Planting Oaks Under Whose Shade I Will Not Sit
Wilderness Notes #3
I plant ten oak trees today in Lilac Wood. They’re tiny, no taller than a milk bottle, and their leaves are the pale brown of unrefined sugar.
We had applied unsuccessfully for a number of grants to buy trees - but in spite of the world being awash with people claiming planting a tree is the way to save the planet, right now, no one wants to pay for trees to be planted in an existing woodland.
Our wooded areas, Lilac and Bluebell Wood, are 90% ash and 90% of our trees have the ash dieback virus. Which means we’ve had to fell all those that could fall on the public footpath circling our land, and those that remain are likely to die soon, haemorrhaging branches as they go. Underplanting seems like the sensible thing to do so that we continue to have woods, and we have woods with diversity that might survive climate change.
I recently gave a talk about our rewilding project - Wild Pinebeck - at the Mendip Hills National Landscape annual conference and begged for help when I’d finished my speech. As soon as my session was over, a woman came over to us.
“I can help you,” she said. “I grow trees. Would you like some?”
A month later I drove to Westbury-Sub-Mendip, looking for the Community Tree Nursery and our saviour, Buffy Fletcher. I eventually found a grassy lane, tucked behind a farm and in the shadow of a church. I switched the Fiat into four-wheel drive and bucked over the sodden grass, brambles tearing across the windscreen.
And then suddenly, in an area the size of a tennis court, with mown paths and raised beds, in a pool of sunshine, I found Buffy and sixteen volunteers digging up trees. It was like a very neat and efficiently run allotment for saplings. Buffy explained that the seeds are initially germinated in old baths filled with soil so that rodents can’t eat them.
Our trees were waiting for me: oaks and hawthorns, wrapped like old-fashioned sweets in newspaper, and bucket-loads of hazels that had been in the ground for a season too long and were four feet tall. I drove home, peering through a thicket of budding branches.
The first holes I try and dig in Lilac Wood are rock-solid. We have the remains of ten ruined cottages on our site and my spade kept hitting the rubble and stone from a former cow byre. I move further into the wood and start to dig in the pockets left where ash trees had once flourished. The soil here is rich and loamy - even so, I add a few scoops of our best chicken manure made from our rescue chickens’ poo.
Working so closely to the ground, I notice the tiniest of things: thistle rosettes, like spiny sea stars; a minute centipede curled into a tight spiral beneath a stone, a flat snail, its shell cream and brown as a humbug; a sprinkling of minute fungi, like a constellation of orange jellies on the end of a log, the dried stalks of candlesnuff poking through moss; scarlet elf cups, a glorious, vivid splash of vermillion; a piece of pottery, blue-and-white willow patterned, frills of lichen, ochre and teal, on fragments of fallen wood.
I stake each tree, wrap it in a tree guard, pile wood chip round the base to help suppress weeds. Some of these trees will grow, I hope, and one day, long after I’m gone, they might produce their own tiny oak trees.
My nature memoir is available to read here: Wilderness: In Search of Belonging.
Loved reading this - sounds like an amazing project!