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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 kin
by 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoThe 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.
- CalRobert 4y agoTo be fair they're not native forest but I quite like a dense, dark forest. It reminds me of forests from home (which is fitting since it's a North American species).
- detritus 4y agoOh, no - I mean the monoculture is so densely planted together that it's a literal struggle to even make your way through. These are not the deep dark forests of yore that threaten Hobbits...!
- CalRobert 4y agoHah, maybe that's why my 4 year old likes it (harder to chase her!) Random example would be Lough Boora which has a sitka spruce plantation and they're somewhere around 2 meter spacing I think, though they're mature so at ground level you don't have too many branches in your face.
- smcl 4y agoI haven't been back for a while, but I remember seeing a few little geometrically simple islands of thick woodland in a sea of farmland. So it's mostly that? Shame