Midwinter spring is its own season, announces TS Eliot*. How right he is.
There are signs of new growth, crocuses and buds tentatively reaching towards the weak sunlight, but the chill air and biting wind is a reminder that winter is not finished with us yet.
I am on the Waterford-Dungarvan Greenway – a treasured respite from the noise, dirt and traffic of the city. Sadly, it is the case that to experience mature woodlands one must leave the city altogether, often travelling some distance to Coillte recreational forests or privately owned estates.
Mount Congreve is just a few miles from Waterford City, but when I reach the entrance on the greenway for some reason it is shut today. That means the beautiful trees I wanted to visit are locked behind a fence.
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Ireland must be one of the few countries in Europe where you must consciously journey to visit mature trees. Coillte’s forests are wonderful places for a ramble, but mostly they are conifer plantations.
Natural woodlands comprising native species of birch, oak and ash, make up less than 2 per cent of Ireland’s forested land, so you really have to know where to look if you want to visit them. Of the 11 per cent of Ireland that is covered in trees, the vast majority of this is in monocultures of non-native conifer species that do nothing for wildlife.
The Irish landscape is now increasingly denuded of mature trees. Storm Éowyn took out thousands more, and there have even been calls to remove trees from hedgerows.
It feels like there is a war on trees. Angry storms, angry people. Tall, mature trees are increasingly regarded as a nuisance and a risk and it seems they are not entitled to a share of the soil or sky. Few people appreciate their ecological and psychological benefits. Sometimes landowners chop down perfectly healthy trees for no reason other than to create a patch of lawn, and with no penalty.
The requirement to have a felling licence to remove a tree comes with a long list of exemptions, especially if it is within 10 metres of a public road. There are few sanctions for hedgerow or tree removal, but even when cases are successfully prosecuted, it would take 100 years for a woodland to recover from the damage when mature trees are felled.
Alongside the clamours from certain quarters for fewer trees, there are furious debates raging over what constitutes legitimate and appropriate rewilding or restoration. I will leave the rewilding debate to ecologists and other experts. Where they do agree is that Ireland desperately needs more native and semi-natural woodlands. We need more trees in gardens, more trees in urban areas, more hedgerows, more parks and publicly accessible mature woodlands.
This involves careful design, resourcing and ongoing management, and appropriate skill sets in our local authorities and state bodies. Nor must we neglect conservation efforts to protect the tiny fragments of once-widespread habitats that would otherwise be lost forever.
Trees should be everywhere, and for everyone to enjoy. But it is only in the tiny pockets of native woodlands or on privately owned estates that one can hope to meet the “remarkable” trees written about so poignantly by Thomas Pakenham.
It takes slow-growing species such as oak 50 to 100 years to reach maturity, at which point it can be as tall as a 10-storey building or 30 tonnes in weight, producing 100,000 leaves a year. But even monumental trees are not invincible. He notes that “we tend to take our large, old trees for granted. When they fall we feel a pang of bereavement. But it should not [require] an Atlantic storm ... to teach us to appreciate old trees.”
Still, unless we are connected to our local landscape and natural heritage, we might not even notice when trees suddenly disappear. Here is a challenge: where is the oldest, native tree closest to you? How does it make you feel to stand beside it?
Richard Nairn captures how I feel around trees in Wildwoods, a magnificent homage to Ireland’s native woodlands: “Whenever I get fed up with work or world news or my brain gets addled by too many things happening at once, I walk down to the wood and just wrap myself in its embrace. I stand still for a few minutes and feel the peace of the wood, sense its long life and stability, the strength of the old trees and the rejuvenation of new plants growing in the sunlight. I feel a sense of peace and contentment with my surroundings and I remind myself to live in the present moment. This is better than any medication and it is free.”
Sadhbh O’Neill is an environmental and climate policy researcher and part-time lecturer at TU Dublin
*in his poem Little Gidding
