"Our casual timber" is what Risteard Mulcahy, eminent cardiologist, as we have all long known, and also tree lover, as some of us learn for the first time, calls those wayside trees which rise out of the hedgerows of Ireland. Others talk of them as our linear woodlands. "Ireland more than any other country, has the vast majority of its broadleaved trees in hedges rather than woods." That is from Ralph Sheppard in the summer 1996 number of Living Heritage, a publication of An Taisce.
And Mulcahy in his For Love of Trees, recently published, lists some of the important functions which trees in hedges perform. They protect crops and give shelter to animals, "in this windy country". They help remove excess soil moisture - to say nothing of their aesthetic value. So the whole sale onslaught along our roads, of clipping hedges in line with practices which may be suitable in other countries, is detrimental here, hacking back our ash and our birch and other useful hardwoods. As to insecticides: wild birds are the most efficient `insecticides', and two thirds of them breed in hedges.
Don't get the idea that this neat paperback of some eighty, well illustrated pages, is all polemic.
Mulcahy puts his views plainly, sometimes forcibly, but love of trees is what shines through all. The second part of the essay concerns ivy, particularly ivy on roadside trees; ivy "this most ubiquitous of plants of Ireland." An while you may feel that you have heard this before, just look at some of his photographs, especially those in colour.
You see, flanking, roads you may pass along regularly, examples of trees in winter, distort caricatures of themselves because of the huge load of ivy they carry - not so obvious in summer.
And, if the aesthetic argument doesn't worry you, and the future of the tree is someone else's concern, just think what might happen if an extra gust came along on a stormy night and you happened to be driving by. The author doesn't stress the physical dangers like this, but he hates what ivy, unconfined, does to trees. He'd see that there are other arguments. Anyway, you can read his own cases from Environmental Publications, Duke Street, Dublin, the paperback £4.99. Yes, there is another side. Ivy, as he acknowledges, is a lovely plant. It can be serviceable too. As in the case of two known households which maintain and cherish (and in season trim, an ivy covered tree near the front doors as shelter by night and for birds and nesting sites.