The oak and the ash and the bonny elm tree

Bud-burst has caught me on the hop this spring, at least among the southern trees on the acre. Days before March was out, the young horse chestnut was unfolding whole fans of leaves like a spacecraft's solar panels, and sycamore buds had split their gussets with peeps of lacy catkins.

Even among oaks, a bit of sanguine southern sap can make a difference.

The buds on the Irish oaks are still tightly wrapped against frost, but those on the one we call "the John Healy memorial tree" are already relaxed and unfurling. John collected acorns from an oak he admired in a park near the EU's parliament in Strasbourg, raised them in the winds of Mayo and shared some of the seedlings with friends. Our tree is special, like others we treasure - this despite running over it with the mower when it was small.

The oak has twin trunks, gracefully balanced, and while a forester might groan, it seems to suit the chic, Continental refinement of golden leaves. Even left untouched by mowers (or deer, sheep or hares), few broadleaf trees take up the posture and ideal shape required by the timber industry.

They lean about, grow too many branches at the wrong angles, and sometimes (as with oaks) even rest their elbows on the ground. But most of those we see in the farm landscape or in parks have been browsed away as high as a cow or horse can reach, or have had their lower branches lopped by chainsaw.

And in forestry plantations, unnaturally close planting of highly-selected strains produces a block of lollipop trees straight out of a child's drawing book.

The drive for more broadleaf forestry planting (6,000 hectares a year by 2006) has to meet the need for trees that are taller, faster-growing and more shapely than the average. Ireland's best birches, for example, have been selected from all over the island and their progeny put on trial by Teagasc in three big Midland fields. After only three seasons' growth, the range of shapes and habits is already striking, and the best trees have topped two metres.

But even with the right trees on the right soils, broadleaves need more intensive management than ever was necessary with shoulder-to-shoulder conifers. The National Council for Forest Research and Development (COFORD) has put quite admirable effort into encouraging hardwood forestry, and a two-day seminar in Kanturk, Co Cork, next Thursday and Friday is the latest to offer instruction in quality, right from the early years of growing broadleaves to the final grading of their timber.

It coincides with COFORD's new Guide to Irish Hardwoods by Gordon Knaggs and Stella Xenopoulou, a glossy manual with seductive photographs of furniture and woodcraft. While its core is technical - how different woods stand up to different handling - the pages on the different species spell out a whole new future for our broadleaf trees.

With all the robust glamour accorded to oak, it is good to open the guide and find alder - that modest weed of lakesides and roadside ditches - transformed into a rocking horse and a fitted kitchen: quite a move up market from yesterday's clogs and brush backs. There's a birch kitchen, too, a cherry bed, and a translucent poplar lampshade on a stand of spalted beech.

Even blackthorn, hawthorn and hazel get their appraisals (hawthorn "grows in wonderfully twisted shapes and is an excellent wood for carving"). Along with ash, elm and yew, and even Irish-grown walnut and chestnut, such attentive grace-notes fit well.

At first glance, nothing could seem more remote from COFORD's high-tech silviculture than the facsimile edition of Ireland's first tree book, originally published in 1794. With its "fs" for esses and woodcut engravings, Samuel Hayes's Practical Treatise on Planting and the Management of Woods and Coppices is, indeed, a charming period piece, beautifully published by New Island with the sponsorship of the Irish Tree Society.

But, as Thomas Pakenham says in his foreword, the barrister who planted Avonmore "with reckless abandon", and promoted trees both for timber and ornament, was a hands-on enthusiast who knew the weather and the weeds of Ireland.

His advice still wears well, whether about sowing tree seeds in a proper nursery (rather than directly in the woods) or regenerating new trees from the stumps of the old.

As for my bifurcated Strasbourg sapling, he tells of a master-builder, offered his choice of the oaks of Shillelagh, who "made choice of an oak, which though forked from the ground, was of such dimensions that each stem was gross enough for a mill-shaft at more than 50 feet from the butt". We shall see.