Talking to the trees

A couple of months ago I repeated in my email newsletter the claim that my home town of Sheffield is the greenest city in Europe. Someone challenged me on it, so I’ve done some research.

I don't suppose anyone’s actually counted every one of the Sheffield trees, but it’s estimated that there are around 8 for every person living here. And that’s just trees in public spaces and doesn’t take into account those in private gardens. Sheffield has tree coverage of 18.4%, rising to 21.6% in the urban areas, compared with the national average of 10%. About a third of the City lies within the Peak District National Park, but the urban areas themselves are exceptionally green. 80 of Sheffield’s 180 woods are classified as ancient woodlands, meaning they have been continuously covered by trees since at least 1600, and some for hundreds of years before that.

In the nineteenth century, the Victorians created great public parks to provide access to nature for city dwellers. Norfolk Park, just over the road from where I live, was a gift from the 12th Duke of Norfolk, who owned the land, a former deer park. It opened to the public in 1848, and was one of the first parks in Britain to be free to the public. The 100 hectare Graves Park was another generous donation to the City, this time from Alderman J. G. Graves in the early part of the 20th century who bought and gifted the land to protect thousand-year-old woodland from building development. And when suburbs like Nether Edge were being laid out for Sheffield’s growing middle class from the 1850s, an urban forest of street trees was planted to bring the woods even further into the city and right into the places where people lived and worked.

The City's parks and woodlands are a huge recreational resource, but their role in the industrial revolution should not be ignored. They were a key ingredient in Sheffield’s transformation into a steel-making powerhouse by providing a source of charcoal which, along with fast rivers, coal and ironstone, was vital to iron smelting and therefore to the growth of the City.

Some readers will know about the tree-based disturbances that raged between 2016 and 2018. They came about because a huge multinational corporation which had contracts awarded by the City Council for highway maintenance wanted to remove 17,500 of them from the streets. This vandalism, which the Council seemed at first to be happy to tolerate, was resisted by local people who wanted to save the trees, and their resistance made headlines across the world.

My wife, Sally Featherstone, is an accomplished artist and for some time she’s been working on graphite drawings of outstanding trees. She won’t draw a tree that she hasn’t seen, so she takes multiple photographs of a candidate and then makes drawings in her studio. Among the giants she's drawn are the Old Man of Calke at Calke Abbey, the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, the Queen Elizabeth Oak in Cowdray Park, and the Great Gregynogg Oak in the grounds of Gregynogg Hall in Powys, Wales. She's yet to address a 450 year-old oak in Graves Park, but it's on her list. You can see more of her work on her own website, www.sallyfeatherstone/drawings.

(I'm indebted to The Tribune for some of the information in this blog, and for the two photographs)