Well where did Summer go so fast? The clocks have gone back to GMT and for me, that signals the end of summer, light nights and the closing down of Mother Nature for a few months. Still there is plenty of greenery and new growth in my woods as well as some lovely autumn colours.
I went there yesterday to do some felling. My chainsaw’s brake broke last time and now I’ve fixed it, I wanted to get busy with some more thinning. I was feeling a bit “trigger happy” – keen to make some more changes but settled on a small, ungainly sycamore with two trunks. It’s close to my work area where I often sit with a mug of coffee and just enjoy the scenery. There’s a decent sized hazel beneath it that is shaded out in summer. Removing the sycamore means it will allow more sunlight in and I could coppice the hazel which will add interest to the area. I only intended removing one of the trunks but it fell onto the other and snapped it off, in hindsight it needed to come down. I cut the hazel down too and another small one nearby. It’s surprising how much work is involved cutting up the trees and clearing the brash and how much different it looks now.
My neighbours came and did some felling in their plot. They have a lot of youngish cherry that needs thinning. Even though young, they are pretty tall and inevitably get hung up in nearby trees. I helped them free them and they were difficult to get down. Bigger trees are easier as the extra weight means they crash through rather than get stuck.
The other job I wanted to do was take the seasonal fixed point photos for the Woodland Trust project. I now have four sets of photos taken at six different locations. Three of them are in my plot. It’s fascinating to see the changes through the year. I’ve uploaded each of my three locations to Flickr so they run through each one and through the four seasons. Here’s the link. Look for the small icon top right that looks like a tv with an arrow in it. Click on that to run the photos as a slide show so you can see the changes at each one and enjoy the woodland journey.
