Chapter 2: Habitat Tree Planting 2025 🌱
February 2025
How appropriate that, in the same week we celebrated a year since we first viewed the land, we found ourselves planting native trees there.
And first of all a big big thank you to all the folk at “Stump up for Trees”, the charity who provided all the trees and guards and canes for Rhuddin who are doing amazing tree growing and planting all over the Bannau Brycheniog National Park.
With friends and family, out under February skies, our first endeavour here at Rhuddin is to create a native woodland habitat and shelter belt.
We prepared the ground with ‘chop and drop’, laying coppiced wood from the old grown out hedge on contour lines across the planting area on the northern edge. This aims to catch nutrients and organic matter making its way down the sloping hillside and also creates a ‘forest floor’. The old wood decomposing into the ground encourages a healthy mycology, mimicking the way dead trees in a forest would decompose and feed the young ones growing there.
Once planted in, we staked and put guards on (we have a hare population on the land!) then covered around with cardboard squares as a mulch. Since cardboard is made from trees, this too acts as a forest floor as it breaks down and inhibits the grass growth around the trees by cutting out the light. Without this, the grass would compete with the young trees for nutrients and inhibit their growth.
We had a mixture of weather for the tree planting. The preparation day was dry and this was a blessing of winter sunshine for our champagne and cream tea picnic on the 18th! Other days that week reminded us of wild Cornish weather, with sideways rain. Up on the hills, with an easterly wind, the windchill made the hot drinks and flapjack very appealing! With no structure on the land yet and the camper van in the garage awaiting parts, breaks were an earnest huddle together under a rickety old field shelter hugging mugs and munching tasty treats. A hip flask appeared at some point (what a good idea!). Everyone showed fine fortitude, in keeping with the land’s new name (which in the welsh language means ‘heartwood’ and also has another meaning: a person’s mettle or fortitude).
There was indeed lots of jolly grinning and endurance as we lovingly pushed the roots down into the ground and secured them in with focussed stamping. Wild weather was braved and evenings with feasts and a fire followed, all the more appreciated after the contrast of our wild outside ventures.
Yes, just as the days are starting to grow longer, my experience was that it was a great privilege to be there in the National Park, doing something which had such tangible hope for the future. Trees we helped root this week could do wonders in that little patch, and some may even grow to mighty oaks in hundreds of years time.
These little trees have really got into my heart and a few days later working at the hospital, I kept thinking of them up there on the hills, wishing them every success.
Take root, thrive and grow strong and one day you will support many creatures in your kind branches! 🌳 🌱🙏✨
