4 ms·

It would help if we didn't have a cultural dislike of trees. I'm getting tired of "You'll be wantin' to cut them trees down for light" when people see my house.

klondike_klive 4y ago
One of my earliest memories of my Irish grandad was him cutting down a tree in our back garden.
BirAdam 4y ago
I don’t know how cultural that is. In the aggregate, humans seem to enjoy sunlight. If a house is in the middle of the woods, I imagine there’s a subset of human who would prefer that but not so much the general population over a large time span. EDIT: though the lighting would probably be awesome for TV viewing or gaming… it’s important to remember that if the house is sticks and siding with asphalt covered shingles, there’s an increased maintenance burden and security risk from having a ton of trees close to the house.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  If it matters, the culture I grew up in (central California) very much valued trees because of the shade they offered, as well as their beauty.
pmontra 4y ago
Trees shade is great in hot weather.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Fortunately Ireland is plagued by neither sunlight nor hot weather.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Considering the moaning caused by 30C I think we're in for a rough few centuries...
  - smcl 4y ago
    My street is lined with trees that (in summer at least) provides great cover from rain, you can walk the whole ~200m down it without getting wet. Maybe that's a more convincing selling point for Ireland :)
smcl 4y ago
My parents had a similar thing in Scotland. They have a big garden, a conservatory and a lovely sea view. They chopped down a lovely conifer (I forget which kind, just remember it had needles) to get more of a sea view, a pear tree that just needed some love and another that shaded the driveway but apparently made the cars hard to clean. This happened when I was away at university, I came back and thought that there'd been a storm or something. Really weird. That said, there's a difference between reforesting efforts the countryside and (stupidly) cutting down a couple of trees in your garden. Scotland and Ireland are I think similarly deforested after previously having been nearly covered in it. There are reforestation efforts in Scotland, though I don't think we'll see a huge difference within my lifetime :( edit: ok it's maybe less negative than I thought, Wikipedia thinks we've jumped from 5% forested to 17% since the ~1950s.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- CalRobert 4y ago
  I wonder how much of that 17% is native species? Nothing wrong with wood farms of course but it's a point of contention here that the government calls a bunch of monoculture spruce from Alaska part of its reforestation efforts. I can't imagine chopping down a lovely conifer. We have a dozen ~20 meter tall trees in a row and our neighbours sounded almost annoyed we didn't chop them down with the rest that we had to fell when building our house. It killed us to lose the ones we did. Mind you we're on 3 acres; we're not shading anyone else. I have a couple hundred saplings growing, fingers crossed I have a nice starter forest in a decade or so.
  - smcl 4y ago
    I'm afraid I don't know, but you're right if it was all (or mostly) non-native it's maybe not quite worth celebrating. Your little future forest sounds great though!
- detritus 4y ago
  The problem with that increase since the fifties is that it's mostly not 'real' forest but plantations, which are their own kind of desert. I don't know if you've ever tried to venture into one but.. it's not fun. Very dense. Very little of nature about them.
jmartrican 4y ago
I can imagine hearing that over and over again can get quite tiring. I'm planting trees all over my house to create more shade. Ambient light coming through the windows is good enough for me.

klondike_klive 4y ago

One of my earliest memories of my Irish grandad was him cutting down a tree in our back garden.

BirAdam 4y ago

I don’t know how cultural that is. In the aggregate, humans seem to enjoy sunlight. If a house is in the middle of the woods, I imagine there’s a subset of human who would prefer that but not so much the general population over a large time span. EDIT: though the lighting would probably be awesome for TV viewing or gaming… it’s important to remember that if the house is sticks and siding with asphalt covered shingles, there’s an increased maintenance burden and security risk from having a ton of trees close to the house.

CalRobert 4y ago
If it matters, the culture I grew up in (central California) very much valued trees because of the shade they offered, as well as their beauty.

pmontra 4y ago

Trees shade is great in hot weather.

thematrixturtle 4y ago
Fortunately Ireland is plagued by neither sunlight nor hot weather.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Considering the moaning caused by 30C I think we're in for a rough few centuries...
- smcl 4y ago
  My street is lined with trees that (in summer at least) provides great cover from rain, you can walk the whole ~200m down it without getting wet. Maybe that's a more convincing selling point for Ireland :)

smcl 4y ago

My parents had a similar thing in Scotland. They have a big garden, a conservatory and a lovely sea view. They chopped down a lovely conifer (I forget which kind, just remember it had needles) to get more of a sea view, a pear tree that just needed some love and another that shaded the driveway but apparently made the cars hard to clean. This happened when I was away at university, I came back and thought that there'd been a storm or something. Really weird. That said, there's a difference between reforesting efforts the countryside and (stupidly) cutting down a couple of trees in your garden. Scotland and Ireland are I think similarly deforested after previously having been nearly covered in it. There are reforestation efforts in Scotland, though I don't think we'll see a huge difference within my lifetime :( edit: ok it's maybe less negative than I thought, Wikipedia thinks we've jumped from 5% forested to 17% since the ~1950s.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CalRobert 4y ago
I wonder how much of that 17% is native species? Nothing wrong with wood farms of course but it's a point of contention here that the government calls a bunch of monoculture spruce from Alaska part of its reforestation efforts. I can't imagine chopping down a lovely conifer. We have a dozen ~20 meter tall trees in a row and our neighbours sounded almost annoyed we didn't chop them down with the rest that we had to fell when building our house. It killed us to lose the ones we did. Mind you we're on 3 acres; we're not shading anyone else. I have a couple hundred saplings growing, fingers crossed I have a nice starter forest in a decade or so.
- smcl 4y ago
  I'm afraid I don't know, but you're right if it was all (or mostly) non-native it's maybe not quite worth celebrating. Your little future forest sounds great though!
detritus 4y ago
The problem with that increase since the fifties is that it's mostly not 'real' forest but plantations, which are their own kind of desert. I don't know if you've ever tried to venture into one but.. it's not fun. Very dense. Very little of nature about them.

jmartrican 4y ago

I can imagine hearing that over and over again can get quite tiring. I'm planting trees all over my house to create more shade. Ambient light coming through the windows is good enough for me.