Something for Nothing
g-A-OPCP
By STRIX
THE other day I did some- thing that I never expected to do; I sold a sallow. In fact, I sold several, at an average price of about £4.
I may be doing the poor brutes an injustice, but I doubt if I per cent of my readers know what a sallow is. Salix caprea, to give it its scientific name, is the commonest of the thirty-odd varieties of willow native to the British Isles. Unlike S. caerulea, from which cricket bats are made and which can be felled and sold for a good price only fifteen years after being planted, sallow is worthless as timber and inferior even as firewood. Its appearance is —to my mind—drab and undistinguished and I have always regarded it as an intrusive weed, taking up space which would be more usefully and gracefully occupied even by the humble birch.
But a market has suddenly opened up for 'instant' trees, twenty or thirty feet in height. They are transplanted to beautify new housing estates (where I suppose they will get summary treatment from the vandals), to screen sewage works and suchlike, and for general amenity purposes; and apparently the sallow is a species which takes more kindly than most to re-
deployment. I thus find myself in the agreeable and unfamiliar position of getting something for nothing; since there is plenty more of the horrible stuff about, we may yet succeed in keeping the bailiffs out of Strix Hall.
Though not given to introspection, I find that this windfall has had an unsettling effect upon my mind. In the woodlands I am lucky enough to own, the grievous wounds inflicted by two wars no longer show even as scars. I started in 1945 to replant the areas on which the timber had been requisitioned during the last war; and ever since I have gone on doing what I believe to be 'the right thing by the land.'
In my part of the world, the 'right thing. is, or certainly used to be, to aim for a final crop of beech. Beech takes round about 150 years to mature, so to plant it involves an act of faith. Not only is one making the tacit, perhaps rather arrogant and plainly unwarrantable, assumption that the woods will be in the posses- sion of one's descendants (or, failing that, of someone who will look after them properly) at the beginning of the twenty-second century: but one is also gambling on the prospect of there being a demand for this particular timber in 150 years' time.
There are plenty of precedents for people guessing wrong in these matters. The utility of yews—even slower-growing than beech—largely vanished when the invention of gunpowder made
bows and arrows obsolete. In many parts of
the country landowners must be cursing ancestors who settled for the traditional mixture of oak and hazel coppice—oak for the shipyards, coppice for hurdle-making; today I doubt if a cubic foot of home-grown oak goes into any of the ships we build, and the advent of wire, plus the rise in wages, has made coppice a hopelessly uneconomic crop. Apart from such imponderables, the appearance of the grey squirrel and the steady increase in its numbers have dramatically lengthened the odds against a beech tree ever reaching maturity, for in the summer, between the ages of roughly fifteen and twenty, beeches (and also sycamores) become irresistibly attractive to squirrels, who gnaw the bark off them with fatal results for the trees. The experts tell us that a world shortage of timber is just around the corner; and although the Government does not recognise forestry as a 'productive' industry for the purposes of SET, economists deplore the fact that the country im- ports 90 per cent of the timber it needs at an
annual cost of £550 million (which is more than double the amount of money voted by Parlia- ment for the development of our own forestry resources since the First World War ended nearly half a century ago).
So what with one thing and another, the con• scientious woodland owner lives in a rather baffling world; and his grasp of realities. infirm enough already, is not strengthened by suddenly discovering that half a dozen weeds with only twenty years' growth on them bring in as much money as a noble beech tree six or seven times their age.
But don't think I'm grumbling.
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