I’m From the Virginia Department of Forestry and I’m Here to Help

I knew that these two weeks would feel like a crunch.  I wrote down the tasks, counted the days, and tried to prepare for the rush.  I knew it, but I didn’t feel it until the first trees arrived.

Buying most of your trees as babies is the only way to go if you hope to make a meaningful dent in several acres.  They are cheap, generally tough, and easier to haul around than a 36” rootball.  The downside is that you must buy more than you need to account for some attrition, they are prone to the whims of our local deer population, and that as a man of a certain age, I’m faced with the cold hard fact that I may never see them in their full glory.  It takes an oak seedling 15-20 years to begin flexing its muscles.  Do the math.

Sunny and warm - today we have snowflakes

The first delivery was straightforward — six David Austin rosebushes — three for the White Garden (Windermere) and three for the Side Entrance (Olivia Rose Austin)  Bare root roses go in fairly easily: dig the hole, sprinkle with mycorrhizal fungi powder, amend the soil, and make sure you cover the graft union when backfilling.  Last-minute indecision about the hours of sunshine in the White Garden caused a change in plan and the Windermeres went into pots.  Common sense tells me it’s easier to move them to a permanent spot later than to dig them up and pot them if the situation proves unsuitable.

Loblolly Pines recover from their journey

The horticultural body blow came the next day when 300 saplings arrived, a week early, from the Virginia Department of Forestry.  They run a brilliant scheme where you can buy two and three-year old native saplings from their nurseries, have them delivered to your home, and use the sweat of your own brow to help reinvigorate Virginia’s woodlands.  The tally runs as follows:

White Pine 100

Loblolly Pine 50

White Oak 50

Pin Oak 50

Black Cherry 50

Standard operating procedure would be to plant these directly into the ground, stake each sapling, and surround them with one of those ugly-ass white tubes. I’m approaching it from a different angle, placing each seedling in a 5-gallon grow-bag hoping to baby it for a couple of years, bud cap it, and then send it out on its own to face an uncertain future.  This plan shows promise for the conifers, but the excellent quality of the deciduous stock means that even their young root system is too large to fit in the grow bags. I find some number that do fit, duly plant these, and heel the remaining saplings into a large pile of commercial compost.  Even with our recent warm spell the oaks have yet to break dormancy so I’m hoping to buy myself a couple of weeks. In any case that will have to be OK, as I’m exhausted and the UPS truck has just delivered my apple trees.

Dormant Oaks sit in a pile of dirt

Apples will always mean The Bury House to me: our years in England, and the commitment to an impractical, but highly satisfying, kind of nostalgic gardening.  I remember scooping up armloads of long-forgotten apple varieties and storing them in the shed, wrapping them in paper and giving them room to breathe through the winter.  “They do this every year,” laughed Mr Steve, Heydonbury’s Wodehousian gardener.  I didn’t care.  The fruit from these 200 year-old trees seemed like treasure.

So once again I’m tilting at this windmill—planting Cox’s Orange Pippin, Ashmead’s Kernel, and Pomme Gris.  In the face of beetles, fungal diseases and an inappropriate climate I’m hoping to see if we have a sufficient quantity of bees and a tall enough fence to bring home a harvest in four years.  Maybe I’ll plant them next to my Monkey Puzzle tree.  But enough about these little trees.  Maybe the budget will stretch to some bigger specimens. . .

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NB.  Apropos of nothing, and prompted by a minor story line in The Archers, we’ve been laughing about one of those funny Anglo/American linguistic quirks.  In America we refer to the “EASTER Bunny”, emphasis on the first word.  I guess to differentiate it from the “CHRISTMAS Bunny”, or the “HALLOWEEN Bunny”.  But in England it is pronounced “Easter BUNNY” as if to keep it separate from the “Easter MOOSE” or “Easter AARDVARK”  Two countries divided by a common language, I guess.