The Occasional Gardener: Trees aren't just lovely to look at, they're useful too, providing shelter and reducing the risk of flooding

The garden is starting to look a little forlorn now the gales have blasted all the leaves from the trees.

It would look a bit better if the sycamore, birch and chestnut leaves I swept into piles a couple of weeks ago had been tidied away instead of blown around to blanket the paths and garden.

My excuse is that at the time of year when so much colour is leached from the landscape, the warm orange and rust-tinted leaves cheer me up.

The plan is to squash them all into black binliners which have a few holes pierced in the top and then put them in a corner to rot - so in a couple of years I'll have lovely leaf mould for compost or mulch.

The antidote to the winter blues is to add lots of red to the garden - and shrubs with red berries will also feed the birds.

I recently put a striking strawberry-jam coloured berberis outside the window of my home office to brighten up my view - but all the leaves dropped off.

The other new reddish shrubs are doing well although they're too small yet to make much difference to the gloom of a drizzly day.

But no matter how bare the garden looks, stone cottages at least blend into the landscape, which is more than can be said of modern rural bungalows.

One of the reasons they look so ugly is that they're often prominent on the skyline - our ancestors cannily built their homes in dips to take advantage of a natural windbreak and surrounded them with native trees.

While some new houses might have a few conifers, many of my neighbours in the west of Ireland don't seem to like trees at all.

When I had drainage ditches dug along the fence last year - to stop the nearby well flooding the garden - the digger-operator took the opportunity to uproot as many old crab-apple, beech and Scotch pine trees as he could.

I was like a crazy tree-lady rushing out about the rain every time the digger went near another ancient tree, but all my entreaties to "save that tree" seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Not understanding anything at all about trees - and mistakenly thinking that a countryman could be relied on - I crumbled and let him do what he wanted.

The ironic thing about destroying trees and hedgerows to create a drainage ditch is that trees take up thousands of gallons of water each year and so help to reduce the risk of flooding.

But I've learnt my lesson: never agree to anything irrevocable unless you're 100 per cent sure it's the right thing to do.

As well as looking beautiful, trees and hedges make a useful windbreak - which can help to save on heating bills and provide shelter for smaller plants - even in urban gardens.

According to Jay Rufus, a tree lover from Co Tipperary, "a hedge . . . is a far more efficient barrier to wind than a solid barrier, such as a wall or fence. Not only do solid barriers tend to break or blow down in high winds, they themselves cause strong disturbances in the airflow at ground level . . . creating eddies, swirls, downdraughts and gusts."

Although a hedge takes about 15 years to grow big enough to provide much protection and trees can take up to 50 years to grow to maturity, I recently spent €30 on 10 alder - quick-growers which like boggy ground - and 10 rowan, for their autumn colour.

Happy at getting such a bargain, I was being rather over-ambitious since planting 20 five-foot trees involves a helluva lot of digging.

It's taken me three weeks to get 12 into the ground but I've run out of support-posts - and somehow keep "forgetting" to buy more.

The feng shui consultant who recently looked round my garden recommended planting more native trees - so maybe all the digging will bring me good luck now, even if I might not be around to see the trees fully-grown.

More on Irish trees and hedges at www.thehedge.org and Jay Rufus's site www.iol.ie/~plugin/trees.htm