Everyone is on about trees, even if it's only Christmas trees, and that's a different thing. But just now is also the ideal time for cutting down trees, trees you've planted yourself, sweated over, worried about. Were they in the right place? Did the soil suit these particular species? And, in the case of very small saplings, did they need shelter? Now, less than two decades afterwards, it's a question of trying to cut for yourself a few gaps, so that you see out and feel yourself part of the neighbourhood. Broad gaps, in some cases, where your might see more than on cow at a time; where you might even glimpse, at. night, a neighbourhood friendly light.
Then the trees that are simply too tight together to flourish as their nature dictates. Daft, for example to put so many pediculate oaks in one biggish plot? Not really. You never know how a tree will thrive. Its roots might hit an obstacle, or find a poor stretch of soil, and thus not prosper. So you overplant. And eventually, where you had put twenty such oaks, your successors may cut them back to four or two. For you don't just plant and leave. We are talking here of planting for pleasure or landscaping, not of commercial foresting.
You don't have much compunction in thinning willows; they thrive like weeds. Ash makes such good firewood that, again, while admiring them as trees, you equally have them in mind as firewood. Even oak, most reluctantly culled, serves the same purpose after a few years maturing. And it's a big question to take out a Douglas Fir, which has grown to an enormous height. The special pleasure here lies not only in its huge shelter factor, but in those lovely, dangling, hairy or pointed cones. But there are more, if this one comes down.
Birch, being slim, will be retained in most cases. A real heartbreak is to have to dig out a red American oak. With our climate, you do not find every year that brilliant scarlet which the leaves at times seem to put on overnight; but even in lesser shades of red, they make an autumn in themselves.
As to the pinus pinea, the umbrella or stone pine, they were so doubtful a crop, being brought back as seed in a pocket from various countries, that they were particularly over planted, being, of all, the most problemmatic of the species.
Now huge and producing huge orange size cones, they are crowding, and where twenty were, six should be. Remember the oak leaf count the other day? 120,000 were raked up from the lawn. Still more lying, and more not yet fallen. The count may make the half million, or more.