By Alasdair Crosby
Xanthe Hamilton
THIS is a story about death and the afterlife of trees in Jersey.
A couple of days after Storm Ciaran had done its worst in early November 2023, there was an opportunity to see how the countryside had fared; it did not look happy. Not so much bruised and battered; rather, the ravished victim of a violent rape by a brutal and devastating tempest. Tree trunks that should have proudly borne aloft a canopy of green, now ended with a raw and jagged stump, with their upper parts collapsed and trailing on the ground.
Ciaran is history, but recently we have had Storm Darrach, in which trees also fell and inevitably there will other storms in the future. Of course, trees are also felled intentionally through human agency, rightly or wrongly.
Xanthe Hamilton has founded the Racc’moder business enterprise to utilise fallen timber for local use. She said: ‘I just felt it would be such a shame, if all these amazing trees, that had taken many decades – if not centuries – to grow, were just cut up for firewood.’
And Racc’moder means…? ‘It is a Jèrriais word, which means to remodel, make new, repair, revitalise, or regenerate. I love this word, because I don’t think we do this enough. We just throw away and buy new. Racc’moder stems from a time of making do and mending. For example, in some old Jersey houses, the beams would have been made from shipping masts.
‘I was excited by this word, anyway, and I was thinking we could bring this word alive, by tackling old buildings and renovating them as a cooperative.
‘You can racc’moder anything, really. You can racc’moder your soul, or your health, or your relationships, or a country, such as Syria at the moment, can racc’moder its society. I love the fact that the word is uniquely Jersey.’
The best thing to do with a fallen tree is to leave it in situ. It moulds down, and eventually disintegrates, and that process is good for biodiversity. Nevertheless, it can be messy and ugly, so if it is going to be cleared, the best thing is to use the wood for a useful purpose, rather than just letting it be used for firewood.
Xanthe said: ‘To begin with, I was not too interested in wood. But I am interested in doing things that haven’t been done before, and I have an interest in environmental innovation. Yes, there are other people milling fallen trees, but I just want it to be the default reaction that when you lose a tree, you mill the timber and it goes into the local supply chain.
‘That certainly make sense, especially with the price of timber and the cost of importing. Otherwise, you don’t know where the timber has come from, it might not be ethically sourced… it’s imported in shiploads every day, but there is no reason why we couldn’t be supplying our own.
‘There is this mentality that a fallen tree is only really good for firewood, which is a real shame.
‘I am trying make an opportunity out of a disaster. Storm Ciaran was a disaster, so how do you create something positive out of that? And, speaking more broadly, how can we respond, as an Island, to disasters? Because storms are going to keep coming. We should be agile, as a small place — and a small island can be more agile than a larger place.’
At La Collette, were literally hundreds of tons of waste timber, and Xanthe was told to come and take what she wanted. She arranged to pick up 90 tons of it and this was moved it to a field in St John.
The key piece of the missing infrastructure of Racc’moder was a wood mill. She went to Dorset and Devon to look at different wood milling and timber innovation locations, and she was recommended not to hire a wood mill in England to be sent to Jersey, but to buy one, and a wood miller would come over and train local people how to use it.
So, they managed to buy a mill, and training was arranged for Racc’moder’s employed carpenter, Dan Davies, to use it. Since then they have been practising, converting timber to floorboards, beams, and big slabs for counters, just to see what they can do with the raw product at their disposal.
Drying timber so it can be used for furniture or fittings is a slow process – one inch of tree trunk, measured inwards from its outer circumference, can be dried in one year through air drying, but that fits quite well with major development projects, which are planned for around two years before building starts. Also, drying wood in a kiln accelerates the process.
About 40 trees have been milled so far so far. There is not enough staff really, both to operate the mill and to convert the timber into items for domestic use or for the local building industry – Racc’moder is still a new enterprise.
‘What I was excited about, said Xanthe, ‘was that we had all this storm timber and we could do something quite radical with it. But then, I thought: we really could do with some big building projects, because it would be so nice to commission an architect to design 10 affordable houses and use as much storm timber as possible.
‘The wood doesn’t have to be structural timber; it could be kitchen worktops, or flooring, doors, bannisters, doorknobs… I thought: wouldn’t that be a wonderful project? So I set about setting up the Community Land Trust. We are looking at three different sites that could be community hubs or cultural centres, and for which we could use as much fallen timber as possible. This could be an even more ambitious outcome.’
The Association of Jersey Architects has engaged with this project, and has part funded the cost of the mill. ‘I am being asked all the time for quotes; architects want to do an experiment with cladding.’
She hopes to hire out the mill, to make milling more accessible as well. It can be hitched to a car and taken anywhere.
‘There has been a real sense of people wanting to see Racc’moder happen. The material we use is very tactile and very natural – and I prefer handling it to handling the synthetic surface of my computer keyboard!
‘A lot of people are attached to trees, so it has been quite easy to get support and commissions, because people love and want the story. Waste wood has a special meaning for them. People want it – it’s not a hard sell! And we shall always have a supply of raw material, at no cost. People just want it off their land!’
Xanthe has started to get commissions for utilising the wood. Benches made from fallen evergreen oak have been made into benches, which will be placed near the Hillgrove Street entrance to the Market. There will be a QR code visible on the bench which will tell their story of death and life. More benches are being commissioned for the Airport. Also, she has just received news that her business has been successful in obtaining a grant from the Sustainable Economic Development Department to renovate a small shop within the Market that has been empty for some time, and which will become the showcase headquarters for Racc’moder as well as a miniature arts venue. It is due to open next spring.
Readers may remember Xanthe’s name with the Branchage Festival, of which she was the driving force, working from a London office in Bethnal Green, and, in her words ‘fusing Jersey and London cultural life’. She has now returned to live in the Island where she grew up.
The Community Land Trust that she has been instrumental in founding, is a not-for-profit organisation that is run by the community to deliver building projects, such as affordable housing, a cultural venue, a farm – the ownership is with the community and they make the decisions, with the community acting as a developer.
‘It is run by a board of directors, but it is all about people doing their own “regeneration” of community life. You can get really good results when people do that, because they are super passionate about what they are going to deliver.
‘It’s not about the bottom line, it’s about how great we can make this for our community.’
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post, and is reprinted with their kind permission
