Stumps

James is here to stake out the specimen trees and spray round the whips that he and the others planted this spring. (Spraying required by the Forestry Commission grant, and I hope with nothing more sinister than glyphosate.) We found him in the morning filling large tanks with water. All the trees are desperately in need of rain, but it's only viable to water the specimens. Looking into the forest of green tubes, most of this year's and last autumn's whips have put effort into some leaves and blossom, and need rain to be able to sustain it. Some have already died, either from lack of rain or the extreme winter cold, or from being gnawed by voles; Anthony has found quite a few vole nests at the base of the tubes.

In Easter week, the timetable becomes a bit fluid. A group of us went down to Oxford for a tour of the Bodleian library (150 miles of shelf space in its new book repository in Swindon, most of which will be taken up with editions of Barbara Cartland), with Exeter College (founded in the same year as Bannockburn) and other sites thrown in. I took the opportunity to go to the Ghost Forest outside the University Museum, at the other end of the spectrum from our whips. Ours are temperate broadleaf forest, as native as possible to the UK. The Ghost Forest comprises ten primary rainforest tree stumps from Ghana. Ours are thin and incipient. The Ghost Forest stumps are fallen trunkless giants. But they are/were all vulnerable, and they are highlighting sustainability.

The Ghost Forest "is intended to highlight the alarming depletion of the world's natural resources, and in particular the continued rate of deforestation. Today, a tropical forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds, impacting on climate, biodiversity and the livelihoods of indigenous people. The trees in Ghost Forest - most of which fell naturally in storms - are intended to represent rainforest trees worldwide; the absence of their trunks is presented as a metaphor for the removal of the world's lungs caused through the loss of our forests."