The stubborn persistence of trees

It has been a four seasons in a day kind of week. Floods, gales, sun, heavy showers blowing up on vicious north-west wind. No snow yet, though the forecasters say it’s only a matter of time. Even this weather can be lovely, especially if you are seeing it from behind glass:Everything is soaked, and there’s nothing I can do in the garden, without leaving a quagmire behind. I’ve shifted my efforts to my small patch of woodland. Much of it is bog, and useless for growing anything but nettles and alder, but there is a dry spot at the top, which is planted with young birch and Scots pine. I’ve been thinning out the weaker brethren and taking the lower branches off the birchesOne day, this will be a sunny birch wood, full of birdsong, carpeted with moss, where fauns gambol happily in the Spring…..….and where grey squirrels are hung up by the hind legs and roasted over a slow fire….
The grey squirrel is a public menace, with an unfortunate liking for stripping the bark from beech and sycamore. The damage is random and extensive. Grey squirrels attack mature trees as readily as young ones, and they don’t even eat the bark, but just leave it scattered in piles beneath the tree. It’s probably a sexual thing – the woodland equivalent of adolescent males binge-drinking on a Saturday night. Show me a grey squirrel being lovingly fed nuts by some old dear in a public park, and I’ll show you a ruthless, cunning, predatory coloniser only good for the stew pot. Luckily, the fluffy animals protection society has yet to triumph, and I am still allowed to use most methods to get rid of them, short of explosives or crossbows. (Not that it is easy).But, for all that, trees persist. You can see how the fresh wood is curling around the squirrel damage, and will eventually cover it, provided the rot stays away. Trees aren’t flippity-gibbet types to keel over at the first hint of frost, or to regard a mere decade or two as a suitable life-span for a plant. They have huge resources stored up, and deploy them to keep going:This birch lost its top in a gale several years ago. The trunk is half-rotten and pitted with holes where the woodpeckers have been at it. It ought to be dead. But it’s still pushing out young growth from the base, and even from the top, trying to turn itself back into a tree again. I haven’t the heart to cut it down and turn it into firewood.The bark on the trunk of this old beech has cracked and flaked, and a lot of rich humous has filtered into the crevices. So the tree has pushed out a set of new roots from five feet up the trunk to take advantage of the nutrients (I peeled some of the bark to show off the structure better). Finally:This Douglas fir seedling has rooted itself on an old rotten stump. It is surrounded by  beech seedlings trying to grab all its light. But despite its increasingly perilous position as the stump crumbles beneath it, it’s still in the fight. I might help it out. On the other hand, I suspect it knows best…