More trees, please

“A morning mainly involving digging/planting rather than the destruction/fire that some prefer!!” was the session leader’s summary of the programme for today.

It was to be a return visit to some familiar sites in Benson, including: 

Warwick Spinney, April 2018

In spring that spot, especially on a warm and sunny day – which today was, at least to start with – can be quite pleasant.  It is not, however, a noted sitooterie.  (Yes, that is now an officially recognized word in the Oxford English Dictionary.)  Or perhaps we should say the place is not much of a sitooterie yet.  Maybe it will be, once Green Gym and other volunteers have worked through the programme for management of the land.

Not much sitting around and admiring the place for us this morning!  The task was to plant little trees along fence-lines: plugging gaps in the existing tree cover in two locations in the village, Sunnyside and Warwick Spinney.  Not quite farming in the city stuff, but doing countryside things in a more built-up area than we usually work in, if I’m not mistaken.  (Do I hear 21?)

At the Spinney, planting involved some lopping of branches of existing trees, plus other clearance to make room for the new ones to grow.  – Although much of the preliminary work had already been done by a small Green-Gym party earlier this year, so that the tree-planting detail would not fetch up “stuck on a wire, out on a fence.”

WGG working and New Year celebrating party, 1 Jan 2019

Fence-line cleared, ready for the next team