Trees may be slow but forests are fast. That’s how it seems to me in our Welsh woods. We were honoured last year with a visit from the Royal Forestry Society (or at least its North Wales Division), and I recalled how things have changed in the 29 years we have been in charge.
What is still recognizable are the contours; slopes of five hundred feet or so from the valley to a ridge, commanding a huge view across the sea towards the Wicklow Hills, and south to the rocky north face of Cader Idris (a mountain more noted for its bulk than its height). That is the airy mountain component. The rushy glen is the course of the Afon Dwynant, from a few springs high on the hill to a burbling, occasionally rushing stream as wide as a country road that eventually tips into the estuary of the Mawdach. The estuary is lined with what is termed ‘Atlantic Oak Woodland’, a precious zone where contorted oaks thrust up from a bed of boulders with only moss and ferns for company. Last year there was no rain for week after week. The hillside springs were dry, with a surprising effect: without moisture they appeared as brown, even scorched, patches in the grass and heather.
The rotation of a commercial forest (as much of ours is) is about sixty years. The tallest remaining trees from the last major plantation , in the 1990s, are spruces almost a hundred feet high and larches, perhaps eighty feet but incomparably beautiful, their delicate canopies soaring on ramrod trunks to form airy colonnades.
Foresters talk about ‘yield-class’, a figure denoting the number of cubic metres of timber produced in a year per hectare – depending, of course, on many factors. Inevitably, sadly, the star performers are always the aggressive Sitka spruce, black in the landscape, spiky to touch. They don’t seem to care if it’s bog or rock; you don’t even have to plant them; their self-sown seedlings sprout everywhere. Foresters say ‘re-gen’, often so dense that it needs ‘re-spacing’.
Our policy is to leaven our money-making blocks of Sitka with admixtures of other conifers, usually larch, or a scattering of broadleaves, which could be beech, birch (which comes up anyway), alder, wild cherry or even Norway maple. Oak is too slow in getting started. Larch, tragically, is suffering and dying from a virulent form of Phytophthora. The lovely Western hemlock, with drooping sprays of bright apple green, is prolific, and can be vigorous enough to hold its own – though sadly sawmills, the market for all our trees, have problems using it and prefer the conventional spruce. Then there is birch and rowan, the sweet-smelling gorse, and of course bracken and brambles. The forest is never dull.
