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As I write, storm Eunice is raging. The sheep have found the stillest place on the slopes beneath us, but the house is shuddering and I am trying not to look at the garden as it is hurled this way and that. At the hamamelis in its prime and the long-awaited wintersweet, which is flowering well for the first time this year, but with such unfortunate timing.
Though we are just one hillside away from the Bristol Channel and would never say that our conditions are as extreme as coastal exposure, there is more often than not a breeze blowing through the valley that has a taste of the sea in it. The decision not to plant out the views to provide more shelter means that the garden has to flex with the openness and what comes with it and the shrubby willows help with this pliable backbone.
I originally grew the willows as a trial in the very first year we arrived here. They were planted in a row on the front line of a rectangle we had cut from the field in which to garden. They grew fast and provided a buffer and a little shade and, of the ten or so I tested, there were at least half a dozen that felt right here. Right for being easy on our retentive ground, but also for sitting so well in the landscape and not competing with the backdrop of the crack willow (Salix x fragilis) that stands alone in the ditch.
Though I have grown them before, the rusty-red flare of Salix alba ‘Chermesina’ would have been too demanding here in winter when we like to enjoy the pared back tones of the landscape. The willows that worked here have been muted in tone with silvery stems that rise easily from winter grassland or the darkness of moody purples that you have to find or wait for the right winter light to strike them. Salix daphnoides ‘Aglaia’ (main image) with mahogany-red wood and silver catkin and the grey-leaved Salix candida that provides a little lightness on the edge of the wood work both in winter and the summer.
I used three shrubby willows in the garden and stepped them out to draw the garden into landscape. Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ sits close to the house and is perhaps the most ornamental, with laurel-green stems and coal black catkins that just this week have shed their protective sheaths. In a fortnight or so on a bright day you will see they have pushed a flurry of red anthers that are tipped with gold pollen. This is a neat shrub that I am gently tipping into shape rather than stooling as I do some of the others for their stems. It sits in one of the most exposed places here on the edge of the drive where the rubble cannot make living easy. In its shadows I have interplanted lime green Helleborus foetidus and selected primroses where they sometimes seed a pinky-mauve.
Further down the garden, at the threshold to the gate into the field, I have grouped the straight species, Salix gracilistyla, which is as light as its cousin is charcoal. This plant has sage green leaves rather than lime green and grey stems which catkin early in a conspicuous shimmer of silver. The pussies are made better for being backlit by morning light and when the weather warms and the catkins push their pollen, they will be alive with early bees. I cut these willows back as you might a buddleia, to a framework of stems after they have dropped their catkins so that they retain some structure on the edge of the garden. They are underplanted with azure blue pulmonarias for now and pale wood aster for the autumn.
A selected form of our purple osier, Salix purpurea ‘Nancy Saunders’ is the plant that bridges the garden and the wet ditch that runs down to the stream at the bottom. This willow is fine in all its parts with wire thin growth and grey-green leaves that are wider than needles, but not by much. The wind is good in their limbs whenever it blows, they animate how it moves over the course of a day – or in a storm. Late into full catkin in about three week’s time, they produce shoals of tiny grey pussies that throw a ephemeral grey cast over the bushes. I coppice these plants hard on a three-year rotation in the garden, but leave the shrubs standing in the ditch where they form rangy shrubs that start to lean after about six years. They are as happy in the wet soil there as they are on the exposed slopes higher up in the garden.
The first of all to catkin is Salix purpurea ‘Howkii’ which I have planted with S. irrorata on the banks near the Cornus mas. The two are good together, one being as many-limbed and catkinned as the other is sparse, each moving differently one against the other. We are lucky to have the room to stand back and let them do what they are good at here and they are remarkably easy. A rod or wand of growth as long as a walking stick, pushed into the soil in winter will send out roots. For the first year we keep the grass away from them and then they can stand their own with the willowherb and the meadowsweet and a storm or two to keep them company.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 February 2022
Cultivated in England since the early part of the 16th century, the black mulberry is a tree that has a timeless quality. A ruggedness that speaks of previous custodians, of care and cultivation and lives lived around it. A mature tree, squat and always rounded, shows the decades in its fissured bark and the mosses and lichens that find a home there on twisting limbs. Limbs that often reach to the ground under their own weight and lean on elbows to root where they have rested. If you step inside the cradle of branches you find a leafy world within, the lush foliage hiding bloody fruits, like sharp, juicy loganberries, that stain your hands and mark your appetite in August.
As Morus nigra have been widely cultivated for so long, it is not known from where exactly they originated. Mesopotamia and Persia are listed when you try to understand their requirements and, though vague, this does explain their desire for a warm position and their preference for southern England. As temperatures warm their range will surely extend slowly north so they may well become more widespread as vineyards move up the country. They are often grown in association in Persia since the conditions vines favour are typical of their preferred habitat. Warm slopes and free drainage. Somewhere that basks in sunshine.
Morus nigra was mistakenly introduced into this country in the belief that it was the fodder for silkworms. The white mulberry (Morus alba) – the real food crop of the silkworm and a bigger tree – has inferior fruit and less charisma in a garden. However, you will often be sold it as a substitute since they are more easily grown in the field. Black mulberries are rarely sold as large plants and are most often containerised and supplied as feathered maidens of not more than 1.5m. That said, they are not as slow as you might imagine and begin to show character remarkably early in life.
Our mulberry was one of the first trees I planted in our first winter here in 2011. Though I only had the garden in my mind’s eye at that point, I placed a young maiden in the rectangle the farmer before us had carved out of the field to grow his brassicas. Now that I know the land better and the winds that race down the valley, I see why he had put his only growing patch just here. It has the hedge behind it and the shelter of the house not so far away. Despite the fact that there were no trees here initially, I instinctively knew that a mulberry would be my gateway tree to the garden that one day would follow. A tree that would eventually hug the hill and make this place into a garden as it matured and brought with it that certain gravity.
Planting trees early in a project is a rewarding milestone with time mapped in new branches. My youngster, with all its promise, sat amongst the rotations of our temporary vegetable and perennial trial garden for the following five years. Every year gathering a little more strength and presence and slowly making us work further around it to ensure its well-being. By the time I finally made the garden in the summer of 2016, it was already the deciding factor for where the paths would sit to either side. One grass path to the rear and the other – the primary route into the garden – on the sunny side. Ten years in, and with the garden now grown around it, the tree has already formed its own microclimate, a pool of shade beneath, where pulmonarias and snowdrops trigger spring and a place on the grassy walk behind where the grass is cool and shady on a summer’s day. Together with the medlar which is planted nearby, it already gives this young garden a feeling of age and establishment.
Though in time I know my tree will become idiosyncratic, with limbs and character that I could never plan for, I like to set a young tree in the right direction with formative pruning to establish a good framework. In the case of the mulberry, the structuring of the tree is also to keep it open with free air movement, because in the last couple of years we have slowly seen mulberry leaf spot wither the lush foliage in high summer.
Leaf spot, a fungal infection caused by either Cercospora moricola or Phloeospora maculans, is quite common on mulberries. It is noted that the fungus is most prevalent in wet conditions, and recent outbreaks in Turkish orchards have followed mild, wet winters, so we avoid watering near the tree on the rare occasions I put out the oscillator. This year we also applied a neem oil spray every fortnight as soon as the tree broke bud, which had a noticeably positive impact. Of course, come a busy August, there wasn’t time to be consistent, and so spraying stopped, but the tree has done better for it, only showing signs of infection again in September. We have cleared the fallen foliage to remove the spores that fall with the foliage and hope as time goes on that it will be only be a problem in wet summers.
Mulberries bleed to their detriment if you prune in the second half of the winter, so I do this in late autumn as the leaves drop and the sap is being drawn back. It is an easy and meditative process and I remove a small amount only, to thin the limbs and not trigger sappy regrowth. The time spent with the tree allows me the opportunity to imagine the branches reaching out and over the paths one day. An easy reach for a luscious berry as we enter and exit the garden and take pleasure in the knowledge that with time this tree will only get better.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 27 November 2021
Eleven years ago in this last weekend of October we arrived here on the hillside. It was a different place then. The house was damp, with a pink 1980’s bathroom, vinyl floral wallpaper and swirly carpets that hid a whole ecology of rot. It was a farmer’s house, so there were enough practical comforts. An old oil range, so we were warm once it was up and running and uPVC windows which kept out the weather, so we were happy. The house would be fine for a while, the real reason we were here lay beyond its walls and the land beckoned.
Grazed to the buildings by beef cattle, the trees had been cut back hard and the broken hedges were neatly flailed so as not to shade the grass. There were no concessions to anything but utility, but the views rolled on splendidly and without interruption. With the prospect also came exposure and, though we have become used to it now, when the wind blew that first winter, we woke to the house shuddering as if we were on the prow of a ship.
I knew immediately it would be wrong to plant out the view to provide shelter, but alongside the dream of finding this place came the long-term ambition to plant my own orchard. By the time the leaves were off the trees in the hedgerows, it was clear where it might be. Hunkered into the hill beyond the barns and stepping down the slopes in three parts to frame the landscape. I planted that first winter; a plum orchard on the higher ground where the earliest flowering trees would be least likely to catch the frost, West Country apples further down the slope and a group of pears to the west of the barns, where they would bask in sunshine and be afforded shelter from the easterlies.
The old adage goes, “You plant a pear for your grandchildren” and I’m pleased we moved quickly to get the trees in. A decade on and it is interesting to see what we have not had to wait that long to have learned. The pears that have done well in their huddle of shelter have grown into fine young trees, but their fruit is erratic, one year off and maybe another year on. On the fruiting years their habit of dropping all in one go over the course of a week when they are ripe has also proved problematic. The windfalls bruise and ripening is inconsistent in the branches, though the fruit still drops.
The pear trees we trained as espaliers on the south-facing walls of the kitchen garden have proven their worthiness in half the time. A half day applied training the limbs into position in combination with a late summer prune has given us reliable yields and an orderly backdrop. Pears that are ‘on display’ as it were and hanging neatly along branches to bask in sunshine also make better fruit. The fruit is restricted in number by the management of limbs where an unmanaged tree will, more often than not, be burdened with the flux of feast or famine. This year, we had a week of frost when the pears were flowering in April which saw all the blossom in the orchard trees lost, but we were able to fleece the trees on the protected walls.
We have four varieties, starting with ‘Beth’ in early August and they neatly hand over one to the other, ‘Beurré Hardy’, ‘Williams’ and the last and the best of them all, the delectable ‘Doyenné du Comice’. Doyenné (meaning ‘flavoured one’) was a mark of distinction when the first pear bearing the name, ‘Doyenné Blanc’ emerged in 1652. Several were to follow, but ‘Doyenné du Comice’ (1852) or the Comice Pear has been the most enduring. And with good reason, for the pear is of superlative flavour. In Joan Morgan’s excellent ‘The Book of Pears; The Definitive History and Guide to over 500 varieties’, she describes them thus: ‘Handsome, generous appearance with rich, luscious, very buttery, exquisitely textured, juicy pale cream flesh; sugary sweet yet intense lemony undertones, developing hints of vanilla and almonds’.
Of the four varieties on the kitchen garden wall ‘Doyenné du Comice’ is the lightest cropper, a four-tier cordon produces 15 to 20 fruit a year. You might think this would be enough, but they are so very good that, to mark our marriage five years ago, we planted two more cordons on the front of the house, where each new set of limbs marks time and increases our harvest.
During the last couple of weeks we have been watching keenly, but the last week of October, our moving-in week, seems to be the perfect time to harvest. Pears should be picked and ripened inside on a cool shelf for the best results. Cup the fruit gently in your hand, lift and gently twist a quarter turn. The stalk yields to the turn when it is ready and the fruit can be left in-situ if not. Make sure to check daily, because a fallen fruit will be nibbled and ruined overnight by mice. They also know of their charms, but do not wait for the fruit to fully ripen.
Jane Grigson writes beautifully about pears and, most notably that ‘the old legend that towards the end it may be necessary to get up at 3 a.m. to find absolute perfection is not a great exaggeration.’ Test for ripeness by applying gentle pressure at the neck with your thumb. If it is hard still, be patient, but as soon as the flesh begins to give, the fruit should be eaten, preferably with the skin so that the melt has some structure as contrast. Either alone or with cheese, a fine combination. A perfect fruit will be as good as a warm fig picked fresh off the tree in Greece. A delectable reward with the sun and summer goodness melting in your mouth as we slide into the dark weeks ahead.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 30 October 2021
The poplars are the litmus. Standing tall and forming our backdrop, grey in all their parts and also in name, their ghostly stillness will let us know that spring is here when suddenly one day their catkins are caught by new light. That early, the wild garlic at their feet has already emerged to carpet the ground, shiny and lush and rushing whilst the wood is still open. Then, as spring gathers pace and the understory of hawthorn becomes green, the trees above assume their next chapter.
The last week of April this year is the moment you wish you could stall, the buds on the poplars breaking open in unison to shower the trees and once again define the extent of the of their canopies. You have to stop. Against a thunderous April sky, it is almost impossible to describe the colour, a mat aluminium. Chalky and luminous. Caught in the low evening light and with breeze in their limbs this backdrop is mercurial. Plumes of silvery ink dropped into water, shoals of fish; the mind tries to grapple for an image to describe the moment.
The truth is, the poplars are just doing their thing, at scale and in unison and marking a particular shift that we know now will take us rapidly through into early summer. One day the silveriness is sage-green and the leaves fill to tremble and hiss on the wind. With the unfurling, the now-flowering garlic is plunged into shadow, the bright white briefly brilliant, the wood smelling never more strongly as the understorey runs to seed.
The Grey Poplar, Populus x canescens, is a naturally occurring hybrid between the White Poplar, P. alba and the Aspen, P. tremula. The silver in the leaf from one parent and the flattened petiole from the other which allows the leaf to tremble and means that the poplars are rarely still in summer. Soaring with hybrid vigour to 30 metres they are loftier than either parent. They sucker up the hill and out into the light of the slopes to the other side and to date have not crossed the stream in their reach to conquer new ground. Living fast and outreaching themselves they do come crashing down, usually in full leaf and after an August rain. Once at night and just to the side of a camping party we were having on the bottom field by the stream. Everyone slept through it and came out unscathed. Another time one fell to take out the power lines which cracked and whipped like a snake in a snare.
In the time we have been here there have now been three that have fallen. After they have been limbed for firewood, we have left the trunks as makeshift walk-the-plank bridges. A wild bee colony has taken up residence in the “party tree’, the first to topple ten years ago. We are pleased not to have been too hasty to clear and to tidy completely and it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the bridges collapse under their own weight and decomposition. Poplar wood, traditionally used for panelling rooms and for workshop floors, absorbs both the sound and the blow of a tool to protect it from breaking if it is dropped. It is a soft wood and as it burns hot and fast when it is dry, it is also used for matches. Maybe the bees have already found the fault in the trunk that will bring the first of the bridges down.
At altogether another scale and entirely more manageable, I planted the whitebeam, or what I believed to be whitebeam in the blossom wood to take the silver up onto our side. Sorbus aria also has a delectable moment which is no more than a week of awakening. The leaf buds light the tree silver before it dims to a pleasantly grey-green. Unbeknownst to me the whips I was supplied with were the Swedish Whitebeam, Sorbus x intermedia. A wonderful tree for a seaside setting or an exposed site, but here it is already being left behind as the Geans and the faster growing trees in the blossom wood outstrip it. No matter. We will enjoy the mistake whilst it lasts as we do the awakening of the poplars when they are in their moment.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 1 May 2021
It’s my birthday so today I will be brief. There is a springtime out there to be part of. A moment of guaranteed awakening, coming to life and indecisive weather.
I know this time well. In observations that are marked by fresh growth. Snakeshead fritillaries chequered in shiny new grass, celandines blinking open in sunshine and the gold of marsh marigolds illuminating the wet hollows. The blossom trees billowing. Plums in full sail, pears just breaking and the cherries lighting up the still grey woodland.
The Sweet Cherry, or Gean or Mazzard (and Massard) is a tree I have a long relationship with. First encountered in my childhood home, where they had outstripped a long-forgotten garden and towered thirty meters high. We would hug their dark, rough and peeling trunks which by that time were seventy years old and leaning rakishly in their last chapter. The dark limbs and roots running widely over the surface and the light above as the flowering branches flushed palest pink bud and then white against often grey skies. They were the first trees to come crashing down as we cleared the garden, our family spending weekends making inroads into the undergrowth. It was as if they sensed the end of an era and they leant down gently in the night. One first, then another following, without a sound or associated drama.
We have them here as a borrowed view down the valley, youthful trees pushing up though the alder woods which line the stream and provide the cherry blossom with a dusky undercurrent of bruised purple. I planted them in the Blossom Wood in our first winter here. Young whips, navel high and easily identified for their richly red bark and promising buds. Living fast and not for much longer than eighty years, they make a quick presence. Growing vigorously up and forming a pyramid of limbs that make their own space before racing skyward to claim an early loftiness in a young wood. Though the double form Prunus avium ‘Plena’ lasts a whole week longer in bloom, the Gean is brief, but no briefer than the plums. A fortnight of expectation as the buds swell and give way to a week or ten days in a cool April.
Following on in early summer, the fruits, held in drupes and often pairs, ripen early. A dark, rich red and tart enough for you to make the mistake of thinking another day will make them sweeter. The birds will get there first if you do and it is the birds that distribute them and give the tree its specific name, Prunus avium. An April wonder.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 10 April 2021
At the bottom of our hill, where the stream runs along our boundary, everything changes. The stillness there is a constant, even on the days when we descend the slopes to escape being buffeted on the higher ground. Although it now stands tall, the wood that runs our neighbour’s boundary is not so old. Glad, who lives just behind us remembers being able to see the slopes on the other side when she was a girl, eighty or so years ago but you can see signs of ancient woodland in spring mapped in colonies of wood anemone, bluebell and, in one place, herb Paris in the places where it must have stood for longer.
It is interesting to imagine the push and pull that must have happened over the decades with the management of the wood and the open ground respectively. When we moved here ten years ago this very weekend, the land that runs down to meet the stream had been grazed hard and the ankle twisting ruts that the cattle had made in the clay ran up to a twist of barbed wire that hugged the stream edge. The battle the farmer had made with the wood to keep it back was traced in bluntly severed limbs and an ongoing tussle with the brambles that were leaping from the wood across the water. We made the removal of the wire and the encroaching brambles our first winter job, so that we could see the lie of the land and the path the stream had cut in the valley.
The following summer I fenced off the lower slopes of the Tump, tracing the line where the farmer dared go no further down the slope to cut the hay. The plan was to bring the wood back over the stream to our side in a swathe of trees for coppicing on an eight to ten year rotation for firewood. The young saplings were planted over four winters. Hazel made the foundation and the majority, whilst small leaved lime, sweet chestnut and hornbeam were added to ascend above the hazel for shade. Managed on a slower cycle of twenty years, the tall trees in the mix will make fencing poles and wood for the burner. The first hazel should be ready when I am about sixty and the larger subjects should be mature enough for their first cycle of copping when we are pushing seventy. A good incentive to stay nimble, but in the meantime a joy in the coming together of this new environment.
Seven or so years in and we are beginning to see the changes. The tussocky sedges that told us this was heavy, wet ground are slowly being shaded out, the advance of the wild garlic has begun stepping out from the small groups on the stream banks and the roosts and runs of the animals that live here are already in evidence.
I took time to look at the established wood to see which trees did best immediately beside the stream because without tree roots to hold the banks, we were vulnerable to erosion on our side. It is only where we have occasional alder that their thickly matted roots hold the stream banks sufficiently to bind them. The alder, however, are not shade tolerant and as streamside trees they would ultimately not be ideal in the coppice. The shade tolerant hazel do not have a root system that holds the stream banks, but looking at my neighbours mature hornbeam, it was clear that they were both good in shadow and also in holding the banks. Where they sit by the stream it moves around them and in the spring you can see the influence where the garlic laps up to their root plate to leave mossy circle free.
The fibrous roots of hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) can be hungry in a garden and you can see that alongside a hedge where company grows less easily, but for the streamside they are ideal. So this is where the majority have been planted and they have shown their tolerance of the thick heavy clay here too, throwing sturdy growth and showing that they have taken to their position.
I was brought up with the ancient hornbeam coppice that grow on the downland where I spent my childhood. Some of the old stands were hundreds of years old, the timber the fuel for smelting iron and making charcoal. Known locally as ‘bluntsaw’, for the wood is one of our hardest and consequently hottest burning, hornbeam has also been used for making yokes for oxen and clock parts for its strength and ability to withstand wear.
Currently, in this last couple of weeks of autumn, the hornbeams are flaring yellow so that you can see exactly where they are in the wood. As young trees in winter and cut to retain juvenile growth as hedging material, hornbeam retain their foliage. Russet brown and rustling nicely in wind, they provide fine protection for winter birds. Holding onto their seed late, they are hung with the papery bracts for some time yet before the windborne seed is liberated or eaten by the birds before it has a chance to spiral down. As hornbeam mature their trunks develop a smooth and undulating musculature which makes a coppiced tree all the better for winter interest in the wood. Spring is heralded in pretty catkins that festoon the branches with countless creamy verticals. April foliage is the brightest of greens and in summer the pleated leaves are host to a wide range of moths that use them as their food source.
Though in summer the canopy casts a dense shade, the elderly branches reach widely and elegantly and hold their own and very particular place in the wood. A hornbeam can live to three hundred years or longer if it is coppiced. They wear their age well so it is good when we see such progress to ponder the lives of our youngsters. Happy here it seems and making the place their own.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 31 October 2020
The Cornelian cherry have been expectant for the better part of January. Round buds plump and peppering the branches. Look closely at the beginning of February and you see the dark casings that hold them tightly, ruptured and revealing a seam of gold. I return daily as they gather momentum, passing the witch hazel, which is already perfuming the exit from the garden, and crossing the track to the ditch where I have planted a grove of Cornus mas. Here, staggered on the steep slopes, they step from one side to the other in a group of half a dozen to frame the passage the bridge makes across the water.
I am eager for life this far into winter and the cornus budburst happens at the same time that the snowdrops claim these last two weeks of February and as they pass the baton to the primroses. I have combined the three here deliberately and en masse, so that the crossing becomes an event to focus the near horizon. With the waning skeletons of the garden now behind me, the energy in the cornus help start to move things forward. One at a time, but quickly gathering pace, the darkness in the bare branches is eclipsed by a myriad tiny cadmium yellow flowers of invigorating intensity. Each bud contains up to twenty tiny flowers that are as much stamen as petal, but the accumulation of thousands make the trees appear to be spangled with an inner light. With the snowdrops and primroses they are a magnet for early pollinators.
The cornus are young and are currently not much taller than myself. I brought them in three years ago as root-balled specimens to replace the brambly hedge that had swallowed this little ravine. Cleared and opened up again the banks have been host to meadowsweet, willowherb and other marsh-loving perennials. Though they are very slow growers – creating a wood so dense it sinks in water and is highly prized for making tools – I hope that eventually they will grow to about the height of a hawthorn and touch in places where I have planted them close enough together. In time, flaking limbs, branching low and twisting give the trees winter character – a contorted, Japanese quality – and me the opportunity of raising the canopy by pruning out the understory. Something to look forward to and deliberate upon whilst doing so.
I watched for the first couple of years to find the places where the cornus might be at home, because I knew they would not take the wetness that our native Cornus sanguinea is happy with. Although widespread in Southern Europe and Southwestern Asia, their preference is for ground that holds moisture and doesn’t dry out entirely in the summer, but that never gets waterlogged. It has been an education to see how they have already shown me where they like to be. I hit water when planting two, the springs in the bank not being visible above ground. Since the land is steeply sloping I felt it would be free-draining even with running water, and so I went with it. Sure enough, now that the trees have had two summers to settle in, I can see that, given a damp position they are already growing more lushly than those on the higher, dryer ground. Only one has suffered from being planted in a boggy pocket, and seemed slowly to be going backwards, although it has started to shoot from the base, so may be making its own adjustments. Time will tell as the conditions express themselves further in growth, but for now all of them are happy.
My mission now is to extend the snowdrop trail that I have growing under the nearby hazel to follow their canopies. The snowdrops will be sure to let me know where the ground is too wet, but they are likely to enjoy the drying effect that the roots of the cornus will have in the summer when in growth. The trees will be in flower for the best part of a month, so I have underplanted them with Tenby daffodils which will pick up as the snowdrops wane and the cornus dim.
In summer, the Cornelian cherry is easy on the eye in a natural setting, for its leaves are not unlike our native dogwood. Late in summer, in a warm position where the fruit can ripen, you will see that they are hung with small drops of ruby red, which are highly prized by birds. Though too tart for us to eat raw, they have been an important food source for over 7000 years in Greece, where they are still made into jam and raki. As autumn comes the foliage colours russet and gently red and, by the time the leaves drop, you will already see the embryonic buds, ready and waiting for the time when we gardeners are hungry for signs of life.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 16 February 2019
We have half a dozen mature hazels (Corylus avellana) that survived here for being out of reach of the grazing. They cling to the banks of the brook opposite our neighbour’s wood and were protected by a run of barbed wire that kept the cattle from the brook’s edge and, in turn, provided the trees with their own little sanctuary. Their domain, very sensibly, was over the water and into the shade, but it is remarkable how quickly a change of regime is marked in growth and, in the eight years without the cattle, their limbs have reached back over our land so that that you now have to duck as you approach. In their shadow I have been planting snowdrops, which like the moisture there in the winter and the drier influence of their roots in the summer.
The pools of catkin and snowdrop have made new places that we are drawn to explore when the winter is with us. Look down now on the wood from our perch on the hillside and the pale golden cast of the catkins reveal where the hazels run. Happy to live in the understory of the tall poplars above them, their rangy limbs topple like collapsed scaffolding where they have gone without coppicing, but you can read their preference for the hinterland. At the edges of the wood and where they step out from the high canopy and finger up the brook in the open crease at the bottom of the slopes, they look most contented. The billowing outline of one tree running into another reveals their true character and shows you where they thrive. Huddled on the edge of the wood where it is still and moist and sheltered.
Walk the line of the hedges up the slope away from the wood and you find hazel here too. Nuts that were buried by squirrels and forgotten, but happy to be part of the hedgerow and its community. It is impossible to tell the age of the hazels that sit in the hedge, for they will take a regular cut and regenerate as a shrub rather than a tree, but they are probably as old as their cousins in the wood. Further up the hill again, where some of the hedges along the ditch were nothing more than a twist of barbed wire and bramble, it is often the hazel that has outlived its neighbours. By disentangling the wire from the bushes that had been habitually scalped by the flail and then kept in check by the cattle, a number have been freed and left to regenerate. Although you can see the previous brutal regime in their eldest limbs, they have shot from the base as hazels do and, in just eight years, we have the beginnings of a new grove.
Where I come from on the South Downs, the ancient coppices contain trees that are thought to be as much as a thousand years old. The original stumps have rotted away from the middle, but you can see the oldest plants in the coppice mapped in the close groupings of offsets that have radiated outward over time. New trees that have been deliberately layered (that is, rooted by bending the longest shoots to the ground and weighting them with a stone) stand at a sensible distance of about eight strides to give them room enough, but still with the company they need to draw new growth up and straight towards the light.
Coppicing extends the life of a tree and the industry around it traces our woodland symbiosis in a long and unbroken line of charcoal production as well as material for hurdles, furniture and building. Cut on an eight to twelve year rotation, a hazel coppice will regenerate fast, the trees touching again in four or five years, but not before a valuable interlude of light has been allowed to reach the woodland floor. Ephemeral woodlanders such as foxgloves seize this window of opportunity and bluebells, wood anemone and primroses take the chance to build up their strength before being cast once again into more permanent shade.
The best material from coppicing, which retains its pliability, is cut at the beginning of the winter. Later cuts between January and March produce wood that is prone to brittleness. The finer top growth is used for pea sticks, faggots and withies. The rods, which can run straight to four metres, are either split and used for hurdle making and building materials or, in my case, for plant supports in the kitchen garden. A twelve year rotation will also produce firewood. The brash and less useful brush is piled or woven over the coppiced stump to prevent the deer from nibbling the regenerating shoots. A year will see new growth push clear of the grazing line before the brash has rotted and returned to the ground.
In the second winter here, having seen where the wild trees were happiest, I planted a grove of filberts and cobs below the new orchard. Cobs are Corylus avellana selections, filberts Corylus maxima. Though very similar in appearance to the native hazel, they are chosen for their superior nuts and are distinctive for their crested outer calyx. There are twenty one trees, three of each of seven varieties; ‘Webb’s Prize’, ‘Gunslebert’, ‘Kentish Cob’, ‘Cosford Cob’, ‘White Filbert’, ‘Butler’ and, naturally, ‘Pearson’s Prolific’. Though to date the squirrels have stripped them just days before we consider them ripe enough for our own consumption, we remain hopeful that in time we will get enough nuts to go round.
Staggered in an informal grid of eight metre spacing, the trees sit in grass and take the formality of the orchard down to meet the wood. For now they are protected with tree guards, so that I can let the sheep graze amongst them, but in time, when the canopy closes over, I will fence the nuttery in and bring the woodland floor into this area. Further downstream, a new informal coppice of straight hazel is set to join the mature trees that run the length of the stream. In five years’ time I am hoping they will be big enough to coppice. A cycle which may be repeated many times in the life of these young trees. Only a handful of times by me, but hopefully many more with their legacy.
Words: Dan Pearson/Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 2 February 2019
The farmer here before us had grazed the land hard with the precious pasture or ‘grub’ taking precedence over the trees. Our neighbour has shown us photos of the valley when she was a girl, unrecognisable for the majestic elms in every hedge. When the elms came down during the 1960’s and ’70’s, their demise opened up the landscape and, save a handful of mature ash that run along the lane, the hedges have remained low and uninterrupted. On his last winter here, the year before we took over the land in 2010, the farmer scaled the solitary ash that stands proud on the slopes of The Tump and pollarded it back to its torso. The ancient pollards are a feature of the valley, for ash (Fraxinus excelsior) burns green and so is a valuable wood for winter fires. Our limbless pollard stood starkly that first November, just a small amount of regrowth marking the time the property had taken to come into our hands. Representing, as it did, the end of an era and the start of a new chapter, we immediately marked about thirty hedgerow ash so that, when the hedges were cut, they would be left to rise up and away to become new hedge trees. Though not a brilliant hedging plant, ash in a hedge are more than happy to take a yearly cut and, with the advantage of being already established in the hedge, they have raced away. In that first winter I planted another thirty ash whips that were winkled in where gaps opened up after removing elder and bramble. The young whips have to be watched for the first three years as they have competition for light and water from the hedge to either side, but as soon as they were tall enough I tied a ribbon to their leader so that the farmer who cuts our hedges can work around them.
The old ash pollard on The Tump has now been joined by a number of self-seeded hawthorns
One of the ash planted eight years ago on the slopes above the old pollard, the top of which can be seen in the background
Three of the ash planted eight years ago into the hedge on the lane
It was a good plan, or so I thought, to have my hedge trees on a ten year rotation and pollard enough every year to fuel our wood burners. The spectre of ash dieback was first confirmed in the UK just two years later in 2012 and it is now sobering to think how quickly things can change. We discovered the first signs in some seedling trees about three years later and, although none of the trees I planted have been affected yet, my own plans of ash pollards are now in question. And then, as with the disappearance of the elms, there is the visual change we will inevitably see in the landscape, since ash is such a key and widespread component of our woodlands.
The initial panic that circulated in the press soon after the discovery of Chalara eased a little while we waited to see what happened. However, caused as it is by a fungus with wind-borne spores, it has taken only 6 years to become widespread and is now present in most of the country, bar the north of Scotland. What has become clear is that, once a tree is infected, the disease is usually fatal. However, mature trees can survive for some time and during that time they continue to make a valuable contribution to the local ecology and landscape. Ash are also profligate with their seed and scientific study into variability has already shown that a small number of trees are able to tolerate or resist infection.
Hopefully the strong will win out and, with that belief, my plans seem not entirely without hope. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that diversity is important and that no one environment should have all its eggs in the same basket. With this in mind, I have been widening my net and, every year since we came, I have made it a mission to broaden the palette of native trees on the land. There are several projects on the go and winter work includes hedge improvement and extension and the finding of places for long-termers that can step into the fields without making them difficult to manage with machinery.
A newly planted oak has a temporary tree guard
A gate marker oak planted 4 years ago
Every year I have planted a handful of English oaks (Quercus robur), using them as markers by gates (main image, the large trees are ash) so that you can both locate the breaks in the hedges from a distance and to make a place of the gate; a place to stop in the shade or somewhere for the animals to gather in the heat of the day. Although with climate change there is some speculation as to the long-term suitability of oak in Southern England, my hope is that the combination of our hearty soil and the spring lines that run through the slopes will give them their best chance. Oak has the highest biodiversity count of all native trees and so I am also planning for the life that comes with them.
As gaps have opened up as I upgrade our old hedgelines by stripping them of dominant runs of bramble, elder and old man’s beard, I have been adding common lime to replace the ash should they fail as hedge trees. Tilia x europaea is a beautiful tree if you have the room, not just for its vibrant leaf colour, but for the perfume of the flowers and the benefit these have for the bees and us, as it comes in quantity and makes a delicious tea. Once again, the trees will need extra care and, with this in mind, I made sure they were all planted before the end of the year so that their hair roots can get the best possible chance of being in contact with the soil before the spring. The trees were also given a good mulch of compost to hold in the moisture.
One of the new limes planted as hedge trees
Hedge trees are space efficient and their presence along the lanes as another storey above the hedgeline produces protected microclimates and a stillness that harbours insects. The bats run through these fertile air pockets, using them as feeding corridors, as do the birds that benefit from cover from predators. When we first arrived here one of the first things we noticed was the lack of birdlife near the house, with no trees and scalped hedges. We have quickly seen them return, as the trees have risen up to provide shelter, shade and perches for chatter or prey-watching.
Part of the area of hornbeam and hazel coppice on the lower slopes of The Tump above the stream, which were planted 4 and 5 years ago
Dan putting tree guards on the newly planted coppice of hazel and sweet chestnut
For the last five years I have been slowly extending a new coppice in the hollow where the field dips away too steeply to the stream edge for haymaking. Thirty trees a year now sees the beginnings of something. Oak, to form a high canopy, and hornbeam and hazel, which will be put on a coppice rotation of twelve and eight to ten years respectively. This year I added some sweet chestnut to see if we can harvest our own poles for fencing in years to come. The coppice will provide the firewood I might be short of should the ash fail, and species variation within it will be good for ringing the changes in the ecology as we work from end to end over the course of a cycle.
It is a good feeling to this year have reached the end of the planted area and to be able to look back from the little whips which have just gone in to the progress mapped in year-on-year growth on the slopes beyond. This next chapter is begun.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 January 2019 We are sorry but the page you are looking
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