Planting trees

Coronavirus or no, trees have to be planted.

This morning, the Friends of Southwick Country Park and the Countryside Team, armed with spades, stakes and tree guards, some of us beset by coronavirus-driven child-care problems and at least one of us just two days short of her ninetieth birthday, gathered to plant trees.

• 

• 

• 

• 

These are some of the 420 whips that were donated to the park by the Woodland Trust. We decided that half of them were to be used to make a hedge around the new car park at Hope Nature Centre, and today half of that hedge was planted. We put in a mixture of hazel, silver birch, rowan, wild cherry and hawthorn which should make a beautiful hedge full of flower in the spring and berries in the autumn.

The car park is to be extended even further, so the second half of the hedge won’t be planted until after that has been done, and the boundary bank moved. It’s difficult, what with one thing and another, to be sure when that will happen.

• 

• 

• 

• 

When we had finished, Hope Nature Centre provided us with excellent coffee, enormous slices of delicious home-made cake and fruit buns. Thank you; we really needed that.

For a while, the Friends will not be meeting for work parties; we will be following the advice of the medical experts not to gather in groups of more than ten. Here we are trying to pose for a group photograph while failing to stand two metres away from each other.

Look after yourselves; stay safe.

---