We had a proper look around the garden and in the wood today, as the wind had dropped. Yesterday afternoon was still wild enough to put us off investigating potentially unsafe trees up close and personal. The willow that's collapsed along the back of the ditch is not as bad as I'd feared. The main weight of the trunk is lying along the line of the boundary, so it can let itself down further if it needs to over the coming months without any risk of it falling into the border. The side branches overhanging the bed need trimming back to let more light in, as does the hazel it has slid into, but we'll do that once the leaves are off. I wanted to reduce the hazel (or, more accurately, to persuade the Systems Administrator to reduce it) anyway, because that corner of the garden is getting too dark.
The birch in the wood has failed more dramatically than I realised yesterday. It was growing as a multi-stem, with two main trunks diverging at ground level. That's an unusual method of cultivation in woodland, although it has been in vogue among garden designers in recent years. One trunk was dying back before the storm, and when we had a couple of arborists in a couple of years ago to do some coppicing on behalf of the Essex Wildlife Trust, they took the dead top out of it while they were there, on safety grounds. Yesterday's storm, however, caused the base of the birch to split in two. The dying trunk has fallen one way, towards the garden, but the other half, that was looking reasonably healthy, has fallen backwards into the wood, and is rather precariously wedged against a younger birch and an alder. The root plate has split and lifted, and the tree is a goner.
It is both sad and not sad. It was a handsome tree, and supported a bracket fungus that an ecologist from the wildlife trust said was interesting, when he visited more than a decade ago. On the other hand, birch is not the longest lived species, and it had probably reached its natural span. It will provide an impressive amount of firewood, once we've worked out how to extract it, and its demise lets a useful amount of extra light into what had become an overly gloomy corner of the garden. So often I have read, in accounts of the great storm of 1987 and other tree-related catastrophes, that after the shock of losing a familiar landmark plant, one realises how dark the garden had got, and how the growing conditions will be improved by letting more light in.
Driving through Old Heath in Colchester this morning, I saw a wind thrown mature birch in a front garden resting on somebody's house. The root plate was huge, and Old Heath lived up to its name, as underneath was bright orange with sand. The tree looked healthy, and I suppose an unlucky, especially strong gust must have just caught it and bang, over it went. It's a tribute to the build quality of the house that it didn't go through the roof. Having a collapsed birch tree in a wood really seems quite a minor problem in comparison, though I'm afraid our's will do more damage as it comes the rest of the way down, which it must at some stage.
I had a terrible, heretical idea, as I looked at the amount of space opened up where the birch used to be. I said to the Systems Administrator that I'd had a wicked thought, to which the SA replied that I was thinking of planting non-native species. Got it in one. The gap is right next to the garden, and it is very tempting to have a magnolia or two. The soil is pretty wet, so I'd have to choose carefully, but I could just imagine looking out of the garden and over the rabbit fence, straight into the great goblet flowers of a magnolia.
The UK has a terribly limited native flora, compared to most other countries. This is down to our particular geological history, and yes, it is true that native plants tend to be the best for wildlife. However, as more and more plant diseases seem to arrive every year, I'm beginning to think that it wouldn't hurt to hedge our bets and plant a wider range of species, to increase the chances of something surviving in any given situation. Besides, I like magnolias.
No comments:
Post a Comment