To keep the rabbits off, the new hedge plants get a bamboo cane to prop them up and over that gets popped the spiral tube.  And so the hedgling plant grows away. The tube is see through and the [...]]]> Now what is that?  I have not taken flight for Honeydukes  or gone Munchkin in the head.

To keep the rabbits off, the new hedge plants get a bamboo cane to prop them up and over that gets popped the spiral tube.  And so the hedgling plant grows away. The tube is see through and the young plant gets light and water and is invincible to browsing coney teeth.  Until it reaches the top of the tube.  From there it bushes out,  out of rabbit reach.   But that makes a hedge on legs that the rabbits can walk straight through.  A far cry from stock proof.

Enmeshing in wire makes the weeds difficult to get at.  Cutting the  plants back down to resprout makes for a wide and wandering hedge.  I am hunting for a cure for lollipop syndrome.

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And timed arrival to perfection to coincide with the one tonne machine that has come up from Mersea Island by trailer to grind our roots.  Paul and I [...]]]> The temperature has dropped and the rain has bucketed down.  The ground out there is very soggy.  Winter conditions have at last come to the east of England.

And timed arrival to perfection to coincide with the one tonne machine that has come up from Mersea Island by trailer to grind our roots.  Paul and I have talked a lot about his stumpbuster on the telephone and reduced it to vital statistics.  Photographs have pinged back and forth by email.  We have a 900mm  gap between us and the next house (if we take the gate right off and we have).   His machine is a millimetre or two less than that.  Will it fit through?

It does.  The sky is low and sleet storms come and go.  All day the teeth of the stumpgrinder churn, eating their way through stumps felled and left in the ground.   Chomping   away like an aardvark clawing the termite mound.

Why have we bothered?  Two good reasons. A large stump of a long gone cherry is wearing an amber necklace of Armillaria mellea (or a close cousin)  It is  better know as honey  fungus which feeds off dead stumps before sending root-like rhizomorphs through the ground to prey on living trees and shrubs.  And then there are a smattering of stumps just exactly where today’s fencers are to put in chain link fencing and dig it in.

Let the mud and sawdust bath begin.

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61 Cotoneaster franchetii were wrapped in a gossamer of clingfilm and waiting on the pallet.  These are for a customer who [...]]]> This is a follow-on from yesterday or the day before’s post on my blog.    It is not about buying plants from reputable nurseries that are well-known.  It is the bargain basement end of purchase.

61 Cotoneaster franchetii were wrapped in a gossamer of clingfilm and waiting on the pallet.  These are for a customer who wants a fairly instant hedge.  The plants were in 2 litre pots and height advertised was 60 to 90 cm.  Each plant cost round about £5.50.

Is this a good way to buy plants?  Well, the first hour of the day was spent in cutting out all the dead twiggy bit of the hedglings.  There were surprising quantities of stick deadery.

Yes, the plants were big which means that the customer and her caravanserai of dogs, lolloping great dane and racing whippets and a coming and going of many people to her busy back door will not walk through the new hedge but round it.  The secateurs were itching to cut back after planting.  Resisted.

About 10 percent of the plants either had signs of muntjac damage or had developed aerial roots, mangrove swamp style to cope with an erratic watering regime.  Every single plant was root bound.  The pots had to be cut off the plants which was a bore and doubled the planting time.  The tightly bound knot of roots were pushing out fresh white radicals, so I guess the plants were not objecting too much to subsisting in their pots.  I made a slight cut into the potted balls and fed them on bonemeal.

Would I buy from this wholesale company again?  I wonder.  The extra time involved in preparing the plants bumps up their cost by about 30%.  The free pallet that came with the job lot was the best thing about this order. And of course, smaller is better when it comes to planting hedges.

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Serried timber trees, broad trunked with fly agaric mushrooms poking through dead leaves.  Why is this the popular image  of a wood?  Should we blame Racey Helps or Beatrix Potter?  Apparently not.  According to  Oliver Rackham,  (the historian of the English countryside)  this woodland askew view is to be blamed on [...]]]>

not quite fly agaric

Serried timber trees, broad trunked with fly agaric mushrooms poking through dead leaves.  Why is this the popular image  of a wood?  Should we blame Racey Helps or Beatrix Potter?  Apparently not.  According to  Oliver Rackham,  (the historian of the English countryside)  this woodland askew view is to be blamed on the  “scientists and savants of the Enlightenment”.

And so to put things right in my own mind, at least, I took myself on a day out.    Yesterday I went out into the hazel wood with Angus.  Two woods in fact.  Both ancient and under proper conservation management.  Angus has taken them both on.

The first is owned by a foreign consortium who leave him to work the woods, apply for grants, liaise with the gamekeeper and pay for his time with the sale of firewood.  The second wood is on a farm nearby.  The farmer has turned over his acreage to conservation.  Ponds have been cleaned of bramble and bullrush, corners of fields returned to meadow and strips of crops to yield birdseed planted in 8 of the fields.  We walked up  and sent a flurry of buntings into the sky.

young hazel coppice regrowth

Old woods have been vigorously worked down the centuries  on a cycle of coppicing.  This means that deciduous species such as hazel, ash and the like are cut down every 15 to 20 years for firewood and hazel rods for thatching and hurdling.  They make an under storey under the big trees.  The latter, growing away to timber (house-building size) should only take up 20 percent of the allotted space and not drown out all the light from the underlings.  These underlings are close-planted to draw them skywards, yielding good straight stems.  The art of coppicing is simple:  fell the tree pretty much to ground level if it is a hazel.  Ash, equally common, is cut down to about 40 cms off the ground.  This leaves a hoary stump providing a habitat for insects and birds.

The cutting to the ground encourages strong regrowth from the basal stem of the tree called a “stool”.  In areas of old wood pasture with grazing cattle  ’pollarding’ was the preferred cut.  In other words, the trunk cut for the branches to regrow above browsing height.  Treated like this, the trees far out span the life of a standard.  Human interference regenerates. Deciduous woodland, felled in cycle to provide firewood and other coppice products is often ancient, with records going back to the 12th century and earlier.

new hazel stool

Such woods will have very large stools from previous felling  and quite often a ditch or bank which at the time of digging would have been a mighty earthwork de-marking land ownership.  One strong clue to age is the mix of flowers and ground carpeting perennials.  There is a matrix of flora that is confined to ancient woodland by lack of efficient means of seed  dispersal.  Plants like dogs mercury, wild garlic, oxlip, and cow wheat establish by clonal means very slowly.  Or seeds are moved about by ants and not very far.  The coppicing cycle opens up shafts of sunlight, warms dormant seeds.  Modern woodlands are just too shady.

brash to deter deer

A wood is divided into patches of roughly one acre, to be felled in turn year by year over the winter months.  Firewood is logged and stacked to season and dry out.  The brash (unwanted side stems and branches) is piled over the newly hewn stumps.  It is a way of fire-fighting deer damage.  Bambi is  number one public enemy.   New coppice growth is munched, bigger branches rubbed raw by antlers  and the carpet of woodland flowers browsed to extinction.  Deer numbers are on the up.  The richness of the wood is under attack, diminished.  Any means of keeping the mixed deer population (red, roe, fallow, muntjac and Chinese water deer) down has to be encouraged.

Angus works the woods in winter.  He is sensitive to their good and long term health.  Tractors have been banished for the damage to the soil from heavy tyres:   spraying wet mud sideways and creating bubbling pools of liquid clay.   The most remorseless quagmires have been filled with old logs and timber to level and dry out the land.  A learning curve for the gamekeeper who has had to take to walking through the woods.

In the drier summer months he weaves hurdles from split hazel rods.  Sometimes this is supplied by weaving a fencing line in situ.  He is also a master of the craft of laying a hedge.  This is where the main trunks of a grown out straggly old hedge are  practically severed towards the  bases and laid on their side.  New growth is stimulated the whole way up the trunk, encouraging bushiness and regeneration.   A stock-proof fence is remade by these means.  Working the landscape with the skills keeps it young and lively.  Perhaps Angus too.  He doesn’t seem to have aged in the 15 years since I first met him.

Is the  secret elixir to wield a chainsaw, kevlar-clad in the wet and dripping woodlands?    Perhaps not,  but he gave up a career he hated in industrial design and lives by thoughtful ground rules.  Topped up by a great deal of bicycling.   I had lost touch with him as he had moved house.  Tracking down a man with no mobile telephone, email or internet connection and no forwarding address could be tricky.  But I googled his name and up flashed a sheaf of champion cycling wins.

“You couldn’t pay a mortgage doing this work.”  He is lucky  that his partner has a regular salaried job, where he is reliant on wood sales.  ”I have got one other friend who does this for a living and he lives in a caravan”.

It looks to me like wood sales might go up steadily with oil price hikes and it would be cool to see this fantastic art of a job become a little more remunerative.

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They are not planted in memorial garden [...]]]> Almost but not quite.   The image has been looming on the desktop and housewifery has hit the computer screen.  Why are they there?  Simply because over and over again the simplicity of this planting strikes me as perfect.  Lovely it is that there is nothing other than birches.

They are not planted in memorial garden manner.  Instead they conjure the heath.  The planting budget has been kept down by steering clear of multi-stemmed specimens.  The trees, less than straight are close planted.  Under a metre between them.  And then they are uplit at night.  Standing like ghosts in front of the huge bulk of the turbine hall of Tate Modern in London.  Anyone visiting London should make a detour in winter to cross the glass bridge from St Pauls.  The bridge takes you slap bang into these trees.

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