I wish I was a lumberjack...

Not many people are lucky enough to own 4ish acres of ancient woodland , us included.  But we are lucky enough to have friends that do!

Our visit to the woodland was a reason to celebrate for two reasons: first, it marked the first proper outing for our first ever car (christened Celestine, after the keen but ultimately hapless sales assistant in the Nissan dealership, who managed to knock increasing amounts off the price, while apologising for his errors), which we promptly broke in by driving through lots of muddy puddles; and, second, it marked the felling of the last laurel tree in the woodland.



The last laurel trees

Although there are over 2000 varieties of laurel (or so I'm told by Wikipedia), there are two varieties of laurel which are commonly grown in the UK.  One is the bay laurel, which provides the bay leaves we use in cooking (who knew?!) and the other is the cherry laurel, which is the one generally used for hedging. 

The problem with cherry laurel is that when left unchecked, it becomes HUGE, blocking out light and out-competing the slower-growing native species. Moreover, laurel has the ability to put down new roots whenever a section of trunk touches the ground.  This means that instead of growing upwards in discrete trunks, when left alone laurel will grow as a dense ticket of intertwining trunks (quite useful as a place to nip to the loo).  It's like the big brother to the spider plant in that respect. 

Destruction-wise this could be most unsatisfying- after 20 minutes of vigorous sawing through a trunk of a branch often resulted result in absolutely nothing because another section of the same trunk was still happily planted in the ground elsewhere. 

We also found that laurel destruction was not without danger- with one of our group experiencing a dramatic fall from a tree, a slow motion slide down a vertical trunk which would have been funny if it hadn't left him with a black eye and bloody nose, and the constant tripping over laurel stumps which were half-hidden in the leaves.  If laurel could snigger...


going....

Timber!



The last trunk falls

We lunched on a celebratory picnic of Wobbly Bottom goats cheese rolled in roasted garlic followed by Wobbly Bottom goats cheese fudge (address according to the wrappers: Wobbly Bottom Farm, Wibbly Wobbly Lane) and various bread rolls with baked-in vegetables, all courtesy of the St Ives Farmers' market (in Cambridgeshire I should add, rather than Cornwall).

Alas, this story has an unexpected postscript.  A week after our triumphant removal of the very last laurel tree, our friends who own the woodland found that the owner of the adjacent piece of woodland had planted a row of new trees along the boundary.  Great!  More people actively taking care of their patch .  However, when they went to nose inside the tree protectors....it was laurel!