New Trees

Anna recently drew my attention to a post on the ‘Make Room for Nature’ Facebook Group saying:

Spent a lovely day off taking Woodland Trust Cymru and Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust staff around a few of last year’s tree-planting sites

If you’d like anything from 1 to 300 native trees to help tackle climate change and the biodiversity loss crisis, please contact me now on Messenger. The area of Mid Wales Landscape Scheme loosely runs from Llanidloes to Caersws, Machynlleth, Aberystwyth, Llangurig and back to Llani.

REALLY pleased with how well the trees are all doing, from the mountains to the sea – Literally!

I was intrigued and needed some trees as quite a few had been felled in the neighbourhood recently. I wouldn’t be able to replace them as some were very old and mature but I could at least try. I contacted them and soon a plan was hatched. Someone was coming to visit our garden to discuss what would be best and we had a choice of various native species:

• Sessile Oak
• Pedunculate Oak
• Alder
• Downy Birch
• Silver Birch
• Wild Cherry
• Rowan
• Crab Apple
• Field Maple
• Hawthorn
• Hazel
• Blackthorn
• Holly
• Dog Rose
• Elder
• Goat Willow
• Scots Pine

What would suit us?

We’ve always been reluctant to spend too much on plants for our garden. Mainly because it’s quite a challenging place for plants to thrive and many don’t do well here. Larger trees would be expensive and it would not only be a waste of money if they died, but kind of sad too. We had a good idea what would do well here but some expert advice never goes amiss.

I met with Philip on Sunday and had a good chat in the garden. He was quite impressed with the two Scots Pines that we already had in the garden and reckoned that the one that had recently been cut down was probably 100-150 years old. That would be the problem with species like that, they’d take quite a while to grow.

He was also impressed with our Oak Tree, especially once he heard that I’d grown it from an acorn. It’s doing really well, but had until recently had quite a bit of shelter from the other trees. That was no longer the case so I was after trees to provide some shelter from the wind so as to protect what we’d managed to grow so far.

The fact that they were native species was of course good – that was after all the whole idea of the project. Things that generally grow well here are Willow, Elder and White Poplar. We already have quite a few of these around the garden. White poplar is native to the UK and the others aren’t really that exciting. The other option suggested was hawthorn. I think I brought up Hawthorn and Blackthorn as I knew they grew OK here and they have flowers that the bees enjoy. If we could get shelter, wildlife habitat and honey from the trees then what’s not to like?

Philip was quite keen on Birch too. We do have a birch tree here but it has always struggled. I hadn’t, therefore, tried another, but as these will be free and I too like birch then we may as well try again. Birch does do well a little further inland on the bog so there should be no reason why it wouldn’t survive here. Hopefully, we’ll have more luck with it this time.

The Plan

So, after taking a look at the room we had Philip suggested 40 hawthorns to make a nice hedge around the back of the garden. If most of them survive then it should quickly turn into quite a dense wind break with plenty of habitat for nesting birds. I would never have bought that many plants but it does make sense. Accompanied by a few birch trees for the area in front of this hedge we should end up with a nice little ‘wooded area’ at the bottom of the garden once again. This area has always been kept a little wild and shaded so this might actually make it even nicer down there.

Obviously this won’t be an overnight solution but it does give me a nice project to get stuck into as I now have to clear the area and prepare it for planting! I might put one or two of the 40 hawthorns into pots – I’m sure they would make nice bonsai!

Tags: GardenWildlife