There have been many jokes in the last two years. We are “gentleman foresters”, the “city girl with big plans”, a “real nutjob” and “that woman and her f***in’ trees”. And these are just the things that have been said to our faces.
Our forest is flying, an act of imagination made real. Small knee-high trees are heading sky high. You can almost see them growing.
It’s been four years since we bought 40 acres of farmland in Co Roscommon. Two-and-a-half years ago, 27 acres of it were planted with thousands of small saplings: birches, oaks, alders, hazels, scots pines, willows and crab apples. All the costs of planting the forest were paid by the Government’s Native Woodland Establishment scheme. Each of these 24,000 trees was firmed with a boot into a clump of sodden earth. Forester Bernard Kiernan was our expert guide every step of the way. A documentary was made, capturing the tentative first steps and some of the deep-rooted emotions around nature restoration in Ireland.
This year’s growing season began with one tree in a hurry. At the end of March, a lone birch in a sheltered dip wore a full coat of soft green leaves, while the rest of the trees were still winter bare. “Come on. We do this now.” This, the ambitious birch seemed to be urging its field companions. And soon they did. Hundreds of thousands of soft green leaves unfolded from tiny buds to flutter above the grass and rushes. They soaked up the sun of the long summer and stored it in a thick ring of growth in their swelling trunks, light made solid. Their roots deepened and tightened their grip, pumping food made from sunlight into the soil microbes, who in turn fed the trees. The dance has begun, a wood-wide-web of collaboration.
We can measure their thriving with our hands. The two-year-old saplings planted in April 2023 were pencil-thin, some even thinner. Now, many of their trunks are more than a hand span. My thumb and forefinger no longer meet around them. They are hefty, some over four metres tall, on their way to being huggable. If we live long enough, we may struggle to get two arms around them. They are starting to leave our human scale behind, time and weather written down ring after ring in timber and branch. Last year we planted more varieties: rowans, wild cherries, spindle, guelder rose, aspen, alder buckthorn and whitebeam.
Already, everything has shifted in these small wet fields. They smell and feel different. They teem with life. The dense grass and rushes that still grow around the trees are home to thousands of frogs, field mice, spiders, moths, butterflies, clouds of midges, and hungry horseflies, huge dragonflies like cinnamon sticks with wings. Oak gall wasps used the tiny oak trees to make their beautiful, round homes, like wooden gobstoppers on the small branches. The insect life feeds the bats and birds, who in turn feed a sparrowhawk, barn owls and buzzards. These giant beauties hunt in a pair, their high calls sending the smaller birds into hushed retreat when they circle and glide above the young forest with slow deliberate focus in the vast sky.
When I moved some orchard trees from sodden ground to a drier spot last winter, I found earthworms in the soil, the first I had seen here. They were large, lively worms, like umbilical cords, signs of life and health. The roots of the trees are bringing the rain deeper into the earth, decompacting this exhausted, overworked land so rain no longer saturates everything, drowning out the air pockets.
The young forest has withstood this year’s weather. In the aftermath of Storm Éowyn, friends and family worried amid pictures of towering conifer woods felled like matchsticks in the ferocity of the January storm. “How are your trees?” many asked. They were fine. The storms blasted through their lines, bending stems but breaking none. Two veteran willows came crashing sideways in the field hedgerows. One of them caught in another tree on its way down. A few weeks later, we freed it with a pole saw, a tremendous crack, thump, and ground tremble as the giant trunk finally crashed to earth. Within weeks, new buds began to shoot up from the fallen wood. Wilful willow, unstoppable sally, always finding ways to thrive.
[ The couple who bought a Wicklow golf course and turned it into a native woodlandOpens in new window ]
In the absence of cows to keep the gaps clear, I play the bovine role. A middle-aged woman with secateurs can do the work of a small herd to keep openings from closing. I snip the blackthorn and the bramble back to the edges each time and use the gaps to make a looped path so friends who came for a summer solstice gathering could walk down through the trees to the Mother Tree. She is one of the oldest trees on the farm, a veteran ash that was given voice by poet and author Kerri Ní Dochartaigh in The Forest Midwife, a short film about our forest project directed by Beta Bajgart. Ní Dochartaigh’s poem The Mother Tree begins and ends the film and is voiced by actor Mary McEvoy, herself a forest owner.
The film has cracked open hearts in small screenings around Ireland. People cry and laugh and talk to us and to each other. Hopefully, some people leave inspired to do something with their own land. My mum’s contribution gets the biggest laugh. She grimaces with every muscle in her face at the thought of what we took on. We commissioned an almost life-size cardboard cutout of the other star – our dog – to bring to screenings, Hollywood-style. The panel discussions have felt like a form of group therapy; audience members talk about how they feel when farms are planted with trees, people explain the joy of their own efforts to make more space for nature.
One question got to the heart of farmers’ reluctance to avail of the generous financial incentives to plant land with native forests, and one of the reasons we are still falling far short of our national reforestation targets. Would we have done this if we had inherited the land, a woman asked? And right there, it dropped home that sense of family history. Losing field boundaries results in the loss of memory of the people who worked those fields. All that legacy, loyalty and a story about the productivity of every square inch being everything that matters. For many farmers, forests are an end of ambition, a relinquishing of the control and order they have imposed on the land. Letting the land go has a deep shame to it, another woman said. There is baggage here in spades.
And yet this makes financial as well as environmental sense. All the costs of planting the forest were paid by the Government’s Native Woodland Establishment scheme. The payments went directly to Bernard, the forester who paid contractors to prepare, fence and plant the land. To move things along as we waited for the planting team, we planted thousands of trees ourselves with the help of family and friends.
The farm was the cheapest land we could find, for two major reasons. It’s spread over four separate plots over a mile apart. The over-grazed fields were barely walkable, they were so muddy and poached. We paid just under €7,500 a hectare. As landowners we now receive a payment of €1,103 per hectare planted every year for 15 years for our 11 planted hectares. We have been compensated by the ESB for the land under their electricity lines that we couldn’t plant. If we were farmers, the annual forest payment would last for 20 years. Even without that five-year bonus, the payments we will receive will more than pay for the cost of buying the land.
Our own blank slate gives us the chance to explore the hope for a new pride in the work of forests: continuous cover forests, where the thinning of trees happens selectively to encourage others to grow large. No clear-fell, just hand-chosen trees to harvest for furniture, building materials, crafts. My husband Liam has leaned heavily into this already, found ash at a small local sawmill and sawed up larger branches of fallen ash from the hedgerows. He has been teaching himself, and his friends, how to make stools and side tables. Potential projects are endless. Cheeseboards are next on the cards.
The veteran ash, the Mother Tree, survived this year’s ferocious storms, but ash dieback is killing her. The fungal disease was first identified in material sampled from a forest plantation a short distance away in Co Leitrim 13 years ago. In nearby Carrick-on-Shannon, a local group is collecting ash seeds from healthy trees and growing on a new generation of healthy young trees. I had the opportunity to visit the project and talk to John Gaffey while researching The Hare’s Corner book, a new collection of poems by Jane Clarke, with illustrations by Jane Carkill and stories I wrote about people countrywide making space for nature. The 10 groups, schools, individuals, groups and urban residents are among all the ripples spreading across Ireland of community action and ground-up projects. They are in direct contrast to what can feel like indifference at the political level to the challenges and opportunities of nature restoration.
[ We need more garden trees - and now is the perfect time to plant themOpens in new window ]
At the foot of our dying veteran ash tree by late summer, it was easy to lose your bearings in the thriving alders beneath her. We are beginning to not be able to see the wood for the trees.
In August, a gathering took place at another new native forest in nearby Elphin. A large affair with tents, chairs, sandwiches with the crusts cut off and an assembly of local councillors and council officials. This was the Elphin Neighbourwood project, the brainchild of local man Brendan Fox and the community group that maintains the Elphin Windmill. The six-acre woodland was planted in 2020. Neighbourwoods are lovely projects funded by the Department of Agriculture. Perfect for villages, towns and cities, a native woodland is planted and made public and accessible to people to visit and enjoy.
The Elphin land, which was owned by Roscommon County Council, is now home to 5,000 native trees, dozens of apple and pear trees, two ponds, and a sensory garden designed by permaculture expert Hannah Mole. The group decided not to spray weed killer to maintain the paths, Fox explained. Instead, Community Employment workers keep the paths clear with regular attention. They have seen red squirrels, hares, a stoat and ducks using the ponds in these former fields. A kilometre of wheelchair and buggy-friendly paths weave through the Neighbourwood.
The project reconnects people to nature, the health, welfare and emotional connections. It’s for wildlife and it has heritage, folklore and history aspects to it also, Fox said in his launch speech. Like the windmill, which dates from the 1700s, “it’ll outlive all of us”, he said.
There could be potential for a Neighbourwood in part of our woodland, and we have started to explore the idea with the help of a community group. We love the idea of sharing a resource that could be used by local schools, people who want to walk or roll safely and easily through a young woodland.
Roscommon is a county with forests at its heart, home to what some experts believe is Ireland’s oldest forest, St John’s Wood: Ros is the Irish for woodland. We can see from the species in the hedgerows – wild guelder rose and spindle, and one old root of a tree the size of a table – that the fields were once a very wooded place.
Our forest is thriving, and yet, despite the success of our project and others like it, we are falling short of our national reforestation targets. The ambition to increase Ireland’s forest cover from 11 to 18 per cent for both carbon sequestration and nature restoration means planting 8,000 hectares of new forests a year by 2030. In 2023 a total of 1,651 hectares were planted around the country, with Roscommon seeing the greatest number, or 189 new forests. Last year Cork county saw the largest amount of afforestation. But instead of going up, the hectarage planted across the country fell to 1,573 hectares, nearly 80 per cent short of the 8,000 hectare target.
New plans and targets are coming. The Nature Restoration Law will require the Government to submit a plan to Europe in September 2026, with measurable targets. The law will give protection to trees in towns and cities, where canopy cover and green spaces must be maintained and, in a few years, increased. Many local authorities are seeing the benefits of urban forests for community-building, cleaning water, absorbing downpours and withstanding droughts. They also have huge potential for community building and placemaking, involving new residents coming together to plant urban forests. The debate around land use is coming to towns and cities, with more innovative planning needed to build in green infrastructure, de-pave large swathes of land, and help create more liveable places for everyone, us and the wildlife with which we share our homes.
It has been a privilege and a profoundly healing thing to get to know this place as deeply as we have. When anxiety strikes, I think about walking through the fields, and one tree in particular. The most cheerful of the thrivers that grow there are the hazels. There is one tiny fragment of old hazel woods at a far edge of the farm where a stream flows. Here, the trees are furred with mosses and lichens, and the forest floor is springy with life. The newly planted hazels have already put out their sunshoots, the stems that grow in multitudes around the base of the single stems that were planted, each one like its own forest. New catkins, which will provide next year’s first signs of spring, as early as January, are already growing, even as the leaves change and these newly forested fields get to show off the first of their autumn wardrobe.
The big win this year was a pond. We had our doubts. It sat sullenly for a while, a muddy hole that got lower and muddier in the summer drought. Should we pump it out and invest in an expensive liner to keep it watertight? We did nothing, partly out of lack of time to do anything, and partly because sometimes ponds need nothing more than time. Inadvertently, we followed the best advice, which was to do nothing. As we were busy elsewhere, the oxygenating plants arrived, and the water cleared magically. Now whirligig beetles dance intricate circles on the surface, and the water mirrors the sky. Another fragment of habitat healed.
We will gather in Galway later this month to discuss the potential of trees to address various urban challenges. NatureWorks is a conference hosted by Pocket Forests, The Ryan Institute, and the Lifes2Good Foundation at the University of Galway. We want to explore ideas of paying attention to nature, how to give it a stronger voice and actions we can all take. Our Roscommon project continues to show us that we get so much more back from the natural world than what we give. For every one good step we have taken, nature has taken 10 large leaps.
- NatureWorks is at the University of Galway on Wednesday, October 22nd. For tickets and information see eventbrite.ie.
