Year 7 riparian aspen just planted @DavidMunro1869 @garnockgordon. Bit late this year but hopefully will be OK (pot grown which should help). Trying a mesh guard this time, hence the stonework to provide a bit of reinforcement when the river floods.
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Planting trees opens our hearts to nature's wisdom. Nurturing them gives exposure to life's vulnerability and teaches how to build ecological and human community.
We plant trees not for ourselves, but for those who will follow. Life gives unto life, and by dancing to its rhythms we can enjoy with clear conscience what has been handed down from the past. We are all children of the Earth. We share equally in the glens, hills, rivers and seas. To become a Phantom Treeplanter, simply plant a native tree with due sensitivity on any land where they have a chance of surviving. Nature sows without asking. You are part of nature. Reconstituting the world is a duty and a right which extends beyond legal concepts of land ownership. You do not need to ask permission. Other treeplanters are at work. What matters is not individual success or failure, but the overall process we share in. Planting trees is about making love with the Earth. Phantom planting recreates wildness. So let us live and love wildly. Let us not be afraid to grow and change. Let us celebrate - life itself. Grass is growing back in the areas where I cut gorse over the winter.
Planted 10 more trees and wildflowers in the bare patches. Planted 6 holly trees in lowest area. Had to do a bit of watering over the dry spell. Most of the trees are growing well, and seem to have avoided damage from rabbit and deer grazing, but are now over-topping the tree protectors. Need to extend protection on over 100. Started a new area with hollies lower down in the area I was originally supposed to plant in. Made contact with 2 Scout troops who expressed an interest in doing some planting. Checked trees on the north side for the first time in a long while, and found that deer had been stripping the bark from them - hadn't had any evidence of deer previously. The damage is so substantial I was worried about their survival, but their crown is still growing healthily. Went back with tree protectors, and found damage to another half dozen.
The trees planted among the fireweed over the winter season have taken well - mainly hawthorns, but a couple of lovely oaks as well. Have had 2 sessions of cutting back fireweed growth so they don't get crowded out. Wildflowers were out in May. Despite Covid and a hard winter, it's wonderful to see wee trees flourishing on Beinn Bhan at Dundreggan.
Thanks to Stephen Couling at Trees for Life for the update. A team of volunteers is hoping a "tiny forest" planted at a community farm will make a big difference to the environment.
Rachel Richards designed the Miyawaki-style forest, inspired by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which has been planted at the farm in Screveton, Nottinghamshire. "Akira Miyawaki found trees naturally grew much faster if planted closer together than ones that were planted and spaced out on soil that had been cleared," she said. "The reason why I decided to design a forest like this was because it absorbs 30 times as much carbon as a normal forest because it's so densely planted." The Japanese plant ecologist Akira Miyawaki observed that ancient forests provided the greatest biodiversity but of course take centuries to grow. He wondered if newly planted areas, particularly degraded urban areas, could be engineered to grow rapidly to achieve similar levels in years rather than decades. The ‘Miyawaki method’ requires species selection to mimic the old forest, extensive ground preparation and dense planting of a large number of species. In Japan, most of the native forest had been lost or replaced by exotic conifers, so Miyawaki’s first problem was to discover the species in the original deciduous forest and grow enough of them for planting. When Es Devlin was told that the one thing no one could do amid the stern 18th-century Palladianism of Somerset House was to plant trees, she immediately decided she must make a wood of 400 trees arrayed in the neoclassical courtyard within those chilly geometries.
Long, long ago, the Pelasgians, a people who lived in Thessaly, planted a forest grove in honour of Demeter – the goddess who breathes life into seeds, who makes young leaves unfurl, who unclenches the grip of winter, who taught humans how to bind straw into sheaves. The forest was so dense, so close-packed with elms and apple and pear trees, that you couldn’t shoot an arrow through it if you tried. Demeter loved the place beyond almost any other. But one day, a king called Erysichthon brought 20 men to the forest armed with axes. The first tree that was hacked by a bronze blade was a tall, elegant poplar. That tree screamed in agony. Demeter heard and she came straight away, disguised as her own priestess. “What are you doing to the goddess’s sacred grove?” she said. “Stop this now – or Demeter will be angry.” Erysichthon just glared at her. “Get out of my way,” he said, “or this axe won’t be just chopping down trees. I need this timber to make a roof for my new banqueting hall.” At that moment, the goddess showed herself in her true form. In the place of the priestess stood an immense, blazing immortal, her head brushing the sky. The king’s underlings scattered. She let them go. But not Erysichthon. “Go build a hall,” she said, with utter disdain. “You’ll need plenty of feasts from now on.” From that moment the king was afflicted with a terrible hunger. He could not stop eating. He ate every animal in his family’s flocks: cows, sheep, goats. He ate the horses, the mules; he even ate the palace cat, good mouser as she was. And yet he wasted away. Melted, like snow melting from a mountain’s peak. In the end, he ended up begging for crusts at the side of the road. And still he never satisfied his greed. It’s an old tale – this retelling is based on the version by the third-century BC Alexandrian poet Callimachus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Erysichthon even pimps out his daughter to feed his appetite, making, as classicist Helen Morales points out in her book Antigone Rising, “a connection between the abuse of the environment and the abuse of women”. JRR Tolkien will have known the story when he invented his Ents, the giant, shaggy, bark-encrusted, slow-moving “tree shepherds” who magnificently rise up against the tree-felling Saruman in The Two Towers. The story of Erysichthon is certainly a myth for now, for 2021. The king’s carelessness, his unthinking greed, lead, via ecological destruction, to his own downfall. Spent a week in the wonderful company of Kajedo at Findhorn Hinterland, with educational tours around the site, a wee bit of tree planting (10 trees I brought from the allotment), a bit of tree protection maintenance - and a LOT of gorse removal!
Kajedo Wanderer, Land Manager at Findhorn Hinterland Trust, introduced me to this aspect of conservation, for which many thanks.
Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system. In contrast to Indigenous worldviews, much of Western farming methods are unsustainable: their industrialized methods are highly dependent on non-renewable resources, poison land and water, reduce biodiversity, and remove billions of tons of topsoil from previously fertile landscapes. Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from "permanent agriculture", but was later adjusted to mean "permanent culture", incorporating social aspects as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming. The term was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, who formulated the concept in opposition to Western industrialized methods and in congruence with Indigenous or traditional knowledge. The ethics on which permaculture builds are:
The principles of permaculture design principles are:
Ten trees will be planted for every adult and child across the Glasgow city region in streets, deprived areas and derelict spaces over the next decade as part of a new urban woodland designed to tackle climate change, benefit wildlife and boost public well-being.
This will result in around 18 million new trees, increasing woodland cover in the region from 17 per cent to 20 per cent in ten years. Planting will be carried out along the principle of ‘the right tree in the right place’, with new trees to go up in areas of deprivation, former coal-mining sites, vacant and derelict land, urban streets and other civic places. Trees are one of the most effective natural means of sucking up harmful greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. Around 29,000 hectares of broadleaved woodland already exists in the area, but these are in fragmented patches due to urban development. The new plans aim to connect these trees, helping to restore nature and boost biodiversity. The pandemic has brought into focus like never before the value of local spaces as places to exercise, de-stress and engage with nature, and this project can help to deliver the green recovery. |
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