Are we to be left with no national illusions at all? Or is George Cunningham having us on? For he writes that he is shortly to tell an audience in Nenagh that the English did not destroy all those Irish trees, for ships, timber beams and so on, but that we stripped the country ourselves. From earliest time, he writes, our woodland cover was being depleted, mainly for agricultural purposes. (No quarrel with that. Food had to be produced.)
But then he is going to declare that the medieval timber cover could be as little as one to two per cent, and that we destroyed our woodlands ourselves. What we have engaged in, he is to say, in blaming the English, is, in his own term "landscape nationalism. Let's have a debate on the real story". Well, you can see what is going to happen. People will turn up with Eileen McCracken's book The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times; with John Mackay's Trodden Gold and other handy tomes. "Trees in History" is his title, and the lecture or debate, or row, will take place under the auspices of the Ormond Historical Society on January 28th. At 8.30 pm.
George says in his letter that he and his wife visited the red wood trees in Yosemite and climbed (by car) eleven thousand feet up White Mountain in eastern California to see the bristlecone pine - one of them 4,600 years old. "I cried as did my wife Carmel. How wonderful to be able to do such things." George, you don't have to be told, lives in Roscrea, and he sent on a splendid magazine style publication Roscrea People. A lot of spaces, rightly, given to the annual Crann seminar held at Terryglass in October. Rickard Deasy - no better man - opened it. There were so many aspects touched on in the various talks and walkabouts.
At Matt Fogarty's tree farm at Drominagh, a huge variety of trees were seen and a discussion took place on the provenance of ash. "We were advised," wrote Jane Coman, "to obtain ash from Coillte if we wanted to plant," for some ash from abroad, eg from southern France is very susceptible to spring frosts. Dutch ash is OK, but still not the best. Matt Fogarty told the visitors that beech and alder like competition, so you plant them close together with other trees.
And on the question of home or foreign tree seed, a forester has been heard, by these ears, to recommend French acorns above our own. Or some of our own. To which, again hmm. Forestry is not an exact science - fortunately.