Clean-up brings joys of woodland home

I HAVE a small piece of land.

The main use I’ve put it to over the years has been to indulge my passion for planting trees. There was no pattern or plan to this. It was random planting, done on a whim, but the result is I now have a modest piece of woodland.

It had become a bit neglected and I’ve spent the past few days trying to do something about this. It has been satisfying work and it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful workplace. When the sun came out and made dappled patches of light and shade on the woodland floor — patches that rippled like water when the breeze stirred the leaves — I had to stop working and just sit down and admire.

The first job was to fell some dead trees, fill the wheelbarrow and stock up my wood shed. All the Eucalyptus gunnii, or cider gums, had been killed by frost and snow the winter before last. They were now perfectly seasoned and I love burning eucalyptus timber because of the exotic scent of the smoke. The only eucalyptus to survive was a snow gum, a small and very hardy species from high mountains in Victoria and New South Wales.

There was also a dead birch to be cut up. They are one of the hardiest tree species in the world, growing closer to the North Pole than anything else, so it obviously hadn’t died of cold.

But birch are not shade-tolerant and as other trees had grown and closed a canopy overhead it had just stopped competing and given up.

The next job was to make some paths through the wood, clearing brambles and nettles. Despite the fact that I’d got some firewood, this is not a productive wood. Its only purpose is to give pleasure. If there is no access there is no pleasure.

The clearance work was made more difficult because I encountered relics of past livestock enterprises. Years ago I had kept both poultry and pigs down here. The domestic hen is descended from the jungle cock which, as you might imagine, is a forest bird. Hens love to live in woodland and their droppings help to nourish the trees.

But ancient chicken wire with tree roots and strong ivy growing through the mesh is very hard to remove. I spent hours on my knees with leather gloves and wire cutters. A couple of times I had to resort to tying a rope to the wire and towing it out of the ground with my jeep.

Pigs are also naturally woodland animals. The trees have to be mature because the pigs will uproot and destroy young ones. But their habit of rooting around on the woodland floor creates the ideal conditions for the germination of tree seeds.

As I rooted around on the floor of my wood I was delighted by the amount of natural regeneration I came across. The paths I was making became increasingly winding and erratic as I routed them round little seedling ash trees, sycamores and hawthorns. The wood was making itself immortal.

Last week, I mentioned a sighting of a rare woodland bird, a hawfinch. I’ve had several more emails about hawfinch sightings. One reader even sent me a photograph of one in her garden taken on Jun 7. Unfortunately, by the time it reached me the quality was quite poor, but it certainly looks like a hawfinch. I also said I couldn’t find the species in the list of rarities published by the Irish Rare Birds Committee. This seems to have been my fault as a member of the committee has emailed me to say it is there and they would like to receive any records.

* Visit: www.irbc.ie.

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