Why we're a generation too late to save our trees

ANOTHER LIFE:THE FIRST whiff of woodsmoke from our chimney settles me comfortably into my skin: summer was never my season. And my love affair with wood goes all the way from growing trees and hugging them in a metaphorical way – the real thing isn't bad, either: a stirring embrace of toughness, mass and weight – to savouring their sacrifice on the hearth.

In between, of course, the lorryload of thinnings from the forest has to be reduced to stove-size logs, but even that can feel good. As summer waned, a run of sunny mornings took me over the wall to tackle the last, neglected layer of spruce trunks, each with ambitions to be, let’s say, a third of a telegraph pole.

The immediate object was to raise them into criss-cross rafts, open to every drying wind. Thinnings fresh from the forest are massively heavy and need a year to lose much of the water they’ve been pumping up to the crown. These were well-aged but still untossable in the Scottish manner: rather to be slid over others, as on rollers, then lifted gingerly at one end, and eased up into the sun. Leverage (of the old-fashioned, non-banking kind) also came into its own.

Between heaves there were rests on a rock amid the curling bracken, to take in the peace of the hillside, the plain and cheerful blueness of the sea. A robin whizzed in to seize the beetles I’d disturbed. And hovering in my mind was the truism that wood is the most wonderful substance and that doing almost anything with it – even hauling it about in one’s old age – is no small enjoyment.

My family, it seems, have known this for many generations. Starting somewhere among Huguenot refugees to England, the first cabinet-making Viney worked in Devon in the 18th century, and the wood-working line continued, well dowelled and dovetailed, to my father’s apprenticeship to a Hampshire village carpenter at the age of 12.

That my own skills have not ventured greatly beyond basic DIY is not the point, nor that the wood-carving chisels I brought from Dublin have never, after all, been used to high purpose: I just love the way wood looks and smells and feels, even when hewing it into logs with an electric chainsaw.

It’s at this point that the anatomy of a tree becomes intimately clear, both in the rings of annual growth and the knotty musculature by which branches are anchored against the wind. I like the clear description in a new publication from the Tree Council: that the year’s growth forms, in effect, “a new tree around the old one. Each branch is itself like a new tree”. Growing new cells over old ones, a tree responds to the mechanical stress of wind by creating more or stronger wood where it matters, widest at the base of the stem. Such simple insights help to explain the robust, knobbly boxer’s build of the ash tree at the sea side of the house.

They come in Amenity Trees and Woodlands: A Guide to Their Management in Ireland, a compendium produced by an enthusiastic team of arboriculturists, park superintendents, landscape architects, horticulturists and foresters, with Kevin Collins as editor. As a resource for planting new trees for the benefits of people, wildlife and even the world, it is splendidly comprehensive. As a strategy for saving old trees and hedgerows from planners, architects, developers and their builders and subcontractors it comes, however, a generation in arrears.

The failure has been, inevitably, one of systems as much as of sheer ignorance and bloody-mindedness, and the book sets out to address “the vast array of ‘players’ who impact on the resource”. It might, indeed, have helped if more people knew that a tree’s roots do not, in fact, stretch straight down into the ground but stay mostly within the upper metre of soil – often far less – and typically reach out to more than twice the spread of the branches.

But, even where the knowledge exists, forward thinking can be rare. It’s no use giving planning permission, says the Tree Council, and then demanding a tree survey and the fencing of root-protection areas. More valuable trees, it suggests, have been lost through irreparable root damage than ever were felled ahead of development.

The book is big on community involvement when new planting schemes are in prospect, to give that vital, vandal-quelling sense of ownership. But it is clearly alert to just how heated public meetings can get: “Although costly, engaging a professional moderator will prove worthwhile.”

And I like the emphasis on keeping community involvement truly representative. “Sometimes,” we’re told, “a small number of individuals end up dominating the process, skewering [sic] the feedback.” Indeed – both, probably.

Amenity Trees and Woodlandscosts €20, plus €4 pp, from the Tree Council (treecouncil.ie)

Eye on nature

All the sycamores on our land are covered in large black spots.

Patrick McLoughlin, Gort, Co Galway

This is tar spot fungus, Rhytisma acerinum, which won't seriously damage the trees. Gather the dead leaves under the tree and burn them to lessen the infection next year.

Recently I saw a pure white stoat. I thought white stoats – ermines – were indigenous to tundra regions.

Aidan Mooney, Dunmore, Co Galway

It is normal for stoats in colder climates to turn white in winter. It rarely happens here. The literature also refers to albino stoats.

We spotted a short-eared owl flying around a coastal patch near Ardmore, Co Waterford. He came quite close and perched on a fence post.

Anne Carri, Tramore, Co Waterford

The short-eared owl is a scarce passage migrant here, and a winter visitor to the south coast.

• Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address