The colour of the day

By ‘C’:

After ‘Blue Monday’ comes Green Tuesday. 

Now the first of those – the supposed ‘saddest day of the year’ (northern hemisphere only) – may be a myth.  In any case, totally does not apply to some cohorts of the population.  Fans of the Green Bay Packers, for example, who are still in celebratory mode:

“Go, Pa-a-ack!”

I give you, instead: Green Tuesday.  That’s not punk- or Day-Glo-green.  Or feeling-nauseous or eat-up-your-greens green.  Or jealous-of-people-doing-paid-work-in-offices green.  It’s green as in leafy ‘green spaces’: outdoors, communing with nature.  Green the colour of hope, serenity, and growth.  Green as in today, 17-1-17: first ‘normal’ session of the new year for Wallingford Green Gym.

‘Normal’ it may have been today.  Well as normal as it gets at WGG.  Nevertheless (“Hurray! a break from watercress”), there was a departure from the pattern of recent sessions.  For although we were once more in watercress-country (aka Benson/Ewelme area), and it was certainly watery enough in places, our tasks today were on solid ground: coppicing old trees; and planting new ones.  In both cases, hazel.

Actually the “old” trees to be coppiced were only some 10 years old.  The grove where they had been planted is coppiced on a rotational basis, to harvest rods.  The first compartment had been coppiced last season.  Our task was to service the next 4 x 8 section of trees:

Note the volunteer standing by on the right, to deliver cut wood over the fence on to the meadow, where it would be sorted, trimmed, and stacked:

It would not have been WGG if there were not at some point a (mock) complaint from workforce to management, plus a (friendly) demarcation dispute between volunteers.  The ‘dispute’ was between lopper-wielders and porters.  The ‘complaint’ was that we were only allowed to coppice one-sixth of the grove.  Green-Gymmers would gladly have done the lot.  Indeed they were putting the finishing touches to the job by tea-break:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the (small) meadow, another team had been engaged on the next stage of a long-term project to reclaim land for nature.  Some years ago, we had removed the plastic sheeting and other detritus of a former market-gardening enterprise.  Then there had been a long wait to see what (if anything) spontaneously grew in the newly liberated earth.  The answer had proved to be: nothing of great interest.  So now we moved in to plant more hazel, but here not in regimented columns and rows.

The planting itself followed the usual pattern for ‘whips’.  Dig hole/slot …

plant whip …

“This isn’t a whip – it’s a whippet[te]!”

then heel in:

What was different today was that when all the new trees had been moved in, each had to be dressed with a bowtie:

The idea was that over the summer it would help prevent them from being run over by the mower.

Similarly, the planned footpath was demarcated from some of the wood from a larger tree, which had been removed from among the maturing hazel grove:

Now that tree-planting was underway, it also seemed a good time to remove sections of redundant low-railing.  This was undertaken with some relish.  Partly using tools, to lever railings away from posts …

and partly by brute force and ignorance, to loosen posts before pulling them out by hand:

After tea-break, it was mostly a matter of clearing up the cut wood.  Some volunteers also went out on missions to seek and destroy bramble, which if left to its own devices would only encroach on to hazel grove.  While others bravely took on the task of raking the pond.  Leaning out with the rake, and pulling it back, was a task for one person:

Levering the rake-load out on to dry land, however, took two pairs of hands:

What the camera cannot capture in that situation is the smell.  Today, however, was a normal Green-Gym session.  So no seasonal get-together.  So volunteers did not have to worry if they would be in a fit state after the session to walk into a pub/café.

STOP PRESS

Proof that serious discussions do continue after the end of a WGG session:

On this occasion, volunteers were evidently not in the position of having to go straight home and under the shower.  A report has just come in that over a post-Green-Gym coffee at a noted local eating establishment overlooking a marina, they attempted to address the question: "How much do sea levels change due to variations in barometric pressure?"  Top-of-the-head calculations apparently yielded results ranging from 3" to 3'.  Our correspondent adds, "Further scientific studies will now be undertaken, and results given out next Tuesday."