Sunday 24 July 2016

Our woody home is surrounded by trees, we look after them and they look after us. We're learning to live with them, in the spaces between them.
If you fence off a bit of a field round here so that it's not grazed, it reverts in a few years to woodland all on its own, becoming richer and richer in diversity over thousands of years. The difference from one side of your fence to the other can be quite dramatic, and all the time the woody side of the fence is sending out suckers and barbed shoots, invading the open side with shade and falling limbs, sheltering a quite different variety of life.
Before we came to live here on the farm, I used to think that woodland was the natural way of much of our land and that there was a time when trees might have stretched from coast to coast, but I think now there must always have been a varying population of grazing animals which would have crashed around keeping pathways open in their wanderings, their poo and pee adding to the woodland's nutrients and bacterial life, allowing a different kind of diversity in the space between the trees, and a greater degree of evolving diversity altogether. And that would be a stable network of life that, given sunlight and rain, could go on indefinetly, a natural bubbling cauldron of life in balance. So how do we human beings fit into that? Well, as gently and lightly as possible is the answer to that I think...

1 comment:

  1. Fully agree with what you say about co-existence, Ian. I think you have done a lovely job with your cabavan. Brill !

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