this land wants to be rainforest. The question is – how do support that while also seeing to our needs?
Samhain 2016 we inherited 3.85h of deforested hill with a couple of old oaks and a line of scraggly holly, rowan, ash and willow up the burn towerin ower a gap of missing shrub and a collapsed field layer.
here’s a squiz, nine years in.
Top left shows natural regen with support from us through tubing oak and rowan sapplings, planting alder, cut and mulch bramble and rushes, girdling sitka. The taller trees at the back mark the burn corridor. That’s whaur a few gems lie hidden on oak, holly, birch and rowan branches.
Along with our temperate forest garden (which i’ve written about here before), what we’ve got now is the ingredients of diverse and resilient rainforest in the making. There are still species missing, for sure, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens both inside and outside the deer fencing over the next 10 years.
There’s so much more to healthy woodland than fluirs but if you’re interested in further reading about the fluirs of native oak woodland then try this – https://reforestingscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Understorey-Kate-Holl.pdf
and link to the full study here – https://reforestingscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Holl-K-Report-2017-Final.pdf
And a wee video from Maddy Harland on temperate forest gardening – https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/how-to-make-a-temperate-forest-garden-part-1/