Historians often bring a different perspective to ideas of landscape ecology. Here the authors show how the dominance of just three trees in the English farmed landscape is not a result of ‘natural processes’, but a deliberate economic choice made over centuries.
For some conservation issues, it is useful to have an historical perspective in order to show how we arrived at a particular situation, and to provide some indication of where we should go from here. This is true especially of the current threats to our native tree populations coming from a range of new pests and diseases, and perhaps from climate change.