The release of Denis Villeneuve’s wonderful film of the first half of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has coincided with the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but few reviewers have made the connection because the book’s ecological themes are largely absent from the screen version.
Last month I attended the RFS “intermediate level silviculture” one day course run by Julian Evans at his wood, Northdown Plantation, near Overton in Hampshire. I read his book “A wood of our own” in October 2007 before I bought Century Wood, and it was part of my decision to buy a wood. I’ve said before that it’s “the book I compare other woodland owners’ books against”. So it was very special to finally visit the wood itself.
There were two dozen of us there on the day: a mixture of small woodland owners like me; staff of wildlife trusts, the National Trust, and Windsor Great Park; and independent forestry consultants. The RFS helpfully provide Continuing Professional Development certificates for courses like this to people who need them.
Continue reading “Visiting Northdown Plantation”
At the weekend we went to the Shropshire Outdoor Show at Whittington Castle near Oswestry. The show is now in its second year and thankfully was able to go ahead despite the pandemic. Two dozen stands with a mixture of bushcraft, traditional crafts, and demonstrations like archery. A strong and lovely smell of wood smoke too. During the afternoon I came across a classic book on forestry, but more of that later.
The location of Whttington Castle is another of Shropshire’s hidden gems. The castle is operated by a charitable preservation trust on a 99 year lease, and they have done a lot of conservation work on the fabric of the buildings. As well as a beautiful place to visit, they also host reenactment events and regular car boots sales.
Continue reading “Book hunting at the Shropshire Outdoor Show”
At the end of this very odd year I received the award for Best Woodland Blog for CenturyWood.uk (jointly with Clare Mansell’s Little Green Explorers). These awards are run by Woodlands.co.uk, one of the two main “retail” woodland sellers, and you can see the other winners in the winter 2020 edition of Living Woods magazine and on the Woodlands.co.uk website.
The citation reads: “A lovely, reflective and regularly updated blog about running a small woodland, with photos and videos about activities, woodland issues, the ‘log cabin’, projects (e.g. using a scythe mower to clear a glade), woodland travel pieces, beavers and pine martens, and Henry David Thoreau.”
I’ve now received a box of prizes and a certificate. Sometimes these kind of things are token gestures, but in this case they are generous and genuinely useful.
This concise but beautifully illustrated book was originally published as “Shinrin-Yoku: the art and science of forest bathing” but now appears as “Into the forest: how trees can help you find health and happiness“. There is plenty of substance behind the pictures: Qing Li is regarded as the world’s leading expert on forest medicine, and was instrumental in providing a scientific basis for the benefits of Japanese shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”.
“Thirty years in wildness wood” is the long story of the Yarrow family’s purchase of a 63 acre woodland, how they lived in it, managed it, and made a living from it. The book has strong parallels with “A wood of our own” by Julian Evans: both Evans and Chris Yarrow are trained foresters, buying woodlands privately and then managing them for decades, improving the mix of species with long term objectives in mind. Their stories are set against the same backdrop of English forestry in the last few decades, and both had to deal with the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987. But Yarrow’s project was more ambitious: to use the woodland as a primary source of income, and to demonstrate the idea of multipurpose forestry by harvesting wood and timber, producing and selling wood products on site, and admitting a paying public.
Continue reading ““Thirty years in wilderness wood” by Chris Yarrow”
Wohlleben’s book was originally published in German in 2015 and then translated and published in English in 2016. The book attracted a lot of mainstream interest due to Wohlleben’s “wood wide web” description of trees communicating with each other and sharing nutrients. I was aware of this at the time and I must admit the way he presented it all put me off. But I’ve now read the book and that’s only a small part of the wide range of topics he covers.
Peter Wohlleben began his career as a forester for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany but became disillusioned with the “big forestry” style of management and began managing a beechwood for the local council of Hummel. He published several successful books about forests, nature, and threats to the environment, before “The hidden life of trees”.
Continue reading ““The hidden life of trees” by Peter Wohlleben”
I read “A wood of our own” by Julian Evans before I bought Century Wood, way back in 2007. I was already pretty sure I wanted to own a woodland, and Evans’ book helped confirm it. It’s become the book I compare other woodland owners’ books against, and I’ve looked through it again after reading and reviewing “A wood of one’s own” by Ruth Pavey.
Back in 2007 I had already read Evans’ book “Badgers, beeches, and blisters”, which is out of print but still available as a free PDF from woodlands.co.uk. That is very much a How To book with a lot of practical advice. At the same time as “A wood of our own”, I bought Chris Starr’s “Woodland management: a practical guide” and Ken Broad’s “Caring for small woods”. Both of these are more formal (very formal in Starr’s case: it’s a textbook) How To books in the vein of “Badgers, beeches, and blisters”, whereas “A wood of our own” is autobiographical. A first person account of Evans and his wife and her brother purchasing and managing the wood.
“A wood of one’s own” by Ruth Pavey has been out for a couple of years but I’ve only got round to reading it this month. For me, it was a bit of curate’s egg. It’s well written (there are gushing reviews in the press) but the content was rather disappointing: the gardening correspondent of the local paper in Highgate and Hampstead buys a 4 acre wood in Somerset, and uses it for gardening. Maybe that is too harsh. It’s really an orchard after all, and Pavey has a lot of awareness of what is going to set people’s teeth on edge: planting garden flowers in woodland, for instance.
Pavey has family and childhood connections to Somerset, and so it was not entirely surprising that in 1999 she ended up buying her four acres there. Mixed scrub, orchard, some big trees, and lots of brambles and nettles.
For several years rewilding has been one of the influences on how I manage Century Wood. It’s never been an entirely comfortable fit though, since “wild” is quite an extreme goal. I’ve contented myself with encouraging elements of wildness but now I think it would be more productive for me to talk about “renaturing”, and I imagine a spectrum with wildwood at one end and very controlled plantation forests at the other.
Rewilding started to enter the public consciousness in Britain about the time I bought Century Wood in 2008, and in 2013 George Monbiot’s book “Feral” gave it a lot of publicity and provided a popular manifesto. I was already thinking about ways to encourage large scale reforestation, and Monbiot’s book crystallized the way in which British uplands are kept bare by sheep, deer, and EU Common Agricultural Policy basic payments.
