Setting our Silver Birch and Rowan Trees Free
Wild Notes #10 A monthly dispatch from our nature recovery project
Hi, I’m Sanjida! I write about writing, wildlife and wilderness. This is one of my monthly-ish Wild Notes about our rewilding project in Somerset, Wild Pinebeck. My book about our rewilding project and searching for belonging is here: Wilderness
It’s free to read if you’d care to share this little dose of nature’s tonic!
A barn owl flits moth-like between two fir trees. A kestrel hovers, slices a parabola out of air. The sky is the colour of river-water, as it would like to rain but cannot summon the clouds.
I decide that today is the day to remove the rest of the tree guards. Our nephews helped us take out the spiral guards for the hedge, but there are 150 four-year-old rowan and silver birch trees that still need to be freed from their constraints.
The tree guards are large, wide tubes of pale lime plastic that protected the saplings from deer and mice as they were starting to grow. Where the trees have remained thin and spindly, I undo the cable ties binding the tubes to a supporting wooden stake and simply pull the guard over the trees’ heads as I close the branches together, as if I’m peeling a jumper from a child.
The trees that have grown sturdy, though, are a different matter. I need to cut a slit all the way down the tube and unwrap it from the trunk. At first, I use scissors, but the blade scitters and slips into my thigh. Fortunately, there’s not much blood. I change out of my yoga pants into protective trousers, and my husband passes me a scalpel with a long-suffering eye roll.
I cut strips from an old Habitat tea towel - originally bought in 1998 when I first moved to Bristol - and tie the faded dove-grey and peach fabric round the slender trunks and wooden stakes. There are a lot of snails sheltering in the guards: giant garden snails, tiny ones: sepia, ochre, mustard, and larger, flatterer molluscs, striped cream and burnt-toffee.
A buzzard perches in the bough of a dying ash tree, watching me, hunched and baleful. Hedgehog mushrooms have gathered in green pools of grass and there are scrapes where the earth has been unzipped. Badgers? Deer have nibbled our baby spindle trees to the nub.
I overhear fragments of conversation from the walkers passing through our land along the West Mendip Way:
‘It’s definitely in the vegetable bracket.’
‘You don’t want to hold my hand because I weed on it?’ (Father to his son.)
‘He only growled because you gave him a fright.’ (Dog walker to me.)
‘I’m sorry, but you walked into my arm.’
‘He’s treating therapy as if it’s gas lighting. It’s the worst form of manipulation.’
A woman on horseback shouts, ‘Every time I come here, you’re out gardening.’
I don’t correct her.
Connor, my springer spaniel, lies in a pile of decomposing hay and chews his orange ball rhythmically, eyes clouded in dog bliss.
I remove the 150th tree guard and something beats in the hedge next to me. I turn and a female pheasant explodes out and flies across the field like a wind-up toy.
I pile the discarded tree guards into the wheel barrow just as it starts to rain: fat tears splash my face. Behind me, the silver birch copse shimmers, their chic ties fluttering, the bark freshly revealed, Raku-glazed.
If you liked this, you may be interested in more Wild Notes, such as:
Or my book, Wilderness, about our rewilding journey and my search for belonging.
And don’t forget, you can come at stay with us at Wild Pinebeck: 10% discount for members of Wild Writing with Sanjida!
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