Late winter in the shire, and what better time to rejoin the assault on the laurel. I usually leave the business of the wood to the Crossley menfolk. Neil has set himself a ten year target of clearing all the laurel, and perhaps more importantly finds the work therapeutic when he is here. For the boys, some hacking and felling provides a quick (if not easy) means to earn some money, with the added bonus of burning bonfires thrown in. When we arrived here in 2019, the wood edge was a dark evergreen wall with nothing able to grow underneath the vast leaf canopies.
Neil made the first massive inroads into the wall (see previous posts), followed by Elliot and Sam flexing their muscles during lockdown. Steady progress, but then you walk around and see stumps sprouting new growth, and decapitated trunks suckering more offspring. This means there is always the sense that you should be in there every day, that every little piece of work makes a difference, and that not working in there will somehow invite a laurel torrent back into the garden. So it was that with the Crossley men tied up with international law and academia, I called on my brother Mick to come and do a few days lumberjacking. With the insouciance of years of chainsaw-wielding, he rapidly felled and logged some hefty specimens, along with some precariously hanging deciduous trees (‘hanging’ is when a tree’s fall is blocked by another’s canopy or branches). Work started around the original gateway into the wood, opening up the space and allowing more light onto the ditch where Neil had planted lots of wild garlic and native bluebells. Ground ivy had extended a couple of metres out from the evergreens, to a thickness that crushed a band of snowdrops. While Mick was toiling over logs, I was peeling back the ivy carpet, and within a day the snowdrop shoots had greened up and were fully upright. We cherish tree ivy as a late season food source for pollinators, but this creeping blanket required some maintenance for balance.
Some of the older laurels are multi-stemmed, with up to four or five trunks snaking and coiling away from the core, and each has its own huge crown of bitter, plasticky leaves. Younger ones can be 4-5 metres tall, but with trunks less than a handspan. If I have been finicking around in the garden on planting details (or if the weather is just too bad) it can feel quite satisfying to grab a handsaw and go and take down a few smaller trees. Ten minutes sawing and you have created another pool of light. That satisfaction lasts up to the point where you contemplate the mountain of leafy branches now lying in front of you, most probably squishing those precious spring flowers you have been busy boasting about. And this is how we come to have multiple teepees of laurel brash around the wood edge and, as the felling moves deeper into the patch, inside the wood too. Trunks and poles are cut in situ, or stacked to be cut to size later, and then we stack and build the bonfire heaps. Laurel leaves contain cyanide, released as an acrid smoke when burning, so wind direction needs to be constant before you commit to lighting, and even then you have to step clean away at regular intervals to avoid the ‘laurel headache’. Bonfires may be frowned upon, but three acres’ worth of leathery, toxic leaves are not just going to compost or rot away, especially as even a cut laurel twig will seize the briefest exposure to soil to re-root and start growing.
The clearing around the main ride brings drifts of snowdrops and better views of the superb sequoias in our neighbours’ garden at the manor house. We know the house and gardens date to the 1860’s, and that our house (formerly a barn) was at the centre of the model farm built to supply the manor. The Victorians were passionate plant collectors, and bragging rights came with ‘trophies’ such as exotic trees, ferns, orchids and so on. About an hour from here in mid-Wales there is a grove of coastal and giant redwoods at the Charles Ackers memorial grove at Naylor Pinetum (beautifully photographed in https://onelifeonetree.com/news/cathedral-of-trees-the-uks-very-own-sequoia-grove-in-wales) so perhaps it is not fanciful to imagine our friendly giants were part of that original shipment of saplings which made it across the Atlantic. However they came to be here, we are grateful for their cinnamon-trunked splendour and the echoes they evoke of the UK’s own - now almost completely vanished - temperate rainforests.
I pick up the wood work when I return from Dubai, but three storms in quick succession, lack of manpower, and a badly infected finger (bramble injury) drives me back to my borders and plans. We have surprisingly little storm damage: predictable attrition on the westerly wood edge where the winds race up over the farmland, but we have just one huge old birch down near the main entrance. And while the winds were howling, the redwoods simply sway, the favourite vantage point for our ravens, home to countless woodpeckers, and reminders that you plant trees for the generations to come.
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