The city not only gives shelter to trees and other plants; it must generate a great deal of heat. For if you go less than 50 miles north into Meath and Cavan country you will find a huge difference in growth. In south Dublin the oaks are not only flowering but showing leaf; yet near the Meath-Cavan border there is hardly even a thickening of buds on both oak and ash - traditionally the latest to green up. The smaller beech trees, say 10 to 12 feet, are still completely clad in their autumn and winter-brown leaves. The hedges, of course, are green with hawthorn, and primroses on some of the steeper ditches are so abundant and bright that they look as if they had been applied artificially. Whins are the most brilliant thing on the scene. You get out of the car to enjoy their smell - and are hit by a blast of airborne slurry odour. (At least it's not as bad as a story from Sunderland, where a land proprietor returned from a business trip to find that one of his fields had been covered with 4,000 gallons of untreated fish farm effluent - according to an English fishing magazine made up of fish-faeces, decomposed food pellets and dead fish. A tenant farmer of the land-owner had been offered the sludge free by a contractor. And all near a small stream or burn.)
The oaks and ash are open to western winds, but they stubbornly hold their record of being the last trees to break out. Well, not quite, but the last of the generality of trees, for one not in the usual run, comes even later - the mulberry. You know you have planted the oaks too closely. They are nearly all quercus robur, the pedunculate oak which, in its time can throw a branch, thicker than a man's body, 10, 40 maybe 50 feet horizontally. So the sad news is that, if you are to do the right thing by this magnificent tree, you have to take out the greater part of them? No, leave it to the next generation. You gathered the acorns from a magnificent, centuries-old source. You can't kill your own rearing.
Never mind that the ash are also too close. They can be used as you go along for firewood - their original purpose when they were planted, as the fossil fuels seemed to be coming to an end. A panic move; but they have their graceful charms too.
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