OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Trees need that little bit of extra help here in Caithness
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Planting trees is hard work wherever you are, but in the far north we need to look after this precious resource even more than elsewhere
Trees are precious everywhere, but especially so in Caithness. There are few trees in the county which have not been planted, and most need a lot of care and protection to grow.
Larger trees such as beech and sycamore have taken a couple of hundred years to achieve a size which, further south, they would attain in a quarter of that time.
Smaller trees such as alder, birch and rowan take 40 years to get to a reasonable size but then start to die.
Spruce plantations grow at half the rate of those in better locations but still get too tall for our strong winds and after about 40 years of growth are decimated.
It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time to grow a small wood or hedgerow in Caithness. There have been many failures where people have hired contractors to plant a large area with broadleaved trees, only for almost all of them to fail.
You need the right strain of tree, not one grown on farms in England or Italy, and time has to be taken over each tree. If you try to plant thousands of trees in a week in Caithness, then thousands of trees will die.
I probably average 15 minutes over planting a tree – this a little bare-rooted seedling less than half a metre tall. That’s another mistake people make, it’s much better in Caithness to plant trees small.
Plant a tall sapling and it will sit at that height for years, probably dying off at the top. Meanwhile (if you are lucky) it will sprout from the bottom, sprouts which after several years will eventually grow to the height of the tree you originally planted. A much smaller seedling will overtake it.
There are lots of deer in the county and if you plant trees, they usually need protection. A plastic tube and stake is best, the stake needs cutting and hammering into the clay soil and the tube needs to be carefully fastened.
In typical rough ground it is very hard work carrying stakes, tubes, hammer, spade and trees from place to place then removing grass, weed and dead branches before beginning to plant the tree.
You will then have to look after it for years, providing fertilizer, water in droughts, replacing broken stakes, clearing choking grass. Trees here need all the help they can get.
The most reliable trees I find are sycamores and alders. Ash sadly is unlikely to survive the ash dieback fungus. So I don’t plant any more ash.
There are still some fine old elms but these are threatened by dutch elm disease which continues to spread north.
Horse chestnut is tough and grows to be a large, old tree but is extremely slow. Local strains of hazel, birch and rowan are worth trying but it is a waste of time to plant seedlings grown in nurseries further south which will struggle then slowly die.
Wild cherry and Swedish whitebeam are also fairly reliable but not very long-lived. By all means try a few holly, oak or other ‘exotics’ but give them shelter and don’t expect too much. Hazel will survive but will take forever to get anywhere. Likewise hawthorn, other than in dense hedges.
So trees are to be prized in Caithness. Think very hard before cutting one down. It does have to be done sometimes unfortunately, for instance where a tree has grown to block out light, but if at all possible avoid it! And a carefully grown patch of woodland, nurtured over many years, is not just a place to put your cattle and sheep for winter shelter.
The saga of trees being destroyed in Sheffield and Plymouth by councils rigidly following old guidelines should show us the need to be flexible about hard rules. But sadly the same thing has happened in Caithness.
There used to be a row of fine trees along the road to Hoy pumping station, with a hedgerow on the other side, a haven for nesting birds. It had taken over 40 years for these trees to grow after careful planting and nurturing.
The crowning glory was an unusual Korean fir, which occasionally would produce a huge and spectacular pine cone. I would always look out for it – and could hardly believe it when, on my last visit, I saw that the whole row of trees AND the hedge had been completely destroyed, chain-sawed off at the ground.
I can only assume some over-zealous interpretation of a rule about trees near roads. For goodness sake, fix the potholes first!
Most Caithnessians don’t understand trees. They are very precious here. Please look after them.
