Dónal Donohoe

It’s over ten years now that I have been living on the hill and having lived in cities all my life the experience on the whole has been a good one. It was not so much a question of reconnecting with nature again, it was more like getting to know it for the first time. The yearly cycle with different trees and plants taking centre stage at different times to hog the limelight with their blossoms and changing colours, coming with such regularity that eventually one becomes acquainted with it.

© Irene Lundgaard

One of the first things I did when I moved here was to plant some trees, somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and fifty trees in fact, the rabbits destroyed some while they were still saplings but the majority survived. They were mostly native trees, oak, ash, birch and beech etc but there were a few exotic ones as well, a ginko, judas and tulip tree and so on. As the years have rolled by many of the trees have reached at least ten metres in height and some like the spruce trees have begun to block the light and smother some of the surrounding trees, so much so that this autumn I will have to select some for felling along with some of the alder trees which have been the most spectacular as far as growth has been concerned.

Still with rising oil and energy prices maybe this is not such a bad thing when one has a wood burning stove that except for maintenance never goes out from the time it is lit in the autumn until spring arrives again.