A picture in an English magazine - a tree with four dancing nymphs, active in and around it. The caption reads: "TREES. A new MORI poll has revealed: two in five people have fallen out of one; a third of those questioned have walked into one; six and a half million people in Britain are likely to have spoken to one; more than five million have hugged one. More importantly, perhaps, fifty nine per cent of those questioned claim to have planted one."
Has anyone here in Ireland, planted too many? A friend invited a tree man to advise on a bit of a planting he had indulged in. "You dilettantes always make the same mistake", said the expert, trying to keep twigs out of his eyes as he plodded through a couple of score oaks of some twenty years standing. "You plant them too close, spoil the growth of the trees and then have to start cutting down and sorting out. Look here - in summer there's not enough light for the smaller ones. Their branches are so intertwined that a person can hardly walk through them to admire the trunk or anything else. So, if you want my advice, we take all the lower branches off this and this, and we dig out these two trees altogether and He went on, marking this tree and that, prepared to take off his coat and start at once into the work.
As the friend said: "He's right, of course, basically; but isn't it better to overplant and then thin out than to find you've left too much space and then have to fill in with younger, smaller trees?" But the expert had a point. If, in his words, you are a dilettante planter, an amateur woodsman, you would leave space around most of your trees so that they can thrive and so that they can be admired. Anything else is a commercial wood, for trees reaching fast into the sky until they reach the selling date, which doesn't mean that groups of five or seven trees, here and there, don't have their function in pleasing the eye.
But as the friend says: "He's right, yet when you've raised them from seed or maybe dug them out from the ground underneath a wayside oak, you develop a parental feeling for them. But I decided to let him cut away. I'll be wiser in my planting next time."