“Ye must aye be sticking in a tree, ’twill be growing whilst thee be sleeping”
This the laird to his son in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels.
I may have mis-remembered it, and the laird was slightly in error; trees don’t grow at night.
Well, I have been ‘sticking in a tree’ for nearly sixty years, and I’m running out of places to stick them. This year so far we’ve planted a hundred mixed species in Lount Wood, sixteen Scots Pine above the Fossil Bank, and a small orchard below the hen run. Also two small groups of Coast Redwood.
The Coast Redwood (sequoia sempervirens) is a splendid conifer with reddish bark which in California makes the
world’s tallest tree. I first saw them in a wood on the Welsh border and was keen to have some at Staunton. I planted a dozen on the Bracken Bank, and in a year or so they’d all died. Leicestershire was too cold for them. That was more than forty years ago.
Since coming to live at the hall in 2003 we have found that we have a thriving specimen, about thirty five feet high, in the grounds. It must have been planted in hospice years (1980 to 2002) probably as a memorial tree. The hall is in a ‘frost pocket’ so the success of this specimen is hardly due to its situation. Global warming has its upside.
So I bought twenty ‘plugs’ of Coast Redwood from our usual supplier. Eleven have found a home where they will be
seen by our family and the wider public. Now I’m struggling to find a good home for the remaining nine. It’s
probably the better sort of problem to have.