Spring News!

The wood is growing (with more planting this Spring!) and soon the trees will be too – buds are swelling and new life is just emerging.

I have just completed planting a whole new area of 34 trees to represent the 34 items on George’s ‘What I want now’ list.  There is a map below to show exactly where they have been placed.  With over 85 trees now planted, you will see that the wood is truly growing!

Central to the 34 trees – the first to be planted - is an English Oak (with its leaves from last year still intact) to symbolise “Trees” from George’s list and hopefully (in a hundred years’ time or so!) it will make a fine specimen.

The other thirty three just planted are a mixture of all sorts – Black Poplar, Wild Cherry, Bird Cherry, Hawthorn, Walnut, Paper Birch, etc. I’m afraid I couldn’t quite manage a different species for each ‘Thing wanted now’! 

And to put the size into perspective, here is a shot of the newly planted area with the plantsman (i.e. me!) standing next to the Oak in the centre. 

Surrounding the 34 trees, I have also planted 3 Scots Pine to the East side and some Field Maples to the North and North East side. 

We had a lot of rain here one day (great for the newly planted trees!) and the river flooded.  The area in the woodland where we hope to have a pond (under the ‘auld’ alders where the old tributary flowed) also filled up, so here are a couple of photos of what the pond might look like when we can get round to excavating. 

Here as well is a photo of a fairly infrequent visitor to our little river – an egret! – I rushed back to the house to get the camera and just caught it taking off – though it did come back the next day. 

Also, here are the promised photos of snowdrops from February once the snow had gone.

And the welcome signs of Spring ... first blossoms and buds.

That's all the news for now!  No poem this time, but feel free to post something you think might be appropriate which the rest of us would enjoy. One final thought though, to borrow a couple of lines from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and with reference to our memory of George and the wood that’s been planted:

“As long as men can breathe and eyes can see (it), so long lives this and this gives life to thee”.