Thursday 13 October 2011

a walk in the woods

The music society is starting to look ahead to 2012-13 season, and the process of putting together a programme turns out to be fascinatingly Byzantine in its complexity.  There is a trio we would like to book, but the dates of their other tour bookings would push their visit to us into the first Sunday in Advent.  Churches have other things to do on that day than give their church over to a chamber music concert so that doesn't work.  There are a couple of interesting sounding string quartets, but we don't want the season to be completely dominated by strings.  One of them might be available with a clarinetist to make up a quintet, but if we were to have the quintet we wouldn't want another concert with a clarinet or oboe as well.  Young singers are apparently inherently unreliable, because if we have booked one for an evening for, say, £300, and they get the offer of five nights of opera work at, say,  £1000 a night for dates that clash with us, they have to have incredibly high principles (and a rather dense eye for the main chance career-wise) not to dump us in favour of the opera.  We can't have too many concerts requiring us to hire a piano, since that costs extra (although patrons do sometimes sponsor piano hire).  The branches of the decision tree soon spread into an incomprehensible tangle, and I have nothing but admiration for the person who goes away with notes of the committee's deliberations, and turns it into a programme.

Today I  drove my father to a Woodland Trust charity day for loyal supporters.  It was organised by their Legacies team, but to my relief the fundraising part was done with a light touch.  Monitoring and assessing the performance of staff employed to get legacy income for a charity must be tricky, as most of today's guests looked pretty healthy, even if not in the first flush of youth, and the lead time between making the pitch and discovering if you've won the jackpot must be quite long in many cases.  We met at a hotel outside Stowmarket, and were taken in a coach for a tour of one of their local woods.

This was Priestley Wood, which is an ancient wood, with a rich ground flora, SSSI status, and the remains of mediaeval wood banks still clearly visible.  We were shown around by the area manager for the Trust's sites in Suffolk and Norfolk.  He led us to something we were promised would be special, which turned out to be a medium sized tree with angular branches and dark, crazed bark.  This was a true wild pear, not an escaped garden pear tree, but a European native at the very northern edge of its range.  It is thought to be the only surviving one in Suffolk, and is considered by some experts to indicate that the area covered by Priestley Wood has been under continuous tree cover since the last ice age.  Somebody has apparently succeeded in taking cuttings from it, but wild pears are on a long-term losing streak.  They used to be much more common in Saxon times.

The other piece of forestry information which amused me was that many of the standard oak trees in the wood are thought to have been planted, rather than having sprung from natural regeneration, and were probably grown from stock taken from the Low Countries, which produced better timber for local purposes than the native trees.  Given that the local versus foreign provenance debate assumes almost religious dimensions at times, locally collected seed being assumed to be superior because it will produce individuals suited to the local conditions, I think it is really rather funny if some of the 'local' trees were grown from Dutch acorns.  (The League of Gentleman completely hijacked the word 'local' anyway, so that I can't help placing it in mental inverted commas whenever I hear it).

For anyone who is not deeply into woodland management, 'standard' trees in this context means trees that have been allowed to grow up to their full height.  Looking like a normal tree, in fact.  Many of the trees in Priestley Wood are coppice, which are regularly cut down and regrow as multi-stemmed plants, to be harvested again and again.  Priestley Wood is in active management with plenty of coppice work going on, thanks to volunteers.  The wood they harvest is allowed to season for a year and sold for firewood.  Nowadays they leave the piles of logs in the wood, well away from the road, until they are ready to sell them, since a couple of years ago they had several hundred pounds worth stolen.  With the rise in the cost of heating oil and the growth in popularity of wood burning stoves, the price of firewood has shot up, and if you leave it lying around it is liable to get lifted.

There are doormice too.  They had died out in that wood, and were reintroduced a dozen years ago in co-operation with the Suffolk Wildlife Trust.  Since then the population has sustained itself.  Muntjac are less welcome, and nowadays owners of the local woods manage them.  'Manage' in this context decodes as shoot, following a survey of their numbers and the extent of grazing damage.  Some of our party did see a muntjac faun lying among the undergrowth.  I didn't go and have a look myself.  I'm sure it was very cute, but in my book they are garden pests and tree murderers.

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