Seasons in woodland

Today is the first day of meteorological autumn. Ever since I bought Century Wood I’ve paid a lot more attention to the seasons and when they “really” are. When does spring really start? When does it turn into summer? What about the distinction between autumn and winter? There are lots of definitions, but could I use the changes of the woodland itself as a guide to the four seasons? More recently, I think there is a much simpler way of looking at it.

Meteorological seasons in Britain are each three months. Spring is March, April, May; summer is June, July August; Autumn is September, October, November; and Winter is December, January, February. I think this is close to the way people outside woodlands talk about the seasons, and it is heavily promoted on TV by weather forecasters.

We used to call autumn “Fall of Leaf” which naturally suggests a more nature-based way of defining the end of summer and the start of winter, until you remember some leaves hang on the branches right through December which has to be in winter.

As you might imagine the Small Woods Association publishes an excellent guide to the timing of forestry operations. It discusses constraints on operations, like felling due to bird nesting, and does this month by month and season by season. Some of the constraints are environmental rather than purely wildlife: timber felling and extraction with big machines is more disruptive when the ground is wet.

What I’m really after is a framework for planning operations in Century Wood. Here the cars come in and out on all-weather roadways, and elsewhere I get around on foot or with an adapted garden tractor. All low impact, even in the rain. So the main seasonal issue is just when I can fell trees without disturbing nesting birds. This suggests a really simple solution. Like the tropics just have Rainy and Dry seasons, perhaps I should such say Century Wood has a Felling Season and a Growing Season, defined by the nesting season from early March to end of August. Of course the Growing season matures smoothly from spring into summer, but that doesn’t really affect what I do when. I’m not doing any planting for instance.

One of the things I’ve really noticed in the last few years is how we often have very wet starts to the year. I was caught out this year by that. I got less firewood cut than in previous years because I didn’t do it in late 2025, despite the period at the start of 2025 being very productive for me in that year rather than this. For this reason, I’m planning to start on the firewood this month, at the start of the wood’s Felling Season.