The American Woodland started life as the more prosaic “back field”. This is where we used to keep lambs in the spring with the sheep being allowed in at intervals throughout the year. There wasn’t a tree anywhere in the field. It was just rough grass and patches of bare rock on a fairly gentle south-facing slope – a typical Asturian combination.
Beyond the sheep fencing on three sides of the roughly square field there was a wall of 30-foot high native trees, ash, oak, hazel and bay forming the boundary with our neighbours and, on the west side, providing a useful windbreak against the prevailing, mostly gentle, wind.
This field is where we found the greatest depth of soil on the whole property, capable of supporting some of the larger, thirstier trees we were keen to plant. Given that it was already almost fully surrounded by native trees, it seemed obvious that we should fill the square with more woodland trees and shrubs, but with an emphasis on North American species.
The ambition was to tie these newcomers into the surrounding greenery without highlighting that they are in fact interlopers. As one of the areas we worked on first, it is perhaps the most developed of the whole garden and most closely resembles already the vision we first had of creating an exotic woodland from scratch.
The rate of growth has been astonishing (the credit goes to the climate more than our own skills) and encourages us to continue our endeavours in other parts of La Corolla.
