Tree Planting - Good or Bad

[docsquid]

Article in The Guardian today from the director of Plantlife. Essentially saying that the mass tree planting schemes being undertaken are being done without thought to the habitat they will create or how they will be managed, creating dull, generic woodlands.

Makes me wonder if we did the right thing planting our new wood, although it does seem to meet all the criteria he states that would make planting reasonable. But it is definitely worth a read, at least to make everybody think before just banging in rows of trees.

http://gu.com/p/3c24d

[Whatisheatnow]

Once again it looks like small is good in that woods small enough to be managed by one person can more easily accomodate species diversity than the momoculture needed by large scale mechanised systems. John Seymour made the point that the main reason land was managed badly was because farms were too large. It would appear the same is true of forestry. This begs the question: how many hours/weeks/months per year of manual labour are required to keep one acre of mixed broadleaved woodland ln good ecological and productive order?

[Wigan Pixie]

I read the article with interest, both from a future woodland owner's perspective and from a recently helping plant a new area of woodland - we're actually extending the treeline outwards. I've never understood the concept of bringing in trees from abroad when, if our local woodland is anything to go by, there are variously sized saplings that are regularly being removed because they're growing in the wrong place. The new bit of woodland I've been helping with were all planted with saplings removed from other areas of the wood, which is something we've been doing for a couple of years and very successfully too. Surely this is the way to go if we want to stop bringing diseases into the country. Personally if I were planning a new patch of woodland, one of the first things I would do is to find a patch of land to bring saplings on from other parts of the wood. It makes perfect sense to me to keep things as local as possible. If they've already started growing and look healthy, then they must be suited to that location.