Trees that surround us in memory of old friends

ANOTHER LIFE:The tree surgeon proved not only to be skilled, devoted and a man of visual taste but a diplomat as well. "You did need some evergreens there," he supposed, "to break the wind in winter."

This made us feel a bit less embarrassed about wanting the usual few metres off a clump of Lawson’s cypress, so familiar to his profession as the towering folly of hedges in suburbia.

The fistful of left-over Lawson seedlings came with us from Dublin, along with the garden shed and bags of unused cow manure (this on a lorry with much else – planks, barrels and so forth – that “might come in useful” for the new life).

The little trees were planted hastily in odd corners of the acre, an open field only lately cleared of thistles and briars.

I doubt if I looked up while digging the holes. Or if I did, it was to discount any future in which little half-metre seedlings might reach a proper height. The ESB and phone lines, branching to our gable, webbed across a hillside in which hawthorn hedges and farm sycamores were shorn into stumpy wedges by the wind. Even the lopsíded spruce at our gate had taken the best part of a century to rear its feathery flagpole.

We did not, indeed, set out to make a wood. But we reckoned without arboreal togetherness, egged on by recent decades of calmer, warmer springs.

The first windbreaks of timber slabs were subsumed into a maze of fuchsia hedges surrounding the vegetable beds and these, in turn, merged with the trees they protected, rearing up into spindly weavings of their own.

When the ocean winds blow now, they sift through Sitka, larch, birch and alder, ash and sycamore, rowan and willow, beech, oak, poplar – around a score of different species, each with its own shape and nature. All have been planted – found room for, rather – as they came along (if you love trees, they keep happening).

In what was once the hen-run, they have coalesced into a pool of cool, deep shade. The house, on a rise, has kept its outlook to the sea, and its bower of summer leaves dissolves in winter to give us back the mountain and traps the rising moon in bare branches. From a distance we are, indeed, the old couple in the wood.

Worries about height and wires came only lately, and most acutely this spring, with (as the tree surgeon readily agreed) the greatest uprush of new growth in many years. The Lawson’s cypress might never have reached the 50 metres they achieve in their native American forests, but their tips were already brushing the ESB power line.

Nearer the house, where the birds perch, a young ash was rapidly aspiring to follow suit. The phone line had already vanished between willow and oak, and the birch across the stream.

In a day’s work with harness and saws, Ambrose Gaughan of Foxford (treecare.ie) restored our peace of mind, carving a new view to the hilltop and leaving a neat pile of logs in the shed. The cypresses now buttress the hawthorn hedge, and the ash is a still a graceful umbrella that will never spike the sky.

We have not had to touch our treasured memorial trees. There is Sally’s lime, for the eccentric ladyship who gatecrashed our wedding and thus our lives, and David’s ash for the farmer friend who should have been a forester.

The oak that John Healy reared from an acorn picked up beside the EU Parliament in Strasbourg has just tipped its twigs with leaves of a rich and mysterious red. This is “lammas growth”, the secondary spurt of leaves that makes up for the foliage that caterpillars eat. The red is extra tannin, to put them off.

John’s friend was Douglas Gageby, this newspaper’s great dendrophile editor, who, early on, sent me a cigar-box of sprouting acorns wrapped in moss. His oaks adjoin the house, waiting on their own, more native, lammas growth (for Scotland’s lammas, read Lughnasa).

But yes, we did have to top one memorial tree, its past now mingled with our own. The old ragged spruce at the gate would not stop growing, even after 70 or 80 years of storms from the sea. It still bowed in the wind like a tall schooner’s mast, but if it went – when it went – it would crash straight across the road.

It was the sole tree planted in the old life of half our house, a little Land Commission cottage built of fieldstone when the hill was striped almost a century ago. Two-thirds of the spruce now remains, shorn of its dead branches, pruned to grow new foliage, and never again to lean in a Force 10. But like the old bedroom door, still carved beneath the paint with children’s names, it kept a claim on the life of a little piece of a hill.

Eye on Nature

Last year’s house martins returned with their brood and occupied their old nest. One of the brood built a new nest semi-detached from the old one.

The other two built separate nests. Recently I noticed a sparrow dodging in and out of the semi-D nest and it seems that the sparrow is rearing a brood in it right next door to the older house martins.

Florence Shields, Clogherhead, Co Louth

While fishing for sea trout on Lough Currane recently, I came very close to a sea eagle. He was perched on a pine tree on the shore, and it was an absolute delight to see such a magnificent creature. I missed a fish because of looking at him.

Tony O’Sullivan, Caherciveen, Co Kerry

When driving along a track near Bellacorick, Co Mayo, I spotted a cuckoo flying from fence post to fence post and scanning the bog from its perch. It suddenly few down and picked a very large green caterpillar from the bog grass.

It flew back to the post and beat the caterpillar against it about 10 times, then swallowed it whole. What type of caterpillar was it?

John Carroll, Appian Way, Dublin 6

In that habitat it could have been that of the emperor moth.

• Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. Email: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.