles to the kingdom's fevered dash toward the future. The axe performed the double-edged duty of relieving the land of trees while clearing a path to civility, turning nature into culture. Forests were often regarded as "blotches of barbarity," and, as one eighteenth-century theologian put it, "the scarcity of timber . . . is a certain proof of national improvement." Wood became simply a resource to be gleaned from those yet "barbarous" corners of the empire. As a result, my wife's homeland is today one of the most degraded, deforested lands in the world.

The heather at my feet has filled that ecological vacuum. Here in Glen Affric, a stunning, steep-walled valley west of Loch Ness, ten of us stand knee-deep in a near monoculture of heather where once stood a portion of what the Romans called the Caledonian Forest. I turn in a slow circle, trying to imagine that forest and the culture it contained. I can't. I see, instead, humanity's long, troubled relationship with trees. We seem to cut them as instinctively as we pull in breath. We certainly cut them in the Highlands. Century by century, the Caledonian forest fell, cleared with the relentless force of glaciers, humanity pushing the Highlands back to the Pleistocene, to the tundra and moorland that covered them before the trees arrived. Along the way Scotland's bear, moose, beaver, wild boar, wild ox, wolf, and all manner of other woodland creatures tumbled into extinction. I rub my eyes. Where once stood wilderness, I now see only a land consumed. I see the consequences of a species blind to limits, a species with a hunger large enough to devour the world and the willingness to do so.

I plant another tree. I shove my spade into the ground because I also see hope. On islands in the middle of lochs, on steep slopes, and in remote glens, a few trees, a scattering of wildwood has escaped the axe. The Highlands harbor nine-tenths of Scotland's surviving native forest and the only land undeveloped enough to allow the possibility of more. To the east, I glimpse the dark silhouette of one of those surviving forests. Beyond this sea of heather, Glen Affric embraces the largest least-disturbed native woodland in all of Britain. When our group walked into that vestige of Caledonian pine on the afternoon we first arrived, we crossed the sharp threshold between Scotland's present and past, between open heather and a rich tangle of trees. The effect was stunning. Moments passed before we adjusted to the light and the realization that these two clashing worlds were rooted to the same soil. Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris), some of them three centuries old, gave us a break from the wind and rain. Their grey trunks stood as solid as Doric columns. Their orange limbs twisted into the sky like flame. Most of our group - all but two of us British - had never seen such a sight, had never spent time in woodland whose ancestry dove to such depths of prehistory. It was a scene dense with life, a jumble of shadow and light, forest scents and sounds.

Yet this kingdom is small, this forest fractured. Most of Scotland's native woodlands occupy less than 25 acres each. Through the pines we caught the somber outline of a ridge, a sharp blade of earth shorn of everything but a tweedy shroud of heather. One of our leaders whispered its ancient Gaelic name: Doire Mhor. Big Wood.

The sky slides toward melancholy gray and a soft rain begins to fall, but the memory of that forest boosts our resolve. My wife and I come up with a compromise: I'll dig the holes and she'll plant the trees. Soon we have several dozen in the ground.

For a very long time few people cared about the trees of Scotland. Native son John Muir left in 1849 as a young boy, and while he worked to save American wilderness, no one came to the defense of his homeland's fading forest. Highland woods continued to fall into the 20th century. Until the 1950s, when Professor H. M. Steven and graduate student Jock Carlisle of the University of Aberdeen conducted a seminal native forest study, no one even knew how much old growth was left or where it stood. Their findings were startling: Scotland contained only 1 percent of its original native forest and little of that was protected from exploitation. The Forestry Commission (equivalent to our Forest Service), which itself had cut much of the native forest or underplanted it with fast-growing, North American conifers, decided to act. In 1960 it declared Glen Affric a native pine reserve and began a process of restoration. Still, public interest didn't coalesce until the 1980s, when a collection of grass-root groups began the work of preserving native woodlands.

Some even spoke of reintroducing extinct native animals like the wolf and the bear. "This in not about physical survival," explains British writer Peter Taylor. "It is about the retrieval of soul. Imagine that we, that is this little island, say to the world, we are bringing back the animals [and the forest] because they will make us whole again. And to do it, we set aside land and spend large amounts of money, and put parts of the economy aside. We signal that something matters other than material growth and physical security."

Tea break-one of the perks of tree planting in Scotland. We clamber along a steep slope, drop our spades, and cluster around steaming mugs of tea. As we sip, the rain cools to lazy snow. It drifts through the valley like tattered bits of fleece, softening hard edges to misty abstraction. The light goes all dusky-blue and beautiful. Then I notice a depression in the moist ground near my feet: the double-crescent track of a red deer. Free of former predators other than man, Highland red deer (Cervus elaphus) has exploded in numbers since the 1960s, to over 300,000. In such multitudes they eat virtually every unprotected tree seedling they find, forcing the Forestry Commission to spend much time and money fencing in Affric's forests and shooting those deer that find a way in. Private hunting estates are largely to blame for the problem. In Victorian times, the aristocracy and merely wealthy bought up vast areas of the Highlands, building elegant homes and faux-the 19th-century equivalent of a second home in Aspen. Their grounds, sprawling across thousands of acres, were and still are mangaged for the hunt, promoting deer while eliminating competing species. Estates control 75 percent of Scotland's private land, including the high ground surrounding Glen Affric. As a result, in weather like this, large herds of red deer descend into the valley in search of food and shelter; they come in numbers five times those that would allow for the natural regeneration of trees.

Estate owners have little incentive to solve the problem. Not only is the worth of their estates tied to the number of stags they hold, but they also consider deer stalking on the treeless heath a noble Scottish tradition, as integral to the Highland mystique as whisky, bagpipes, and-well, heather. One estate owner, his voice edged in anger, told me the growing interest in reforestation is "medieval" and promised that Scotland would never "sterilize three quarters of its land mass for the sake of some antediluvian vision." In his voice I heard those of the past. This otherwise genial man's livelihood depends on deer, yet I found it impossible to imagine a woodland habitat that still nurtures pine marten, red squirrel, badger, fox, otter, stoat, weasel, crested tit, Scottish crossbill, capercaillie grouse, rare dragonflies, lichens, orchids, and who knows what undiscovered wonders to be anything but the antithesis of sterility.

An icy wind ripples the moor. We hunker down, pull our hoods over our heads, and, to keep warm, clutch our tea cups in both hands. Sitting in that tight circle on that empty slope, we look like nothing so much as prayerful druids in Gore-Tex and laugh at the thought of it. A few sips later we get back to work and by evening descend a hillside dotted with several hundred young pines, our day's contribution to the quarter million that Trees for Life has planted in Glen Affric since 1991.

Still, that night I have trouble sleeping. I wake from a clattering vision of America as unknowing heir to Highland history. I've dreamt that our colonial forbearers had spirited their gleaming axes across the Atlantic on a night as black as this, scattering them quietly, surreptitiously through the North Woods of Maine, of Michigan, the Yaak, the Olympic Peninsula, the California redwoods. I pull on my clothes and slip from the stone hut, where our group is sleeping, into a moonless Highland night, into starry darkness and a sharp wind no longer mollified by trees. I button my coat to my chin and wonder if a forested Highlands will ever return. And if it does, I wonder what will stop some forgetful future generation from repeating past mistakes.

Can we ever sustain the devotion, humility, and intelligence required to coax a forest from vacant ground-and then keep it there? Or will ours forever be a world with fewer trees than reasons to cut them down?

I hear no answers, just the low hiss of heather, like wind across some vast and vacant sea.

This essay was first published in the January/February 2000 issue of the Audubon Magazine in the USA.

Guy Hand's work has appeared in Audubon, Sierra, Orion, High Country News, and Northern Lights. He has also written and produced radio shows for National Public Radio's Living on Earth and The Infinite Mind. He wrote this article after participating in a Trees for Life Conservation Holiday.

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Published: October 2000
Last updated: 25 August 2010