This is Michael Walter's latest report:
All the marked pines that I referred to in my October report were felled in next to no time but, although lorryloads of logs have been trundled away, there remain some fairly impressive stacks of timber, the pungent aroma of resin detectable from a long way off. Resin is nature’s elastoplast for conifers – whenever a tree is damaged, this incredibly sticky substance oozes over the damaged area to form an airtight seal that wards off bacteria and fungi. Insects falling foul of its treacly consistency can become entombed in it, and then perhaps be revealed thousands of years later, washed up on a Baltic shoreline, in a lump of amber, which is simply a fossilised form of resin, and may be up to 150 million years old, though most pieces will be far younger.
In the immediate aftermath of all this conifer thinning the plantations look as though a tropical hurricane has just passed through, but recovery is fairly swift. Huge quantities of the trimmed-off branches, known as brash, litter the floor, but because the machine operators like to process several trees from one spot, the brash tends to accumulate in mounds rather than as a uniform carpet, with the result that any residual flora and fauna that has become established since the previous thinning is not totally annihilated. Crushed hazel and other bushes react as though coppiced, sending up new shoots, so that within about three years there is a fresh understorey, while bramble and a variety of herbaceous plants will have emerged, prospering to varying degrees in the increased daylight now reaching the woodland floor. Already, if you avert your gaze from the carnage at ground level, you can begin to appreciate the number of oak, birch, beech and chestnut trees whose crowns are now beginning to fill out the gaps created in the canopies by successive conifer thinning operations over the past twenty years, and half-closing your eyes it is possible to imagine what the wood will look like when the last pines have finally been felled.
“Kissing’s out of season when gorse is out of bloom” goes the old country saying, so you may be pleased to know that some gorse has been in flower for several weeks, and will be blooming profusely right through next spring, yet the petals will all be long-withered come the summer. Does that mean the saying is wrong and that summer is a closed season for kissing? There are in fact three species of gorse: common gorse, with which we are familiar in Kent; western gorse which, as you might expect, occurs mainly in the West Country, Wales, parts of the Midlands, Lake District and southern Ireland; and dwarf gorse which is largely confined to the heaths of southern England. The two more localised species are much shorter than common gorse, and their flowers are a deeper, harder yellow, but they also flower later in the year than common gorse, typically from July through to September. So, in many areas of England two species of gorse may co-exist, with the result that the flowering season can be seen to last for about nine or ten months of the year, making the saying with which I began this train of thought sound like a cheering remark. But, sadly for Kentish lovers, both these scarcer species are very rare in the county, so our osculatory skills may have to be put on hold for a brief period each summer.
Gorse in Church Wood, taken in April: