Ending quietly

Should you happen to take in the latest WW2 movie, and find yourself wondering why
the landscape Brad Pitt & Co are “heroically” fighting their way across, looks more like English chalk-hill countryside than anything in Central Europe, that’s because it is.  

Brad Pitt & his tank crew were actually trundling across South Oxfordshire.  Indeed Green-Gymmers may instantly recognize the backdrop in the trailer, because action scenes for ‘Fury’ were filmed on land adjacent to the site where we were working today.  (Turn left at the top of the slope, and they’d come to Cowleaze Wood and Aston Rowant National Nature Rerserve, guaranteed free of death-dealing Wehrmacht.)

We, by contrast, do not generally disturb the normal peace & quiet of the Chilterns.  War may never end quietly, but Green Gym does:

Today was no exception.  Trees were being coppiced – all part of woodland management – but only with handtools.  The particular soundscape generated by a banter of Green-Gymmers is all just part of the normal countryside mix: the rasp of sawblades, the squeal of loppers, clink of billhook, crackle of bonfire, chatter among the workforce.

The task was, quite simply, to bring together: unwanted scrub; and bonfire. 

This meant that we were, for the most part, handling decidedly spikey plants (thick gloves a ‘must’).  For the species which were designated for eradication from the particular part of the site – so that other species could get a look in – were hawthorn and bramble. 

Some hazel was also to be cut back, but they were only being coppiced for the sake of being encouraged to grow back more vigorous and healthy.  And the couple of crab apple trees (Malus sylvestris) were spared, partly because they are more unusual, and partly because of their value to wildlife: 

• the long and early flowering period makes for a good source of nectar and pollen for insects, incl bees
• the leaves are a food-source for the caterpillars of several kinds of moth
• the fruit is eaten by birds and mammals, incl mice, voles, and badgers
• the whole tree is one of the few which host a plant whose cultural significance comes into its own in December (clue: a fan listens to ‘Under the Mistletoe’ at Christmas time; a Belieber listens to it year round)

By session end, as always, you could see where we had been.  Had we completed the task?  No!  There will still be plenty to do next time we are there.  By which time, as one Green-Gymmer, observed, there may be snow on the ground.

Where there’s a willow

... there’s a way, observed one of our volunteers this morning.

Armistice Day 2014 dawned red …

then faded to field-grey.  And we, Wallingford Green Gym, wound up considerably more than ankle-deep in water – but only the limpid waters of a Chilterns chalk-stream. 

For two minutes, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we did pause in silence.  And doesn’t it feel different keeping the 2-min silence outdoors!  For many volunteers this was the first time they experienced hearing the wind whistling over field, brook, and trees during that time, even a farmyard cockerel not so far off, and – a few seconds behind us – a distant piece of ordnance at RAF Benson. 

The rest of the working time this morning was dedicated to the almost year-round business of keeping water channels clear of excess plant-life.  Except that on this occasion there was also the business of clearing banks of invasive willow before we could start bringing in the heavy loads of vegetation cut from the stream:

A chalk stream is a very exclusive natural neighbourhood.  98% of the world’s chalk streams are in 12 English counties.  Ewelme Brook is typical:

• the water is pure, the same temperature year-round, and an even flow
• the stream runs reasonably fast, but shallow (hence safe for us to work in)
• the base is gravel, which makes for a good place for fish to spawn on
• the little shrimps, snails, etc living in the vegetation make a good spread of food for fish
• the fish and the plants – some of them – make for good food for humans (no, we don’t down tools to hunt for our elevenses, or even a bite to take home for lunch!)

While the chalk-stream may be one of the few habitats almost exclusive to this country, specifically central southern England, one of the plants which flourishes in that habitat – watercress (Nasturtium officinale) – is prized across Europe and Asia, even in places where it is not so easy to grow.  Very nutritious it may be, but there is such a thing as having too much watercress swaying, especially where is little scope for a stream to alter its course.  Those of us who’ve worked at this site before have got used to doing the counter-intuitive thing and pulling up great heaps of the stuff and flinging it on to the bank:

By half-way in the session (which was when I had to leave to go to the paid job), a length of bank had been cleared.  Willow rods were being stored with their toes in the water – for collection later.  And volunteers were wondering if they had any use for the wood.  “Make me a willow cabin at your gate?” suggested one.  (Will Shakespeare, Twelfth Night I v – Green-Gymmers are a cultured crew.)

I look forward to hearing whether anyone from the group did put their name down for a bundle or two – and hope people didn’t get too wet.  The serious rain didn’t appear to start until around lunchtime.

Wellie-boots on the ground

“A nipping and eager air” first thing this morning!  Or so it felt after the record-setting, T-shirts-laid-up-for-winter-unearthing warmth of Hallowe’en.

The only climatic problem we had experienced ahead of today’s session was bad weather in cyber-space.  Almost every time I sent an email to an AOL address, mailer-daemon would come back to me complaining “Mail server for ‘aol.com’ unreachable for too long”.  But not always.  Sometimes a ‘Failure Notice’ would arrive after a reply which told me my original email had arrived safely at the first time of asking.

The only weather-related problem experienced during the session was that a few impudent drops of rain began to fall before session end.  On the re-start, rain started to fall heavily just as we were getting back in our cars to go home.

In the meanwhile, we had sight of the first new hat of the season:

Headgear inspired by the French onion-trade

The all-important tea-break (this week featuring toffee cake, lemon-drizzle cake, and pumpkin sweets) took place around the first fire of the season:

We do, of course, also do a fair amount of working out.  Hence one of our members remarking that she had lost half a stone since starting Green Gym.  (Well done!)

The task before tea, alas, did not prove a popular one.  “Preparing ground for Cornfield Annuals”, we had been told.  To which the response from any experienced Green-Gymmer is, “How exactly are we to prepare the ground?”  Any relief that we were only being asked to “rake over to produce a fine tilth” after the soil had been dug over by a rotavator, was soon dispelled by the discovery that many of the grass roots were still attached to some remarkably clingy soil.  Moreover, that grassroots which had been detached by the power digger, promptly re-attached themselves to the rake-heads.

There followed a hunt for every fork, garden-, digging-, or pitch-, that we could lay our hands on, to replace the rakes.  Even so, this proved to be one of those tasks where we could only say that we had done our best. 

All changed after the break.  An advance party had already collected some of the brash from the cyclical cutting back of willow re-growth, to get the bonfire going.  Green-Gymmers could then alternate tasks of collecting and wheel-barrowing logs for wood-burning stove, collecting and carrying brash for the bonfire, and reducing said brash to lengths short enough for immediate consignment to the flames.

There was not time to move all the logs out of the fen* area, so some were left by the side of one of the walkways.  If the Green-Gymmer below looks as if he is concentrating very hard, like a sportsman …

that’s because he is a sportsman, and was lining up a shot:

*Until I began Green Gym, I had not fully appreciated that there are many different types of wetland to be conserved – and that therefore the many different words used in English for wetland have quite specific meanings.  A ‘fen’ is a sub-category of ‘mire’, which in turn should be distinguished from the category ‘marsh’:

Marsh             inundated with surface water; mineral soils (no peat)

Mire                permanently waterlogged; peat-based

   Mire-fen      

• groundwater or spring-fed, so …
• nutrient-rich and neutral-alkaline (typically pH 6.5-9)
• sedge and grass dominated vegetation
• peat laid down slowly

   Mire-bog     

• rainfall-fed, so …
• nutrient-poor and acidic (typically pH c 4)
• acidophilic vegetation
• peat laid down quickly (1-2 mm pa)

 The markers for a fen:

• Peat ½ m thick
• Base-rich

At Withymead the peat is just thick enough to qualify as ‘fen’ (measured at sample points, July 2014).  At the very bottom – 3.6 m down – is the gravel of Thames river bed.  Also lots of shells!  During the summer those of us lucky enough to be there when the hydrologist took his core samples, saw finds which included an ammonite which could easily be 10,000 years old.

10,000 years later, on the present surface of the Earth, we were just glad to get the task to a good finishing point before the serious rain set in.