in the wood

There was another thin flurry of snow this morning, just enough to delay work in the garden for an hour, but it barely settled in the wood and I was able to get back to the task of clearing the fallen birch.  By mid afternoon I'd almost finished shredding, and it was amazing how the whole top of a mature tree had compressed into no more than half a dozen smallish bags of woodchips, and a modest pile of branches no thicker than my arm.  The Systems Administrator is baffled at how birches don't seem to yield any intermediate sized logs at all, and the SA is right.  There's the trunk, which the arborists logged for us on site, and small branches and twigs, with virtually nothing in between.

I carried some more logs out of the wood, being careful where I trod to avoid the snowdrops.  It's a nice question whether to take them up to the house in small loads in the wheelbarrow, which means fewer trips but a long detour across the width of the back garden and back again, or whether to carry them individually up the dozen steps past the conservatory, saving a two hundred yard round trip.  I opted for the direct route, since the tree team had done as we asked and sectioned the trunks into pieces that were small enough to carry comfortably.  I'm sure that lugging lumps of wood up a flight of steps must be very good for toning all sorts of muscles.  Forget joining a gym or hiring a personal trainer, just get a couple of blokes to saw up a tree for you and then carry it around.

Some of the snowdrops are being smothered by the encroaching brambles, so as a change from shredding and humping wood about I started cutting them down and pulling them up.  The roots will generally rip out of the soil in a very satisfying way at this time of the year, when the ground is wet.   Brambles are adept at grabbing any light that's going, and are mainly a nuisance around the edges of the wood or where a tree has fallen or there's been coppicing.  I cleared most of them from the area just inside the wood where I've planted (shock, horror) some non-native shrubs, a witch hazel and a scented north American charmer called Oemleria cerasiformis.  The latter has begun to sucker nicely, not too much, and I think I could risk removing its protective ring of wire netting before it grows through it too much.  The witch hazel still looks rather small to be exposed to the full ravages of the rabbits and deer.

There is also a tree magnolia planted some time ago, one of those varieties that doesn't flower at a young age.  It is now getting to the size and age when I might expect flowers, and I am eager for the first bloom just to confirm that it is 'Charles Raffill'.  It should have huge, saucer shaped flowers, rose pink without and soft white within, and faintly scented.  It would be a shame to find I'd waited a decade for flowers that were small, dingy or otherwise unexciting.

A couple of Daphne bholua suckers I managed to detach from my original plant and pot on have taken nicely.  I'm pretty sure that the parent plant was on its own roots and not grafted, in which case they too will be 'Jacqueline Postill'.  They are not flowering this winter, but they are growing despite being rather over-run with brambles, and the leaves look healthy.  At one point last summer they looked very sad, as if something had been eating them.  An Amur vine planted last spring to replace a Vitis coignetiae which suddenly died just as it had made its way a worthwhile distance up a tree is probably alive, though it's difficult to tell at this time of year, but didn't make any extension growth last year.  The colour of a vine in autumn tumbling out of a tree is a glorious sight, and I decided to try substituting Vitis amurensis for V. coignetiae after reading that the former was happier on acid soil and coped better with damp.

The water table in the wood is always unstable, the latest change being that the area next to the fallen birch, which has been fairly dry for the past twenty years, has suddenly thrown up a boggy patch with two inches of mud.  I shall have to think carefully about what I plant in the space created by the collapse of the birch.