Our Social Forestry projects have targeted a range of disadvantaged groups from NEET’s (Not in Employment Education or Training) to women offenders. This time we are engaging members of Telford’s black and ethnic minority.

We have managed to gain some funding to buy a minibus, bought cheaply courtesy of Hitachi Capital, which allows us to pick people up from the town centre. As a result this broadens participation and removes another barrier to exploring the forestry sector.

The group arrived on site back in June to discover what just a few months neglect can do to a bivouac camp. They have now, however, got the place tidied up, restrung the tarps and begun small woodland projects of their own. Their projects have begun with simple tasks to understand basic jointing techniques and they have utilised their new knowledge with more advanced projects such as chair making. It is wonderful how their experiences and learning from their homelands has filtered through to the project and given them a sense of belonging.

The project is aimed at members of the BME community from Telford who potentially experience issues around wellbeing and isolation and as a result often the most valuable time is spent chatting over a campfire cooked lunch or storm kettle tea.

Discussions are often about the similarities and differences between the landscape here in the UK and from their native countries. One of the key outcomes of this type of project is to enable people to better identify and take ownership of their local landscape. With understanding come’s respect, and a desire to preserve.

This is a good arena for people to spend time chatting, as often much of their daily routine is segregated either by work or at the place of worship. This was a surprise as at the beginning of the project the anticipation was that we may need to run a women only day, apparently not !

All of the participants have involved themselves in helping each other with their respective projects and there is a good social rapport which continues on a weekly basis, discussing topics which have a common theme between them, and their experiences.

We continue to observe ways in which we can widen the participation within our social forestry groups, and, this week we had staff from West Mercia Probation team come out to the site to see what it is all about. They had a great time, although one or two had to be persuaded that they probably wouldn’t get to finish making a chair in one day! They also discovered that good spoon carving is not as easy as it might first appear. However, we hope that despite aching wrists they will be better placed to refer relevant people from the probation service who may benefit from the therapeutic nature of the environment, as well as, creating craft and managing trees within the woodland.

The challenge ahead now lies with getting some management done, Ash trees need thinning and coppicing, young Oaks need the light and formative pruning and the large Crack Willows need bringing down to size!

The tree needs the forest more than the forest needs the tree

However, the question arises as to whether we have got this the right way round. The conventional view was that a forest is made up of thousands of trees and that the forest depends on the trees, but some more recent thinking reverses this and suggests that the tree depends more on the forest: the tree needs the forest to originate the seed from which it grows, to create the ecosystem which nourishes it and to create the protective cloak within which it can survive. This may shed some light on how we can best create, protect or even change our forests – should we be looking at changing the trees or be thinking in terms of whole-forest changes?

National forest: creation or adoption?

Efforts in the last couple of decades to create new national forests (understood as protected areas with a good proportion of trees but also many clear areas) have had mixed success. Some initiatives have been criticised as if they are mostly re-badging wooded areas and announcing how many trees there are and what acreage of forest there is in these areas, rather than nurturing the complex ecosystems that sustain healthy forests.

Forests fight back against the cult of the conifer

This way of thinking, forests over trees, may well explain why it is so difficult to change the nature of a woodland – it’s not just a question of felling a few thousand trees and planting up different species. In dozens of deciduous woodlands we have seen that the coniferisations of the 1960s and 1970s are not in fact forest-changing: the original species thankfully continue to pop up as “weeds”and as edge species. The dominant idea in the post-war years that plantations should be created on ancient woodland was always an environmental disaster, and this is the area where some of the most important conservation work is currently being done in UK woodlands. Indeed, our researches into what woodland owners are doing suggests that many owners of small woodlands understand this very well and are doing it in their woods.

Woodlands are much more than just collections of trees……

Treating the forest as the dominant story rather than just thinking about the trees also leads to concerns about the recent drive by some organisations to plant more trees in the UK willy-nilly. It may well be that a better objective would be to extend existing forests.  Where a new forest is wanted, it needs to be more than just trees in fields. There have been experiments with taking rolls of forest floor and transplanting them as part of woodlands creation (a sort of giant skin graft), but this approach has not been widely adopted.

Perhaps the problem lies in our perceptions: for as long as most humans perceive a bunch of trees as being a woodland we won’t be motivated to try to recreate the other elements of the ecosystem that make a real forest, if indeed such re-creation is even possible over short periods.

Forestry and woodlands are a long-term business but those of us planting in ’73 can see the fruits of our labours: we stand back and look up at the hornbeam, hazel, hawthorn and fieldmaple spreading wide and high;  the oak, ash, beech and birch are trees, a miraculous metamorphosis from those tiny whips planted during the cold winter months – it seems like yesterday.  We plant for the next generation but once established trees grow quickly so we can all enjoy watching them develop.

National Tree Week isn’t just about planting trees in the right places, its about; conserving and protecting  the trees we have,  focusing on the benefits of trees in our communities and landscape, supporting the many organisations involved in trees and woodlands.

Why do we need National Tree Week?

The Human response to trees as with animals is a paradox, we love animals but we hunt them for pleasure, eat them for food and exterminate when our direct interests are challenged.  Ever since man developed the tools trees have been the main focus of human destruction throughout ancient and modern history.  That paradox is still with us, trees bring so much pleasure and well-being but there is also in many a deep seated suspicion of trees and woodland.  National Tree Week helps to remind us that life on earth simply depends on trees.

National Tree Week also helps to remind us of the need to look after the trees that we have, Andy Byford co-author of  “Forestry recommissioned”) and Plantlife’s Landscape conservation manager is quoted as saying  “we’re living in a time when everyone is rushing to go out and plant trees,  we believe that we need to see better management for the nation’s woodlands, rather than just creating more dull woodlands.  The legacy of the 1960’s/70’s coniferisation of ancient woodland is still with us with 1,000’s of hectares of PAWS (plantations on ancient woodlands) waiting to be restored while there is some chance that the diminished ground flora will re-establish.

Making more use of small diameter wood

Tim Parry is passionate about putting small diameter timber to good use. He has worked in Gloucestershire woodlands for over 25 years after initially training as a tree surgeon. In 1987 he first saw the need for more active woodland management while clearing up windblown timber in Sussex, following the “Great Storm”.  At that point he realised just how much wood goes to waste and he is constantly working out ways to make the most of all the timber produced by coppicing.

Geodome made from hazel rods

His most recent projects are geodesic domes which are light-weight but also enormously strong. The joints are made using sections of old polypropylene drainage pipe with 6 carefully drilled holes. “It’s tough to get the angles right but once it’s built its structure gives it great strength. This one is made from hazel but I have used chestnut which works just as well. This dome could be used as a chicken run, for a roof on a small shed, a cold frame or even a small greenhouse.”  Tim charges £150 for a structure like this. It owes something to Buckminster Fuller with his studies of the use of geodesic domes in construction and his profound recognition that strength through design has many advantages over strength through weight.

Coppicing and coppice materials

Based at Hartpury in Goucestershire, Tim has just launched his own website, which describes the woodland management services that he offers, from fencing to rhododendron control, tree planting, ride mowing and charcoal creation. One reason Tim offers such a wide range of services is to make sure that all parts of the trees he works with are used. He says that estate owners who want coppicing done often don’t care what happens to the wood that is cut. This has prompted him to do charcoal burning, selling firewood and creating fencing materials. Although he doesn’t do hedgelaying himself he does supply hedgelaying materials – mainly stakes and the long poles that go along the tops (“binders”).

Woodland work for new woods-men and woods-women

Like lots of woodland workers, Tim loves simply being in woodlands and when he’s doing a charcoal burn he usually stays overnight. “My main aim in the business, apart from remaining solvent, is to promote the use of small diameter wood”. Although Tim owns his own woodland he mostly works in other people’s woodlands and he has recently been restoring a local 4 acre woodland where he installed a kissing gate, put in stiles, did replanting, coppiced and removed wire from old pig runs. “The main satisfaction was in seeing a small wood improved, looked after and getting it back into productive use. It’s really stunning now.” Such projects have allowed Tim to employ trainees (including his daughter) which keep alive skills such as clefting as well as creating useful work.

Industrial time versus flower time

Time in Britain was not always uniform, but the coming of the railways required a national time to be adopted in the 19th century and the noose of time has been tightened ever since, with more and more precise and widespread measures of “industrial time”: time-keeping devices becoming attached to everything from mobile phones to ovens and fridges.  In the past, various people have proposed clocks which are much more in keeping with nature – Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, designed a floral clock of flower hours in 1751 so that the “time” was shown by the opening and closing of different flowers from the Sow Thistle (5am to 12pm) to the Iceland Poppy (closing at 7pm).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaeus%27_flower_clock

Such a clock will of course vary by season and by latitude but the idea was to plant a garden in such a way that you could tell the time by simply watching the flowers open and close.

Clock time and woodland time

Young children don’t work to clock time but to nature’s time, as every parent discovers: they sleep when they feel the need and eat when they are tired.  Part of their “education” is not only to teach them to tell clock time but to teach them to fit in with patterns that others follow (eating elevenses at eleven) getting up when the alarm clock shows it is time to do so.  Part of the beauty of spending time in a woodland or any wild space is to escape from the demands of clock time and children visiting woodlands seem to value this even more than adults.  They express it in terms of “we could do what we liked” or “we liked the freedom of the woods”.

Many “primitive” societies use natural events to mark the passing of time.  For example the Guarani-Kaiowa indians in Brazil would ask “how many times has the Guavira flowered in your life time?”.  Such nature-centred thinking also leads to festivals being dictated by natural events such as full moons; coastal communities time events in relation to tidal highs and lows.

A woodland owners’ calendar

Some people would like to see diaries and calendars with many more natural events in them (moons, tides, seasons) but this perhaps misses the point of natural time – it is hard to predict and maybe counterproductive to try to do so.  Sometimes we observe that summer has “come early” or the leaf fall is “late” – this is an effort to force nature into the narrow tramlines of our own clock time – we might be better to acknowledge that summer comes at different times and that the woodlands will do what they do when it is right for them: the more in harmony we can get with natural/woodland time then the less we will need to follow our regimented clock time.  People seem to like passing time in woodlands (not “spending time”) to help them escape from the idea that “time is money” and to move away from clock time to natural time.

Now, not six months later our woods have become our church, our playground, our school, the best nature documentary ever, and fascinating in different ways each time we visit. I have become both more ‘possessive’ – wanting to protect it from the harm of uncaring visitors – and at the same time realising that it owns me far more than I can ever own it – I even find myself apologising to an ash tree before I fell it for use in green woodworking; I can only justify it by using all the wood it provides in useful and meaningful ways.

My ignorance grows on each visit as I see more things I can nether name or understand as spring moves on to summer and more aspects reveal themselves. Trees, wildflowers, ferns, lichens, mosses, insects, butterflies, moths, mammals, birds – my ignorance is boundless. Who knew that birdsong reduces enormously once mating and hatching is over – I didn’t. And that woodland wildflowers have to flower and pollinate before the leaf canopy cut off the light – I didn’t. I’m beginning to realise that the woodland is a battlefield – but on a timescale that we hasty humans miss. The struggle for light with trees bending this way and that; the colonisation of the invading fungi armies; the all covering creep of the mosses; the cycle of life and decay; its a wonder I find it a source of relaxation at all!

But; to sit on a stone wall above the boggy bit watching the colours fade into dusk, the smell of woodsmoke from our cooking fire on the air; tired from a day’s physical work and anticipating a night in a hammock in the woods; the cuckoo rests its voice as the otherworldly sound of a pair of nightjars kickstarts its engine; is truly magical and deeply restorative; It makes sense in a profound way I cannot put into words.

I have so many plans and schemes, each visit adds to the list and every job takes time. A few steps added to a footpath have taken me and my brother a day and will take another day at least to finish; carving a tentpeg takes half a hour and I need at least twenty. I have worked all my life ‘selling’ my time, I was ruled by timesheets and ‘chargeable hours’ and now, finally, its all irrelevant. The purpose of carving a tentpeg is to be part of the process, the spray of wet sap from the newly exposed wood, the feel of the drawknife going through the wood adjusting for grain and the flow, the slow reveal of the tentpeg – not perfect but ‘fit for purpose’ – its all reducing my ignorance and adding to my experience, my world is focused on the task in hand with a vague awareness of the woods around and anything beyond might as well be be a different world. Its satisfying beyond measure.

And then there’s the pleasure of sharing, the slow reveal to first-time visitors, the anticipation of their joy; telling the kids to ‘wear old clothes’ because you’re with granddad and you will get dirty, possibly fall over, eat sausages cooked over an open fire, drink water from a stream, climb trees, cross rope bridges and generally indulge in the sort of ‘play’ that you can’t get from an x-box or a ‘risk-averse’ society. Poking at poo with a stick to reveal the beetle cases enclosed; a miniature ‘lost world’ complete with woodlouse dinosaurs on top of a boulder; catching a frog and getting the kids to study it before releasing – its wonderful to lay down these memories in my grandchildren’s minds.

So, yes I can justify the woods. It’s changing me and those around me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated six months ago. Imagine the effect after a year, five years, ten years …..    and to think that the woods will still be telling their story to those who listen long after I’ve gone (possibly buried in the woods and becoming an integral part of their story)

The awards, run by the Royal Forestry Society, recognised the efforts of owners who saw their woods flourish as a result of their personal management and care. Richard Scholfield, of Woodlands.co.uk, presented the awards on the red carpet at Madingley Hall in Cambridge on 30 June.

The Excellence in Forestry Competition moves each year around England, Wales and Northern Ireland on a seven year rotation. Next year, the competition will go to Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Dorset, Cornwall and Avon. So if you are a hands-on owner of a small woodland in any of those areas, and have a success story to tell, do keep an eye on the Royal Society’s call for entries to be announced in the autumn. Your woodland must have been established for at least ten years and be no larger than 20 hectares – there is no minimum area. The Royal Forestry Society will even consider entries for small neighbouring units. We do hope you will participate.

You can read more about this year’s winners and judges’ comments on the Royal Forestry Society website.

Hunted.

Well there is a lot to cover in this subject possibly more than one blog would allow but all the hunting so far falls into two categories; shooting and trapping.   The shooting has all been in woodland, only for species authorised on an open licence and the weapon is a .22 break barrel air rifle.   The traditional approach would have been bow and arrow but hunting with these traditional tools is illegal.   The range and level of accuracy of an air rifle does mean that more skill is required in stalking your prey and indeed the size of game that can be effectively hunted is also limited but that’s why I like it.

Archery skills aside I think it has similar limits in its use to a bow and arrow. If you can stalk well enough, and get close enough to take a head or heart and lung shot then it’s an effective means of humanely dispatching animals. If your stalking skills aren’t up to much then you are never going to get a shot. Animals taken so far have been 1 rabbit, 2 wood pigeons and 3 grey squirrels.

Trapping

Trapping is a game of patience. It’s a percentage game where in a new area you probably need to set 20 traps for every one animal you might catch and of course there are many regulations and concerns about the types of trap you can (or should) use and how to use them. I practice the use of primitive traps, made from all natural materials and I usually favour one of two designs. One is a live capture trap suitable for birds and it is effective for pigeons and crows depending on how it is baited.  The other is a killing type trap that is effective for use with squirrels or rat’s. All traps should be set so they offer no harm to non targeted species and must be checked regularly at least every 24 hours. As I say there are far too many details about trapping to go into here, perhaps another blog on trapping in the future.

So far trapping has provided….1 grey squirrel!  My traps are only set for around 12 hours maximum before I leave the woods and so dismantle the traps and this is much less effective than leaving them set in place and checking them regularly.

So what about the last option?

Gathered meat

Two main sources of gathering meat the first is an easy source…arthropods (insects, crustaceans, myriapods & spiders). Woodlice (crustaceans) are an easy to gather, nutritious source of protein and once you realise they are just ‘Land Prawns’ they are easy to stomach and actually taste just like Prawns. You do need to collect quiet a few for a meal but for me, better a handful of woodlice than a battery farmed piece of chicken.

The other gathering option is the meat that other people (like you lovely readers), kill and leave at the roadside.

Road kill has developed a bit of a name for itself and many people are aware of it as a source of food, but perhaps lack the confidence to know what to do with it. Is it safe, what if it’s been dead a long time, what if flies have laid eggs on it, isn’t it a bit yucky with all it’s guts etc? They are all good questions. Before we go on to look at the answers it is worth remembering a few points. All meat you eat gets killed, has disgusting squishy bits, has the potential to be unsafe to eat (people who never eat road kill still get food poisoning) and may have been dead a long time.

Any road kill no matter how squashed and messy can be made safe to eat with enough preparation and with enough cooking but it can’t all be made to taste great. You just need to ask is it worth it?

To be continued ……

Brown and sweet Bananas

The bananas were easiest. You start by wrapping them in kitchen foil and then put them over a hot fire after the flames have died down but while the embers are very hot. As the picture strip shows, we put them on a metal grille. They have to be turned form time to time to make sure they cook on both sides. Once they are done which took about 10 minutes - but it will depend how hot the fire is – you take them off and open the foil.

The blackened skin can be peeled back with a knife and fork and they can be eaten (you probably cant’ eat these hot squishy bananas in the usual monkey style). It’s even more delicious if you cut them open while they are still hot and put chocolate inside – you can use squares from a chocolate bar or even a chocolate spread such as Nutella.

Caramelised apples cooked by campfire

This is a bit more involved but worth the effort and you need to have remembered to bring sugar, cinnamon and ideally some Granny Smiths apples. The first thing is to spear the apple onto a strong but sharp stick. You will then cook it over the fire which will make it warm, easier to eat and will loosen the skin.

Once you are happy that it is cooked you peel the skin off. I know they say the skin is the healthiest part but you do want them to eat these (don’t you?) and anyway you will want a juicy surface for the sugar and cinnamon to stick to. Next you prepare a plastic bag with the sugar and cinnamon mixed together, using something like 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar and one teaspoon of cinnamon powder. Pop the peeled apple into this bag and shake it around until the apple is coated with the mixture.

Food is always nicer when you’ve cooked it so the cooking part can be done by the children and adults who are to be the consumers. Finally you re-spear the apple and hold it over the fire but quite close and the sugar will caramelise so that it looks a bit like a toffee apple. If it glazes over you are there and if it goes black you’ve gone too far.

Finally, finally comes the eating part. Here you and your fellow cooks will need no instructions.

Annual rings form in temperate trees because the xylem vessels or early wood formed in late spring and early summer (when lots of growth occurs) are wider and lighter than those formed in late summer & early autumn, which are narrower and darker (sometimes called the late wood).  A light and dark ring together constitute one year’s growth.   In winter, there is no growth.

The various branches of dendrochronology (dendroarchaeology, dendroclimatology) are based on the uniformitarian principle.  This says that the various factors that currently influence tree growth and hence tree ring development will have operated in the past.  Through knowledge of these factors (physical and biological) that have influenced current and recent tree ring growth, it is possible when looking at tree ring samples from old wood artefacts / timbers to ‘reconstruct’ the climate of the past.

Dendrochronology is also dependent on cross-dating.  This involves taking a tree species such as Oak and then measuring the size (width) of the annual rings in a series of differently aged samples, but these samples need to overlap in age.  This then enables a profile of tree rings that date back over many hundreds of years to be established.   In fact, using living and relic oaks, scientists have developed an “oak ring chronology” for Europe that dates back many thousands of years (the Holocene Period).  This oak annual ring time line has been used to date various wooden artefacts with great accuracy – timbers from buildings, boat frames, and furniture.

Dendrochronologists have used many wooden artefacts and examined the wood from many different species to build up a picture of when the climate was favourable to tree growth (when the rings would be widely separated from one another), and when conditions were more difficult perhaps due to drought or cold.  The period known as the ‘dark ages’ was characterised by climatic instability, with periods of cold or drought. Professor Baillie ( a tree ring expert from Queens University, Belfast) has suggested that in 540 AD,  a meteor exploded in the upper atmosphere. This surrounded the earth with an ‘envelope’ of dust and ice, which resulted in a drop in global temperature. This may be traced in tree ring samples across Europe, Siberia, North and South America and Scandinavia.  The change in climate lead to poor harvests, possibly the outbreak of disease (The Plague of Justinian) and may have heralded the so called ‘Dark Ages’.

Just as time-lines of growth have been established for certain European trees so the same is true of various North American species.  Such studies have allowed scientists to reconstruct the broad patterns of rainfall covering many hundreds of years.  Tree ring data from Mexico and other parts of North America indicate that there was a severe drought in the sixteenth century, and that this drought extended from Mexico to the boreal forest, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Coast.  The only areas exempt from the drought were coastal regions.  This extended drought coincided with two major epidemics of ‘COCOLIZTLI’ (in 1545 & 1576).  This was a swift and lethal disease, with a high death rate.  It seems to have been a form of haemorrhagic fever, and may have been responsible for the deaths of a large number (millions) of the native population of Mexico.  It has been suggested that the virus ‘escaped’ from rodents, when their populations exploded when wet years followed prolonged periods of drought.  Data from tree rings support the idea that the drought was occasionally interrupted by wet years – as in 1545.