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.

coppice work completed

Today the arboriculturalists came to coppice a few of the alder trees.  They have made a very neat job of it, and stacked the fallen timber in piles.  We'll have that out soon and saw it into bits small enough to go on the fire, and it can season over the summer.  Unless you have a felling licence you can't cut more than five cubic metres per quarter.  The rules are slightly different for coppice, which left the arboriculturalist and the wildlife trust officer scratching their heads on their previous visit over how you treat grown-out coppice.  Two men came to do the work, and as I listened to the sound of two chain saws working simultaneously I thought it had odd musical possibilities.  It's a dangerous career, tree work, especially climbing.

Yesterday I planted some hazel behind the hawthorn in the spinney, cursing slightly that I'd bought them bare root and was now commited to planting them when the wind was biting and I had a cold.  I could have heeled them into the veg patch, but then they would sit there reproaching me, and it's getting late to plant bare root anyway so they really had to go into their final positions.  They were bushy plants and I fixed a length of galvanised netting round each one.  The previous hawthorn planting was still intact in its spiral guards, not yet eaten or dug up by rabbits.  I found a couple of fresh shot gun cartridges in the spinney, which I removed.  We give the local farm shoot effective carte blanche over the spinney and the wood, which is only fair when our land is acting as a rabbit reservoir for their field.  They are under strict instructions not to shoot us, or the cats.

managing for wildlife

Our little wood was designated a site of wildlife interest last year.  The consultants who surveyed the area identified it as a possible doormice corridor.  I'm slightly bemused by this, not least because nobody asked us if they could come and do a doormouse survey, but it is a good little bit of woodland with a lot of wildlife and some moderately rare ground flora including opposite leaved golden saxifrage.  If there are doormice as well so much the better.  The Essex Wildlife Trust is keen that we sign up to manage it for wildlife, and drew up a management plan for us.  Today I actually implemented part of the plan by planting some hawthorn bare root whips in a gappy bit of hedge the wildlife officer had pointed out.  I put rabbit guards on them too, otherwise they wouldn't last the week.  I suspect that this bit of hedge may be struggling because it is under the canopy of a large oak, looking at it again, and I might get a few hazel whips to plant behind the hedge line as well.

Part of the wood was originally managed as coppice, and the largest stools are up to 1.8m diamater, which makes them pretty old.  They haven't been cut for decades, and we've agreed to let the wildlife trust's contractor cut some of them to let more light in and start introducing a more mixed age structure.  Part of me worries that once wind gets into the wood it could topple the remaining trees, but without coppicing they are one by one falling over anyway.  We went around with the wildife trust officer and the contractor last week, marking the trees to come down with a pot of left over red acrylic paint.  By the time we'd finished we'd got paint on the contractor's waterproof jacket, the kitchen towel and the cat.  The wildlife officer thought he might have a spare owl box about the place he could let us have.  There are lots of tawnies but it would be wonderful to have barn owls, and it wouldn't be a bad site for them, with quite a lot of rough grass on the neighbouring farms and about as far from a dual carriageway as you can get around here.  According to The Barn Owl Trust collisions with fast moving traffic is one of the leading causes of death in barn owls.  Of course we could build our own box, but that might not happen any time soon, what with the great decking project and everything.