The winter always seems shorter for the winter work. The tasks that mostly lie beyond the garden and are out of sight and out of mind in the growing season. Our orbit shifts with the land laid bare and we venture down to the stream again where the silvery water shimmers in light falling through branches and the nettles have retreated to ground and allow us once again to get to the water. The down season tasks in the areas where we deliberately exercise a lighter touch are rougher and readier than the detailed work in the garden, but there is always a long-term outcome in the heavier work and the land always gives back if it is tended with care.
When the poplars were at their most laden and weighty, two of the vetarans came crashing down to spread their length across the stream. One we heard, with an explosive crack, on a perfectly still day in August. The slimmer of the two, it fell nimbly amongst its companions to strike a fence post like a hammer, gathering up the tension in the wire so that we couldn’t open the gate to the crossing. The second tree, not so very far away and the bigger of the two came down silently, its enormous limbs pressing themselves into the soft earth, taking out a hornbeam and whiplashing my grove of young alders. It was almost impossible to make our way to the bridge over the stream for the carnage of broken limbs and weight of vegetation, so we left it until November when the garden demanded less, and time felt apparently in our hands.
It filled the time, of course, so to help with the clearance we hired a man with a chainsaw large enough to dissect the branches to allow us to clear the ground ahead of the snowdrops nosing through. A heart-warming pile of timber now awaits a week next autumn when the weeds are taking a pause in the garden and the wood is dry enough to trundle up to the barns to be split. We now have a chipper, which has revolutionised what we can compost so all the smaller limbs were made into a covetable pile of woodchip, which we will leave for a year before it is used as mulch on the garden. Used fresh, it would rob the soil of nitrogen, so we piled it on a tarp and will take pleasure in watching it age for a year. The brash and hard to log limbs were added to the biggest of our eco-piles, where we have been stacking wood that will make a home to all the life that favours the slow decomposition and shelter.
The tree that hold the banks the best is the water-loving alder, so it was sad to see my little grove so plundered by the poplar. Alders are trees that have adapted to change, to poor soils that they compensate for with nitrogen-fixing nodules in their roots and to shifting water levels and ground reshaped by floods and erosion. When they flood, the alder has adapted a mechanism to hold its breath and not drown until the waters abate so, where the farmer before us grazed the land hard to the very edges, I planted alders to hold the unstable banks of the stream.
After clearing the poplar, my damaged alders were coppiced to the ground to promote new wood from the base. The fresh cuts revealed a searing orange wound, which dimmed over the course of a month to a memory. Alders respond well to coppicing, which triggers not only multiple new trunks, but also good root growth, which in this case will be good for stabilising the banks. The regenerating growth will be protected from deer with the brash from the severed limbs and, with luck, I should have a stand of healthy new wood by the end of summer.
We coppice the hazels in much the same way on an eight-to-ten-year rotation for their twiggery and to grow a crop of upright bean poles. Coppicing can extend the life of a tree considerably and some ancient hazel coppices on the South Downs are thought to be as much as a thousand years old. Here we cut three mature hazels a year whilst the new coppice is gathering enough strength to start the rotation and enjoy the cycle of letting light into the undergrowth again and the response and flux in the vegetation.
Not all trees take well to coppicing, but I saw an ancient field maple up at Lowther Castle that was coppiced many decades ago, which gave me the confidence to do the same with the young field maples in the Blossom Wood that have had their bark stripped by squirrels. The damage started when the trees were about ten years old and presumably juicy enough, but it took me a couple of years of lamenting the damage to build up the confidence to try. They have responded with a shoulder high forest of young stems that I am hoping will have at least another ten years to grow before the squirrels return for seconds. There are ten trees in the wood, which I will harvest over the next five years to start a rotation. A rotation to dodge the squirrels, to provide me with wood for the fires and the satisfaction of being part of this wonderful cycle.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 27 January 2024
