17 The news from here...

finding the spring in the woods, spring's walking pace & starting the forest garden

Greetings to you all on this leap year day; thank you for being here with me.

If you’ve recently joined me (and several of you have), welcome to you and I hope you enjoy my posts. (If you feel like sharing any of them, it helps a lot.)

A recap: I’m a poet and author, occasional course and retreat leader in the UK, some time painter, and right now a most-of-the-time gardener here in Brittany where we’ve taken on more acres than is sensible (though much of it is woodland or regenerating ex-pastureland being left alone).

What we’re doing: subsistence-growing veganically; tending orchards; making herb- and bee-gardens; planting willow for coppicing; making woodchip for all the veg beds from the many trees brought down in the winter tempests; and right now we’ve just started planting the forest garden proper. We’re trying to be as autonomous and earth-friendly as we can, working with and around our other-than-human kin; growing for friends, family, neighbours if necessary; and for the future. What we’re passionate about is attempting to find the least exploitative ways of feeding humans.

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A mind like frogspawn
From a distance, the top eastern hedge of the North Field is a hazy goldgreen with the lovely catkins of alder, as in the top photo. Even in the (endless) rain the greengold haze of the catkins presages spring.

I have been waiting to see if my one braincell, currently seemingly entangled like the frogspawn in our newish outer-life pond with a blobby mass of green weed, could be cajoled into freeing itself into thought. I have a post that’s been on hold for nearly a week, awaiting a bit of spring sun to ripen it. It’s not that it’s a particularly challenging post; just that I have zero energy to tease out what I want to talk about, and for the first time I understand what people mean when they speak of ‘brain fog’. (And the answer, by the way, to the cajoling is ‘no’. I can’t even find said braincell.)

So here is a gentler post about what we have and in my case haven’t done here on the land, as spring rushes towards us (relatively speaking) at its steady 2mph (ish) pace. See below.

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The Lost Well

It’s always closer than you imagine,
and simpler. All these years. So here
a step into unbelief is all it takes –
the hidden is only the secluded to the seeker.

Part the thicket of yellow irises, step
through foxgloves, and there – a drift
of shingle, tumble of ancient stones, and
her water of course the purer for being so long lost.

© Roselle Angwin


If you’ve read previous posts and other writings of mine you’ll know I’m a bit of a wells and springs aficionado. Coming from Cornwall and growing up in Devon meant that there were plenty of opportunities to find them; and I’ve sought them out since I was a young teenager.

Several years running I led an outdoor residential writing week in West Cornwall in which we tracked the coasts, the megalithic sites and the holy wells. One circuit we walked involved seven holy wells; the only thing was I couldn’t find the seventh. Until I did – so obvious, once I’d seen it, so close at hand, but so elusive. I just had to shake off my beliefs about where exactly it was.

Isn’t there a great metaphor here – the one about seeing what you’re expecting and therefore missing what’s under your nose?

Brittany has even more wells, originally probably springs used by prehistoric peoples and now Christianised holy wells, often still being tended.

Since we’ve been here, we’ve known there is a spring with, so an elderly local man told me, healing powers on the land we tend. I haven’t been able to find it in all 20 months of being here. (There is a lot of untrodden wildwood, is my excuse.) B who sold us the house said: ‘Northeast corner of that field – you know the coppiced hazel in the woodland? Down from there.’ There are any number of coppiced hazels in the wood. (Until relatively recently coppicing was a part of rural life here, for faggots to burn, for bean poles, for tool handles, for charcoal. We too will be using some of the coppiced hazels which throw tall straight stems towards the sky for bean poles and maybe structures.)

A couple of days ago, procrastinating on moving the enormous heaps of brash left by pruning the honeysuckle and wisteria that were strangling the peach tree, I decided to head into the woodland (which drops very steeply to a stream and is hazarded with brambles, fallen trees and branches and sudden brief, rocky and steep drops) and follow my sense rather than B’s description. I chose a big and glorious coppiced hazel to slide down behind. Then I heard an extra trickle of water. And there she was, 100 metres down beside a bank. I couldn’t take a photo as access is blocked by a very large fallen beech; but the spring is healthy and flowing well.

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The walking speed of spring
That figure of 2 mph. (I should say that this is for the UK; I can’t swear that it’s the same in Europe or elsewhere.) The Woodland Trust reported in 2015 on research carried out for Springwatch that spring is accelerating. Here’s part of the report:

‘…the passage of spring this year is 1.9mph, taking nearly three weeks to cover the length of the country from south to north. An average of 1.2mph was recorded using data between 1891 and 1947 and 1.8mph using data recorded between 1998 and 2014.

‘Speed of travel from south to north in 2015 (appearance of event):

• Ladybird – 6.5mph
• Hawthorn leafing – 6.3mph
• Swallows arriving – 2.4mph
• Hawthorn flowering – 1.9mph
• Orange tip butterfly – 1.4mph
• Oak first leafing – 1.3mph
• Frogspawn – 1mph

‘The research also found that the passage of spring is not directly south to north but is aligned southwest to northeast, as are early spring temperatures.’

Know what? Some of this doesn’t hold up; or should I say it’s not quite that orderly. I remember seeing my first swallow, for instance, on the Isle of Iona, 600 miles north of where I lived then, on 28th March one year; the first in South Devon that year was spotted mid-April.

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Life on the edge
I’m currently preparing (well, I’m not yet, but I should be) a talk for Maryport LitFest’s ‘Life on the Edge’ on Saturday (I’ll be on Zoom; it’s in the UK). Ecology is a major part of the theme this year; specifically trees. I’ll be talking about my book A Spell in the Forest and reading some tree-month poems and passages. It’s the forest in that book, the magical Forêt de Huelgoat, that is the reason for our choosing this area to live in. It seems you have to attend the festival to hear my talk, so if you happen to be in that area, I’d love to see you.

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The forest garden
I’ve been dodging doing anything very much on the land lately. It’s partly because of being ill, and partly because it’s non-stop rain. However, the first nine canopy trees for our forest garden had to go in, no matter what. TM has been a star and done that. We’d already plotted their placings to look natural and organic but take account of relative heights, necessary final canopy spacings, and requirements for sun or shade.

So behind our arc of fourteen local apple varieties and a couple of plums, we have now begun the forest garden that was to be our major project here, and one that will take the North Field’s plantings over towards the naturally regenerating woodland. All of these will provide food for us and for wildlife, down the line, as they also sequester carbon.

A forest garden aims to mimic, at least to some extent, natural woodland ecosystems, but here we are choosing the varieties we will plant. There are ‘layers’: the canopy trees and, simply speaking, a shrubby layer and then understorey.

New to our tree-family, then, are a lime, a large-fruited chestnut, a medlar, a walnut, a cobnut, a mirabelle (small-fruited greengage), pêche de vigne, pear and Asian pear. All of these offer edible parts. We will be adding to the canopy trees, plus planting the next, lower, shrubby layer (also edibles, including of course berry bushes). The understorey will include perennials plants: culinary and medicinal herbs, comfrey mostly for the bees, and a multitude of other low or creeping flowering plants, some of them nitrogen fixers. All our new trees are skinny little saplings planted at seemingly huge distances from each other at the moment, of course.

You can make a forest garden of any size. It’s a great thing to do.

The challenge with a forest garden is making it look natural and full, ideally with companion planting. Many people use non-native varieties, including the forest garden guru Martin Crawford; I prefer to use mainly European species where I can, or cultivars that are not too different. There are exceptions: you’ll see that the Asian pear is a non-native. And there is also the fact of climate change: we’ll be growing species that currently thrive in more southerly latitudes.

We also have two long rows of willow slips for coppicing, mostly for woodchip. There is always much more to do, including transplanting many of the even-more-many self-seeded oaks and chestnuts from their current locations to the join-up-with-forest part of that field, but simply getting some canopy trees in and mulching them with our own woodchip has been a coup in a very busy period.

It’s interesting to look at the hedge at the top of the field from the gate at the lower end, and see how clearly it would once have been divided into at least three much smaller ‘bocage’ fields (see The Peasants’ Revolt post). The western third of the hedge contains an enormous beech, then old oaks and chestnuts. The middle section, younger oaks and hazel. Both these two banks contain a lot of similar-sized stones, probably from ancient buildings. The eastern third is young hazels, a hornbeam, and some faster-growing species: some laurels (aargggh) and a stand of alders, from which I’ve taken the photo.

This year in the veg garden we’re trialling various grains and pulses (buckwheat, chickpeas, soya, green lentils, quinoa – vegan protein). If they work, and can realistically be threshed by hand, we’ll be planting up the western edge of the North Field with them in small plots. Later, I’ll write more about why vegan.

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The rain it raineth. And raineth.

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