13th January 2016
Happy New Year
It was a good start, and just as it ought to be:
pale sunshine, January cold, no wind, and dry. We of the Wednesday Conservation
Team always reckoned on Wednesdays being predictably fine, but that all went
wrong in 2015. Maybe this is a sign that the weather will revert to its old
ways. A nice thought but, of course, complete rubbish, nature doesn’t work like
that.
Ordinarily, as you may know, we get our fun from
being destructive in the name of nature conservation – laying waste to
invasions of Himalayan Balsam, uprooting Western Hemlock and (best of all)
making a bonfire of rampant rhododendron. It’s nothing as silly as a new year’s
resolution, but we started 2016 by being constructive.
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| Preparation Work |
In the woods, where we were erecting a willow tunnel,
it was damp and penetratingly cold, and the relative immobility required by the
task almost guaranteed that we would get colder. And we did. Numbed fingers
tied ill-practiced knots to temporarily bind the arched willow wands; numbed
brains tried to fathom the art of weaving willow. None of us had any experience
of this before, and only two of us seemed to have the vaguest idea of what the
finished structure should look like but, by a process of corrected error, the
job got done.
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| Getting Started |
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| An Inquisitive Robin |
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| Platting the Willow |
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| Taking Shape |
Give it a few months and new green growth should
cover our mistakes. Anyway, poor workmanship shouldn’t spoil the fun of the
children who come to this Woodland Playscape in the summer; it didn’t spoil
ours.
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| The Finished Product |
Steve Wootten & Phil Coyne
