In his list of tree grotesques given here two days ago - grey old men, knock-kneed, low-browed, misshapen, hunchbacked etc - mentioned by Francis Kilvert of a well-known forest, he didn't include a type of ancient that often puzzles those of us who are not expert woodlanders. That is, the obviously centuries-old wonder which appears in the best coffee-table books, and which, to the average reader looks like not one tree but about six or more trees together to form one. And in cases, you may be right. You are seeing the result of what experts term bundle-planting. It means what it says. Instead of placing one sapling of a foot or so into a hole in the ground, you put a bunch of them. A favourite number appears to be seven, or perhaps five, in the case of beech in particular, though three is not unknown. And sometimes there may be more than one species in the bundle.
Beech, says a landscaper friend, lends itself to this very well, for it has a thin bark and the treelets will meld easily. Now, why would you want to have a bundle of trees rather than one stately specimen on its own? One expert says that bundle planting of beech was formerly practised for landscape effect to gain large, wide-crowned trees much more quickly than trees from single planting said to be quite numerous around large country houses in Scotland.
A different reason for this practice is for greater production of mast - beechnuts or even acorns - in wooded pasture. Something that was a lot more important in the past than it is today. For pigs, wouldn't it be? And now they are incarcerated far from trees of any kind. Another source of a multi-stemmed tree could be the cache of nuts put down by, say, a squirrel and forgotten. It is said to happen quite often. And then these five-fold or seven-fold trees could come from human frailty; i.e. a woodsman or whoever, at the end of a back-breaking day with his quota not yet finished, might be tempted to give up the planting of a single tree in a single hole, and to push a handful in every time he opened the ground.
Some people who deliberately plant for multiple tree-trunks, put individual treelets in individual holes, but in a tight circle or oval. Before the trees are very high, they are converging. There is another method of producing multiple trunk trees - by coppicing. A subject that needs another day. All this from `Pollard and Veteran Tree Management', vol 2, of proceedings of a meeting held by London Corporation in 1993.