Tree trauma

In my bow-and-arrow years the only convenient forests were round the houses where the ancients lived: old misters and their small, stooped wives, lurking at the heart of sprawling sycamores and great green walls of cypress. The Vineys, too, perhaps, will vanish from view eventually: "the old couple in the wood".

The sheer biomass of branches and leaves on the acre, at its peak in late August, is already beginning to infringe on views most people would die for: oaks screening out the sheep on the hillside, willows climbing the mountain; the ash tree outside the window, floating its leaves on the sea. It will all be restored to us, of course, after the autumn gales. I look forward to the huge hunter's moon, rising through bare twigs.

To understand our chaotic collection of trees you would have had to see the bare field that we came to 20-odd years ago and feel the hammering of the salt winds that made such hairy goblins of the hawthorns on the ditch. The priority was shelter for growing food - not (alas) garden design. We built windbreaks of slatted timber and stuck rows of fuchsia twigs into the ground behind them. As the fuchsia took off, became rampant, created micro-climates, we stuck seedling trees into corners whenever they came to hand, as part of the defences. We did not really believe they would grow - or not, as it were, into "proper" trees.

About 20 different sorts are now rubbing branches in what garden books like to call "informal planting": copses and clumps and thickets that the birds, at least, find wonderful. Their favourite is the big elder bush that blocks out Tully Mountain from where I sit typing. An elder, a weed, but its flowers were dazzling against the blue sea and it's the tree where the thrush sings in spring.

There have been classic errors and consequent butcheries: a Sitka spruce, soaring towards the power line, lopped off and smothered with an accommodating climbing rose; a Lawson's cypress (yes, even here!) carved away to keep a path to the compost bins. Spacing is so hard to judge when tree seedlings are small. A beech and a lime, both modestly amazing in this location, have outgrown their hedge-corners. The ash is too near the house; three oaks are fighting for the one space. We shall live with them all, for as long as we can.

All over the country, people have planted trees in places they wish they hadn't, or chosen the wrong sort and then panicked as they grew. Karel Bacik, a civic engineer with soul, is upset every day by the things people do to trees. He is a planner with Cork Corporation and drives through the suburbs wincing at all the topped and lopped trees, entirely stripped of grace - "trees looking in winter like giant hat-stands, giant catapults, and in summer like giant lollipops or lavatory brushes".

He spoke at last year's Irish Landscape Forum and his passion leaps off the page in the record of the proceedings, Through the Eye of the Artist, just published by Terry O'Regan on the eve of the '98 Forum.

Topping and lopping is often a pathetic consequence of ignorance or fear. Door-todoor cowboys with chain-saws and no knowledge of trees whatever, find it easy to frighten people into thinking that lopping is a sensible, everyday procedure. Some American cities provide detailed advice for their citizens about ways of reducing a tree's height and size without wrecking or killing it: couldn't we manage to do the same?

Bacik, I am pleased to find, shares my loathing for one particular tree, now invading one Irish garden after another, even along country roads. Garden centres, knowing the show-off streak in so many of their customers, have seduced them into buying the alien and misbegotten poplar, Populus Candicans "Aurora" with leaves in ice-cream colours, flushed with pink in spring. Bacik does not enlarge on his "aesthetic reasons" for disliking it but warns darkly of the tree's "aggressively disruptive root systems", which it shares with other poplars.

It was also, obviously, the species at the front of Emer O Siochru's mind when, in another of the forum's outspoken contributions, Boundaries and Edges in Rural Development, she refers to "glaringly colourful imported trees. . . with strange-coloured leaves" exposed to public view, often behind balustrading or ranch-style fencing at the front of one-off bungalows. What happened, she wants to know, to "that sense of modesty and enclosure" that used to set houses back behind the native hedgerows and stone walls?

As much to the point, as she says, is the ambition of so many county council road engineers to make every country road, even the greenest and most full of natural character, safe to drive at 50 mph. They insist, in bungalow planning permissions, on a boundary "set-back" to give an emerging driver a clear view of approaching cars, and this is what has been working to strip so many country roads of their hedge-banks and old stone walls. Like the first two publications in this series, Through the Eye of the Artist* is full of arresting insight and opinion. Landscape Forum '98, which will be held in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, on September 16th - 18th, again has an extraordinarily diverse and stimulating mix, including feng-shui in landscape management, conserving seals, birds and heritage grassland, and the World Landscape Lecture - Brian Fallon, former chief critic of this newspaper, talking on "Public Art in the Next Millennium".

At this fourth forum, the Landscape Alliance is bringing a tighter focus to the legislative options for a national landscape policy. There will also be a proposal for a Land Trust in Ireland, equivalent to the highly successful Vermont Land Trust in the US.

* Price £15 from Landscape Alliance Ireland, Old Abbey Gardens, Waterfall, Cork. Forum details: 021-871460; Fax 021-872503; E- mail: lai.link@indigo.ie