The end of the wood is starting to open up nicely. I finished moving the pile of sawn logs that's all that remains of one of the fallen multi-stemmed birch trunks. There's still a couple of days' work to go to get the other trunk out, but I think that in hindsight I was over-optimistic thinking that I could shift an entire tree in two days. Which is fair enough. Gardeners need a touch of over-optimism. If we were to take a totally realistic view of the weather, the soil, the time we had available to devote to our projects and our own physical and financial limitations, we would realise that the whole thing was quite impossible and never get anything done at all.
I trimmed the side branches off one of the two main stems of the holly that collapsed at some point during the great birch disaster, either hit by the birch as it fell or caught in a freak gust of wind. I just managed to reach to saw the last eight feet or so off, leaving me with the bare trunk, which I felled with the bow saw. It is sad at one level having to section and remove a fairly large young tree, and its loss has somewhat spoilt the dark tunnel of holly I'd been carefully pruning as the way through from the garden into the wood, but the removal is only temporary, since I'm sure it will shoot again from the base, probably with several stems. The second trunk defeated me, being critically too far above ground for me to be able to reach to take the weight out of the top of it. I'll need the Systems Administrator's help for that. I could get it down, but only by dropping it in an uncontrolled fashion on the snowdrops, and I'd rather it came out in pieces with someone there to catch them.
I took out a sagging branch from a coppiced hazel as well, and have been eyeing up a young birch that's been pushed over to such an extreme angle that it will never form a stable tree. It looks like a prime candidate for coppicing, and with any luck would grow back with several white trunks, very smart. I love birch trees, and half have my eye on an incredibly expensive and authoritative book on the genus, published by Kew, though I probably won't get it. I do feel that birches look more at home in a wood or country garden than suburbia, though. They are popular with garden designers for their fast growth that gives relatively fast maturity to a new garden, and their light canopies, but I always feel a little jolt of incongruity at the group of them I pass in a front garden in Dulwich on visits to the art gallery. It's entirely unreasonable of me, since a birch is no more odd or arbitrary a choice outside an Edwardian red brick villa than an Amelanchier or a cherry. But I still find them oddly out of place.
The brambles weren't as bad as they look at first sight. You have to admire the sheer efficiency of brambles, the way their long arching branches take root when they touch, soon forming a zig-zagging impenetrable thicket. The patches of them at the southern end of the wood had spread to cover quite an area, but many of the rooted tips hadn't really got their feet down, and pulled out without too much scrabbling around, while the older clumps hadn't yet grown the kind of solid rootballs that there's no shifting without a pick axe. I snipped the weaving stems into manageable lengths and hauled the roots out as I came to them, pulling up some of the ivy stems criss-crossing the ground as well for good measure.
When we first moved here the previous owners couldn't have touched the wood for years, and whole sections of it were completely lost under thickets of brambles, head high and taller. They were so smothering and tangled and jagged, with great dead stems thicker than my thumb whose hard brittle thorns were ready to snap themselves off in your flesh, and snaking growths reaching twenty feet and more into the holly and hazel trees, we needed safety visors while we tackled them. I assume the brambles made much of that growth after the 1987 storm when tree losses suddenly let more light in. They respond rapidly to light, and are never much of a bother in the darkest corners.
There are some big patches further up the wood where the wildlife trust did the bulk of their coppicing a few years ago, but they may have to wait until autumn since I'm not sure I'll have time to tackle them now. Resuming coppicing in neglected coppice is in theory good for wildlife and increasing biodiversity, but having seen the effects on our wood I think it has to be planned in conjunction with a realistic view of how much time will be available for subsequent maintenance. Under the reduced tree cover brambles and bracken spread faster than bluebells can. I got the impression the wildlife trust had some money available at the time for renewal coppicing which they were eager to use, but they should probably have followed it up with an annual site visit to see how the wood, and the owner, were doing.
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