Unncessary work

The house we now live in is on the side of a hill and just beyond our garden's rear fence there is dense vegetation. Beyond this the land eventually rises to a bare summit of rock and heather but the lower slopes are thickly covered in vegetation, most of which is either gorse or rhodies, as we call them. (Rhododendron Ponticum.) Neither of these plants are native to Scotland but they grow tall and retain their leaves all year round, preventing light from reaching the ground beneath them. The effect of this is that nothing grows in their shade and the soil there remains damp, acid and barren of life. The rhodies have flexible branches which rise up until they find the light where they sprout a mass of their dark green leaves. And should those growing stems bend downwards so as to touch the ground then they are capable of sprouting roots which allow them to spread outwards from their parent tree until they cover the whole landscape. These characteristics make them unpopular here and there are many projects underway aimed at removing them from the landscape although this is not an easy task due to their invasive nature.

Having cut back some of these antisocial plants which were threatening to overflow our back fence I thought it might be nice to go a little further and create a pathway through them which would allow us to walk up the hill to the summit.

At the start one has to cross a small burn (stream) so naturally a bridge of some sort was needed. A couple of washing-line poles seemed to do the job, although these require a good sense of balance to negotiate safely, hence the safety rope hanging from a tree. Immediately beyond this the path plunges into darkness beneath a rhododendron canopy and the ground here is a permanently waterlogged slope - wearing anything less than wellington boots will result in wet feet. I felt it might be possible to open up this section by hacking back some of the rhodie stems to let some light in. I might stress here that this is not our land. We think it is part of the estate owned by the local laird but it is completely unmanaged and we are unlikely to be challenged for cutting back a few of these invasive plants. There are deer and sheep that roam the hillside (which explains the lack of new tree growth higher up) but it is certainly not land that is farmed nor cared for in any way.

So here is my new project, totally unnecessary and physically demanding but rewarding in many ways too as I am simply doing what many would approve of and if money were available others might be doing instead. After donning the appropriate protective clothing I manoeuvre myself carefully across the washing-line poles carrying my small battery-powered chain saw and I set to work. The rhodie stems are quite slim but the very first cut highlights the problem I am facing. The cut tree stem merely hangs there, suspended high above on the leafy canopy about ten metres (thirty feet) above. It takes an immense amount of pulling and shaking to bring just one stem down to ground level, at which point I am faced with dealing with a long twisting piece of wood in the confined, mud filled space which is still shaded by the remaining tree cover. One thing I discover quite early on is how strong the growing rhododendron wood is. Any attempt to snap the branch is impossible as the wood has flexible sinews which simply bend without breaking. I decide to try to pull these long cut stems out of the forest cover so I can deal with them in our back garden. This requires every ounce of my strength but I finally have them in a place where I can cut the wood into short pieces which, when dry, will ultimately become fuel for our wood stove. The first morning's effort created a small area allowing a beam of sunlight to reach the ground for the first time in many years.

The second effort a week or so later ended in a little more of the dark tunnel being exposed to light so I am encouraged to think that I can eventually make a lighted passage right through the invasive woodland canopy.

With rain stopping play on this project my attention turns towards the part of our garden from which we have now largely removed those horrible blackthorn bushes that I moaned about here before, the ones that grow those lethal spikes. (I did read that blackthorn is a native shrub that probably evolved this way as a deterrent to browsing by the delicate-mouthed grazers present at the time.)

This picture shows the area where the shrubs had taken root and spread. Their roots are still firmly embedded in the bedrock on which our house is largely built but with the growing shrubs now gone we can cut off any new shoots as soon as they sprout, a process we have used elsewhere to kill off unwanted spiky things.

What the shrub removal has revealed is a muddy groove in the rock, long hidden from view, in which water now collects when it rains. More interestingly however, are the two separate drain pipes which emerge from the bottom of the wall above and, leading from under the paved area on the other side of the wall. They were clearly put in place to drain that area. Both of these plastic pipes were totally clogged by blackthorn roots but once these were extracted we found that some water did begin to ooze out into the muddy groove until it formed a small pond. (For want of anything better we have named this the 'Rock Pond'.) Which brings us to the puzzling bit. One of these small plastic pipes disappears under the wall then continues some distance beneath the paved area, something I discovered by inserting a long stick. It was clearly put in place before the pavers were laid, which begs the question, where does it lead from? Could it have been intended to serve as an exit drain for runoff from our conservatory roof? If this were the case then one might expect that after a heavy downpour water would gush out into the Rock Pond. But this doesn't happen. Of course it could be blocked somewhere further in and in any case why should we care. Rainwater always seems to just run away - there are no large puddles anywhere - so other than just my curiosity what would be the benefit in digging up the ground to find some answers? This would be unnecessary work.