Check out this story from today’s Guardian, highlighting the ongoing work of the London Tree Ring, a group of projects that engages young people, especially those with learning difficulties, in planting and looking after trees and small woodlands in their neighbourhoods close to the capital. These schemes benefit biodiversity and human communities – a match made in wood.
These are the sorts of projects that we at WftT like best: small-scale, local projects, working on very little funding and sustained by communities working on their own initiative…
… and did you know, talking of tree rings, that the first dendrochronology research laboratory was set up at the University of Arizona in 1937 by A.E Douglass – he built an amazing brass-cogs and sliding scale gizmo full of magnifying lenses – which I used to walk past in the 1980s when I studied there for a bit. Very few parts of the world have really complete ‘dendro sequences going back more than 10,000 years – the USA is one; the British Isles and Ireland another. So-called ‘floating’ tree ring sequences can be tied down to precise calendar dates using Miyake events: bursts of cosmic radiation that produce spikes in Carbon 14 in the atmosphere, which can be measured on tree rings.
One of my favourite achaeological sites is the now-excavated and reburied Sweet Track, a causeway built across the Somerset marshes by people harvesting locally-managed woodland and using stone tools. It was built in the Spring of 3807 BCE (it’s much older than Stonehenge) – and we know that through dendrochronology.