Last week I spent five days at Century Wood, living in the log cabin and working on the new drying barn. We’ve stayed at the wood for a weekend at a time before, but this is my longest stay and didn’t involve any breaks: I didn’t even climb the gate and walk the rides shared with my neighbours during my stay. It was quite an experience.
A short video of bird song at the start of May, including a cuckoo.
An expanded version of my post from January, The Long Tail of Forestry, has just appeared in the Small Woods Association’s “Smallwoods” magazine! (Spring 2018 edition)
Earlier this week I revisited a woodland at the foot of the Jura mountains in France that I also photographed in mid February before the snow returned. I was able to take some before and after pictures of small trees marked for felling by the French Office National des Forets, and then felled, and also see how property boundaries are marked.
The boundary of the Glade at the centre of the wood has been fixed since I cleared it nine years ago, but yesterday I started extending the area beside the Log Cabin to make room for a shed for storage and wood drying. This “drying barn” has been an off and on project for a few years, and three years ago I felled the poplars which could drop branches or fall on the eventual footprint of the barn. Some of the clearing work yesterday was to cut up some of these poplars and use them to edge the extended Glade boundary.
You can see the new edge on the first of these pictures I took during the day. The second picture shows a cut I made through one of the poplar trunks that was felled three years ago. You can see the brown, black, and orange staining from fungi growing within the wood and starting to break it down. The final photo shows fungal caps growing in a sheltered corner where one trunk crossed over another .
There’s a rebellion going on in Britain. All around us. The resistance wins some battles and loses others. It has fought us since we first began to clear woodlands and create fields thousands of years ago. Its aim is reforestation with native trees, its method is natural regeneration, and in more and more places it is winning – increasingly with our help.
Continue reading “Natural regeneration: Nature’s grassroots rebellion”
I’ve just watched the beautiful Episode 7 of the Woodlanders series of films. This episode is about Tinker’s Bubble in Somerset and how they do forestry without using fossil fuel: felling with axe and saw, extraction with horses, and a saw mill powered by a wood-burning steam engine.
The Woodlanders series is made by Costa Boutsikaris and is crowd funded. Please consider supporting his work if you like the film.
The long tail concept is now commonplace in business and computing. It’s the idea that most subjects are dominated by a very large number of small categories. That the “big hits” are actually outsold by all the niche songs or films or books that sell in ones and twos. Some of this thinking can also be applied to forestry, and how small woodlands can be brought into management.
Continue reading “Small woodlands: the Long Tail of forestry”
These are some photos I took in Windsor Great Park in July. The park has been royal forest and attached to Windsor Castle itself since the time of William the Conqueror. As well as general pictures of the park, its open spaces and woodland, I took photos of very well established rhododendron (showing just how bad it can get unchecked) and the park’s herd of red deer.
Around the same time I photographed lynx, wild boar and wolves at the La Garenne zoo in the Jura mountains of Switzerland, I also had the opportunity to see the smaller JuraParc with its group of brown bears.
