By the Session Leader
Photographs by ‘C’ and Mick
Some plants just don’t seem to know what
season it is. Are these touches of
autumn colour in the town we are named for – or symptoms of stress from the
long dry spell?
And on site this morning, there was some ivy
which was looking seriously off-colour:
Perhaps because it sensed that Green Gymmers
were coming ;) If so , it need not have worried,
because today we were engaged on other tasks, some familiar, some new.
Today’s venue – Mowbray Fields Nature Reserve
– is one of the smaller ones in our schedule; and, at Didcot, right on the edge
of ‘our patch’. Small it may be, but the
briefing still required use of the noticeboard map to explain what needed doing
where:
One task was one we have frequently done at this
time of year: to give path-edges their summer-end trim.
During the first half of the session this was
the job which took most pairs of hands.
Inevitably, this also meant turning up the odd
bit of litter. Not all plastic bags
carried with us, though, were for rubbish.
Some were for the workers’ seasonal reward: blackberries, ripe for the
picking.
And not all the rubbish fell into the category
‘empty drinks containers’:
Indeed, one ‘found object’ led to a whole new
venture for Green Gym, after the break.
Meanwhile, those of us on the outer edge of
the nature-reserve zone could, when we turned round, see one of the other teams
at work. The other tasks being
undertaken we could hear pretty much all the time:
The tree-care team was engaged on an operation
which I think was new to us: removing lower limbs, mostly for the sake of making
it easier for those who mow the grass.
Here the site warden is explaining where best to make the cuts:
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| Silver Birch before |
Which branches needed removing, was easy to
establish: everything reaching down to below head-height. Which meant reaching up to cut at a sensible point.
Progress was rapid. As one volunteer cheerfully explained:
Well it’s an easy measure. If you hit your head, chop it off. The branch that is, not your head.
– Yes, clarification needed!
The destructive element of this meant it was
certain to appeal to a certain Green-Gym mindset. Also the chance to tool up with implements we
do not often get to use:
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| No, it's not a katana! |
What also appealed to the volunteers was the
aesthetic side. As the pile of cuttings
grew ever greater, so the shaven subjects appeared to better advantage: “The
trees do look better for having their hemline lifted.”
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| Silver Birch after |
The noisiest of the other undertakings was
the province of the site warden. She was
using the brush-cutter, to reduce the vegetation in a section of the (currently
dry) fill-pond area. Walking the path
round the site, I knew there was a site warden down there somewhere:
All that growth is very pretty, but it requires
active management, in the form of regularly cutting back and removing the risings
so that the wide range of species is maintained – and the fill-pond does not
get filled in with decaying plant life.
When the brush-cutter paused, one could hear
more clearly the other sounds of conservation work:
During the first half of the session, this
was literally workman at work: just one volunteer, banging in staples to the boards
of a bridge walkway.
This was a job we have doing been on off for
several sessions at this site. Today the
idea was that the ‘stapling’ part would be completed. The now redundant chickenwire can be taken up
another time. And at first the person
who volunteered – one of those with the knack of thumping the staples home
first time of asking (well most of the time anyway) – was confident of having
the job done by tea-break.
Well, come tea-break, the hammerer still had
several planks to go to the end. So, after
revitalising caffeine and cake, we redeployed our forces for the second
half. Some – fewer pairs of hands this
time – carried on with trimming hawthorn and bramble from path edges, and reducing
the lower growth on the trees in the ‘rec’ area of the site. The stapling squad, on the other hand, was
doubled in strength:
Another task force was formed, to tidy up
areas where the site warden had been brush-cutting. This largely meant raking:
Occasionally it involved comparing size of
points on different makes of rake: some points are slightly longer and sharper
than others! (Like the different settings on
a pencil sharpener.) Also discussion of
the advantages of electronic tuning forks.
(Prompted, I think, by sight of a pitchfork.)
The other benefit of joining that team was a
close-up look at some of the vegetation.
The ‘bulrushes’, for instance, which turned out to be False Bulrushes,
aka Reedmace (Typha latifolia). Or this Red Bartsia (Odontites vernus):
It may seem a shame to be cutting and composting this, but
it is a species which actually likes disturbance; so thrives on the programme
of cyclical clearance at this site. For
such a small area, and one so close to a major town, this reserve is home to a
remarkably large and diverse set of species, including 200 different kinds of
insects. [I was glad, though, that I had doused myself in eucalyptus-oil insect repellent
before going out this morning: I’m not so great a nature lover that I would appreciate
constantly being visited by little critters. – Ed.]
At this spot, too, there was an ever-growing
heap of cuttings:
The pile was nicknamed by its keepers as “the
grass monster”. If you looked very closely
you could see that after another load had been delivered, the heap carried on
moving for some minutes, as it resettled itself.
We did try to record this on video, but unsuccessfully, so you will have
to take our word for it that this ‘still’ does not do justice to the beast:
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| Mick estimates the height of this at almost 2 metres. |
While all that was going on, another intrepid
Green-Gym duo was taking on another mission, this one definitely a first for
us. Another piece of litter needed
attending to. First it had to be fished
out of the brook, preferably without either volunteer tumbling in:
Once landed, it could be fully admired, and
identified. This particular specimen belongs
to a well-known retailer, which has a branch in central Didcot:
Come session end, one by one teams returned
to ‘HQ’ (site warden’s landie). The
fishermen proudly wheeled in their very clean and shiny catch. (It will be returned to the trolley-pool of its
home store, if the owners want it back.)
The staplers had also completed their task:
This may not look exciting, but the slightly
higgledy surface underfoot will make the bridge a much safer route for members
of the public out enjoying a walk when boards become slippery with damp. As will happen often enough over the winter.
So, one by one volunteers could be ticked off
the Session Leader’s list as safely returned.
Then the steady flow of returning Green-Gymmers paused. There were two missing.
We knew where they had been: undertaking tree
care. The natural assumption was that
they were carrying on to the last moment in a characteristic Green-Gym desire to
try to achieve perfection. [Which, of course, is always out of reach in
this sublunary world. – Ed.] When
they eventually returned to base, however, it turned out that they had done
another characteristic Green-Gym thing: they had responded to a request from another
person, who was quite independently doing Good and Noble Things on site, and who
spotted that Green-Gymmers had just the right tools to help out with another
little job. On this occasion: cutting
back brambles which were blocking a gate entrance on the other side of the
site.
So at last all Green-Gymmers were accounted
for, safe and sound. Before we left,
we could see a family already enjoying a picnic in the newly-cleared area
beneath one of the trees. – Which you will have to gaze at in your mind’s eye,
as none of us were going to whip out a camera to record an image with small
children disporting themselves, however charming the scene appeared.
