Pastures New
Or: how I almost bit off more than I could chew (part one)
4 February 2024
By: James Lennox
I've never been one to shy away from a challenge. Whether moving to a different country (four times and counting), learning new languages (Welsh, anyone?), keeping sheep from field to fork (yes, literally), building not one but two houses from scratch, or living on a narrowboat in lockdown (good times), I like to keep busy and pick up a new skill whenever I can.
Perhaps I've just got an incredibly short attention span, but for me there's nothing quite like embarking on a new venture. Especially one that involves expanding the garden at La Corolla. And so it came to pass that we bought a field. We didn't have to look far - it was right next door and we'd had our eye on it for a while.
What we could see of it, that is. A neighbour had been in the habit of putting his small herd of cows in there from time to time to keep down the grass and weeds as a favour to the absentee owner. There was only one drawback to the arrangement. The cows and their offspring were surprisingly sprightly creatures, keen to wander over and take a closer look at our progress in the garden.
So, over the years, we'd allowed a buffer zone to develop, growing up, through and beyond the dilapidated fence. The deterrent worked; our trees were safe, thanks to a continuous twenty foot wide bramble barrier, our very own Todesstreifen, if you like.
All well and good, until you decide to break through and re-unify the hillside. Step one: tear down those brambles, Mr Gorbachev. What better way to spend a week in autumn than to hack at a thorny tangle with nothing but hand tools, numerous pairs of leather gloves and a song in one's heart, before rolling the resulting piles, tumbleweed-style, to the nearest bonfire. (A tip for budding pyromaniacs: brambles and gorse are Mother Nature's very own firelighters.)
Step two: take in hand all remaining growth along the boundary. The bay trees which had acted as a perfect windbreak for the garden in its early phase were thinned and their canopies raised as they had become far too dense over the years. Enormous clumps of hazel were tidied and a programme of coppicing begun. That just left a couple of raggedy cherry trees (Prunus avium). One week of white blossom, greedy surface roots, premature leaf-fall and no fruit to speak of. Clearly they were destined for the chop, and not just because I'd been given a new chainsaw.
Step three: assess soil conditions. I already had a rough idea what to expect from the existing garden. The new field is just a continuation of the same slope. And sure enough, the dark crumbly loam at the bottom of the hill gives way to stoney orange clay in the middle leading to my favourite combination of solid surface rock and off-the-charts acidic sand at the very top. That's what the textbooks refer to as a wide-range of planting opportunities.
Step four: weep and re-think one’s designs. Inspired by my recent travels, I was determined to go North American. The existing American Woodland was already bursting at the seams, and I'd barely got started on the conifer family. So it was pines (P. banksiana, jeffreyi, radiata, strobus and taeda) to the rescue at the top of the hill; Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Monterrey cypresses (Cupressus macrocarpa) to deal with the wind; Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) and Coastal Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) for vertical accents; and oaks (you name it) and flowering dogwoods (Cornus florida - the species takes some beating in a woodland setting) in the more favoured spots.
Step five: recover from digging 137 holes. To be precise, square holes, two spades wide and one spade deep (if that, in places). Remove cubes of soil and grass, slice off the turf, discard loose rocks, position ‘tree’ at correct height, crumble the soil back into the hole, firm in with fist, water and repeat ad nauseam. And the reason for describing the latest additions to La Corolla as ‘trees' (note inverted commas)? Before you think I'm a latter-day Croesus craning in fully grown specimens, the average height of the plants was about 4 inches.
Step six: spend the next 30 years watching trees grow. Yes, folks, I'm in this for the long haul. Some of them I've grown from seed. You can't beat it for that sense of satisfaction. To think, long into the future, my name will live on as a cautionary tale not to plant a dozen redwoods quite that close together. As for the potential errors of judgment I haven't grown from seed, I bought them at vast expense (a euro a piece, roughly) and saved them from a short life in the forestry industry. I ask you, how could anyone cut down a Douglas Fir? (Canadian lumberjacks aside, of course.)
Despite my best intentions, I've no doubt gone and done it again - massively over-planted the entire field. But, there's a good chance numbers could be reduced between now and fully-fledged forest status. The odd deer or wild boar attack could inflict serious damage, despite a decent fence and my solid support for the activities of the local hunt.
And then there's the vexed question of climate change. Have I planted the right species? Will they be able to cope with the extremes we're already seeing at La Corolla? Will my resolve not to water them next summer (aka the tough love school of arboriculture) crumble in the face of mulitple losses?
For the answers to those questions - and the mystery of what I got up to once I'd had a couple of days off to recover - tune in next time for more tales of derring-do and death-defying challenges.
