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.
