Page 61 - BR October 2023 (1)

October 2023 October 2023
leaf coverage has been and will be greater than ever seen before and the oaks
are not the only relevant trees. Ash is certainly the same, as are the flowering wild
cherry trees, which I can see from where I am sitting. I haven’t been out and
about myself enough to see the beech trees on the chalk downland near by but I
believe they too have no intention of losing their leaves just yet. Also I see roses
and all sorts of other shrubs and flowers in our garden and in the wild, which are
still in flower much later than expected or they are putting on a new growth
unexpected for this time of the year.

The hazel shrub just inside our
gate, which at some time had
grafted to it a contorted hazel
but now has dismissed this idea
and has in the last few weeks
has produced new growth of
some twenty odd vertical
growths of two to three feet
high at the top of the “shrub”
two to three feet high. These
shoots were only produced in
the past two to three weeks and
are extremely fragile. The leaves
on these new growths are fully
expanded, while those on the older branches are in fact now wilting. I guess that
we must put all this down to climate change? The hollyhocks growing in our
garden should have finished flouring several weeks ago but they are still
producing flower buds on extended stems, that in one case the stem is
exceeding eight feet in height. I have never seen anything like this before.
Some thirty years ago now I managed to get an honours degree in Environmental
Studies with the O.U. I did this thirty odd years after three years at Seale Hayne
Agricultural College where I obtain a National Diploma in Agriculture and a
Certificate of Farm Management and then spent forty plus years of practical farm
and estate management in both the UK and Southern Ireland.
In Ireland I managed two and half thousand acres of land obtained by building a
sea wall, across the north side of Wexford harbour back in the late nineteenth
century introducing a pump house and drainage system We had our own copy of
the Fens. We built up a 200 cow Friesian dairy herd, a beef unit to rear all the male
offspring of the dairy herd and on the arable side we grew a thousand four
hundred acres of cereals, a hundred acres of potatoes for Smiths crisps in Dublin
and parsnips and carrots for the Dublin market. I have always been involved with
the natural world in its most basic forms.
However I can’t believe what I am seeing today. Although I left Ireland because
my employers an English father and son team decided to sell up and they sold to
the Irish Government’s Board na Mona who immediately converted it into a wild

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