Holy Headline!

By ‘C’:

High summer is when the chalk grassland of the Chilterns is robed in the most gorgeous floral finery:

When The Queen finally gets to deliver her speech to a new parliament, Her Majesty will not be dressed more superbly than the humble downs.  (IMHO.  Wonder if one could still get sent to the Tower for comments like that?)

The only drawback is that all that growth means it is sometimes not so easy to see where one is putting one’s feet, and so stay the right way up on the scarp.  There are plenty of rabbit-holes, ant-hills, etc to upset the unwary:

The site manager being a little delayed this morning, gave us the opportunity to wonder what the crop in the blue field was, which we could see from the RV point.  Linseed seemed the most likely answer. 

(What’s the difference between flax and linseed?  Nothing really!  They are the same species: Linum usitatissimum.  It’s just that the plant is/was more commonly known as ‘flax’; and its seed, ‘linseed’.  This can cause some confusion if someone goes to a health-food shop to buy omega-3-rich linseed or flaxseed, and is faced with a bewildering range of products with different names.)

Our main job today was to re-inforce a line of ‘exclosure’ fencing with some chestnut paling.  The little area from which predating deer, rabbits, etc are to be kept out does not, of itself, look terribly interesting:

Certainly not when compared with the view the other way:

The enclosed area, however, is an experimental site: one of only ten in the country, which are  subjects of a long-term study.  For the past 45 years, scientists have visited the spot annually to measure the growth of the scrub, and so determine what happens if there is no intervention at all on the land – no input from humans, no input from grazing animals.

The first, and physically most challenging, task was to haul materials up the slope:

There was no easy way to do that.  Nor was there any particularly easy way to unroll each delivery of paling.  (Let me never complain again about not being able to find the end of a spool of sellotape, or that a loo-roll refuses to unwind!)

Fortunately, the actual installation of the paling was something which was very suited to the Green-Gym way of teamwork and devising the best techniques as we go along:

“We’re pretty good at fencing, I think” 

(Yup: it’s comic-book criminals who are very poor fencers)

“This seems to call for a high degree of trust”

Biff!  Boff!  Crash!  Most of the job done in no time, it seemed. 

Then it was time for a well-earned break.  Refreshments were unusually highly-organized this morning:

A new line: a no-added-sugar alternative to cake

Drinks colour-coded: orange mugs – café au lait; blue mugs – tea;
and in between, designer mugs – black coffee

In the second half, there were a few finishing touches to be put to our section of the fence-line:

The upgraded exclosure is not yet complete, for the three rolls of chestnut paling were not quite sufficient to cover the whole length:

That gap, however, could be left to another day – and to someone else.

Meantime, we could spread across the grassland, and continue with the never-ending job of keeping down encroaching scrub.  Any species of tree could be removed, with the exception of juniper, which is a rarity.  Wild rose and hawthorn, for instance, are pretty; and it seemed a shame to take out them.  All the same, they are not wanted where they are in the wrong place.  The target scrub came in different sizes, but so did the ‘tree popper’ tools. 

Some targets were more tenacious than others:

This might be tricky, for instance.  But Green-Gymmers are good at fast thinking and team work, as well as zapping things.  In an instant, the session leader had realised this situation called for another pair of hands and, presumably, the bat grade of tree popper:

At session end, I hope all volunteers felt more than just a slight twinge of satisfaction.  Especially as our morning had not been spent at the expense of the misfortune of others – unless one counts the rabbits, deer, etc who will, when the exclosure is completed, have to seek somewhere else to dine.