Get out the saw. Now is the time to pollard woody plants - and add some fuel to your fire
This garden has reached an age where, recently, we seem to be spending as much time chopping down trees as planting them. The most recent to bite the dust was a fine specimen of the New Zealand lacebark, Hoheria sextylosa. For over a decade, its evergreen canopy had been a haven for all kinds of birds: from lanky, tail-heavy magpies to tiny, bouncing goldcrests and wrens - our two smallest Irish birds. In late summer it erupted into a froth of starry, snowy blossom, which attracted bees, and for some reason, wasps.
Whatever the season, there was always something going on among its leaves and branches, which also helped to obscure the unlovely view of the traffic on the road outside.
So, if it was such a treasure of a tree, why did it have to go? Because it grew too vigorously for our town garden. Although a friend came and pruned it annually to reduce the size of its crown, it was still on a mission to block the light and engulf the electricity cables. And when we came home one night after a day of gales and found one of its limbs hanging by a thread, we knew it had become too dangerous to keep.
Which prompts a word or two on tree surgery: one of the most effective methods of pruning trees in town gardens, where space is valuable, is to remove the lower branches and thus raise the leafy crown. This allows light onto the ground, so that a wider range of plants might grow underneath. However, such a regime also makes a tree top-heavy, and with evergreens this can be hazardous during winter storms. The foliage acts just like a sail, pulling the roots from the ground, or ripping the branches from the tree. Sooner or later, you're likely to have a disaster on your hands. Actually, I say this quite cheerfully, because every tree that one fells creates an opportunity to plant another one - a more suitable one.
It also creates a whole stack of firewood - which is particularly relevant in this coming week, National Tree Week, as the theme this year is "trees for energy". I'm not sure how our hoheria will burn: we'll need to wait until next year, when the wood has seasoned, to find out, but in the meantime its logs - which embody 15 years of captured sunlight - are a promise of winter warmth to come. Some of the best woods for burning, according to the British National Energy Foundation, are ash, beech, hornbeam, hawthorn, crab apple and wild cherry.
Besides logs for the fire, trees can also provide prunings for kindling, or - if you have a shredder - mulch for the garden, or material to mix into the compost heap. If you are in the habit of coppicing (cutting woody specimens down to ground level) or pollarding (hard-pruning, but leaving the trunk intact), then you'll be the lucky owner of numerous straight lengths of woody material. Some species, such as willow and hazel, can be used again in the garden, to make wigwams or hurdles. Or, if you use them while they are still "green" (before they dry out), they may be bent into decorative edgings for borders, or even into cages to enclose plants that you want to protect from animals.
Now, incidentally, is the time to pollard and coppice woody plants. Willow, dogwood, hazel, and ghost bramble (Rubus cockburnianus and R. thibetanus) can be pruned within 20-30cms from the ground. All, except for hazel (which remains a dignified grey-brown), will produce more colourful growth. Give the plants a good watering (if the soil is dry) and a mulch of well-rotted manure, or a handful of pelleted chicken manure, to help boost them back into growth. Prunings that are pencil-thick make perfect material for propagating: cut them into 20-30cms lengths, firm them into the ground or into a pot of gritty compost. Aside from keeping them moist (which is why the open ground is less troublesome), you can forget about them, and in a year, some of them will be rooted.
As for pollarding, where the growth is cut back to just a couple of centimetres from the main stem, this not only keeps trees a manageable size, it also promotes the formation of large and luxuriant leaves in some species - Paulownia and Catalpa, for instance. Eucalyptus, on the other hand, produces rounded juvenile leaves, much prized by flower arrangers.
Quietly rotting wood makes a haven for worms, insects and other creepy crawlies, for hedgehogs and frogs, and for the birds that come to feed on the smaller creatures. A few logs piled up in a shady corner will provide the requisite habitat, or you can upend them, like standing stones, and interplant them with ferns and other woodlanders. The roots of trees, meanwhile, can make wonderfully gothic creations. At Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, there is a "stumpery", where the roots of holly and oak trees are piled up to form a gnarled, wooden wall. The stark skeletons are softened with frills of fern, cyclamen, anemone, epimedium, lily-of-the-valley, hellebore and ivy.
Well, so much for dead trees, although I could go on and on about their numerous other uses (for furniture, building, paper, etc, etc). It's the live ones that are helping to keep us alive: absorbing carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. According to the Tree Council of Ireland, for every cubic metre of growth, a typical tree absorbs one tonne of carbon dioxide, and produces the equivalent of 727kg of oxygen. Which is as good a reason as any for planting a lot more of them.