How to get to a place of bliss (legally and safely)

By ‘C’:

Access to places where the general public is not admitted, is one of the occasional treats of Green Gym.  Today we were in Paradise. 

Yes, really: Paradise Wood – the largest collection of timber trials in Britain.  All the extraordinary compartments we walked past to the one where we were to work, are scientific experiments in progress.  This one in particular, we thought, was quite magical in appearance:

Paradise Wood is so large, it would be quite easy to get lost among the trees.  That didn’t happen, but we did have two lost souls outside the gate.  They had arrived just that fraction too late at the RV point, and had been unable to attract the attention of the rest of us by calling out.  Eventually, they managed to make contact by that wonderful modern invention, the mobile phone; and ‘St Peter’ walked over with a key to admit them.

Meanwhile, the working party had been guided to the right ‘heaven’: a comparative study of companion trees for walnut.  The secondary planting here was hazel.  The ideas is that companion trees could supply shelter for the timber trees while they are small, encourage the timber trees to grow tall and straight, and discourage “epicormic growth”.  (That’s low, side branches – the point being that knots reduce the value of timber.)

Hazel itself is also a crop.  So we were detailed to progress the task of harvesting: coppicing and processing hazel rods. 

One team worked on processing what had been cut by a previous work-group.  Thin rods were cleaned up, and sent for binders (min. 8’), while sturdy rods were fashioned into stakes (6’):

In the course of this, we found once again that the billhook is a wonderfully versatile tool.  Also that a trestle can be improvised from almost anything – here the pile of stout logs for firewood:

There were almost no left-overs, for the remaining brash would be useful in due course.  The last action, by the final working-party in this compartment this season, will be to pile brash over the freshly coppiced stools.  The entire wood is secured all-round with deer- (and people-)proof fencing; but still the deer manage to get in, and relish nothing better than fresh shoots for breakfast.  The volunteers at the locked gate would not have had to have been kept waiting for the porter (“Oh dear!”) if they had been Bambi and the Great Prince.

Meanwhile, the second, larger party was engaged on cutting down more hazel.  This could, on occasion, be a two-person job, especially to extract some of the larger pieces:

The coppicing was a tad haphazard to begin with.  By tea-break, however, the usual Green-Gym desire for order had prevailed.  Cuttings were soon being sorted into piles of different materials:

There was even some preliminary processing taking place:

By session end, there was still plenty to do.  But there are plenty of other working-groups scheduled for this task.  Having left the site in a tidy, orderly state (and retrieved all the different tools: billhooks, bowsaws, pruning saws, and loppers) we could return to the world beyond the gate with a clear conscience.