"I need 300 acorns" he said briskly, having recently bought a few acres in the West with a modest house. He got them quickly. For this seems to be a good mast year. And around the country, just now, people are gathering under the banner of Crann, that splendid organisation, to celebrate the Festival of Trees, or rather Feile Shamhna na gCrann '99. It opened last Saturday - appropriately, in Avondale, Co Wicklow - and it continues until Sunday 31st countrywide. Can't list the meetings and plantings in full, but they take place in Galway, Dublin, Glen of the Downs, Wicklow, Tipperary, Limerick and elsewhere. As usual the schools are in there, too, taking part in the plantings. Their first great project, Oak Glen in Glencree, Co Wicklow is now well completed with 100,000 trees planted, all sponsored by the public at so much a tree.
A press release tells us that now you can help, for £25 per tree, with Oak Glen 2 on the shores of Lough Derg in Tipperary at Coolbawn. Crann HQ is at Crann House, Banagher, Co Offaly: phone 0509 51718 or fax 0509 51938. Remember their slogan: Releafing Ireland with Broadleaf. You could hardly plant too many trees of the right sort and in the right place. But there are snags, particularly with the neophyte. An enthusiast who planted quickly and too densely a few acres around his house in the country came reluctantly to see that not everyone who complains of having his or her view obstructed is a sorehead. For he suddenly realised that his view of a lovely run of river just a few yards below his windows had completely gone - two alders and three other 20year old trees eventually came down to give light and view to the main rooms.
However, better maybe to overplant and thin out later than to wish that 20 or 10 years earlier you had started a more judicious planned layout. And in this year of plentiful acorns, beech mast and chestnut, take advantage of it and plant in pots. A carefully looked after little seedling makes a fine present. "The reality is that trees are mysterious beings that we can never understand," wrote Oliver Rackham. Was it not Bismarck who claimed that he got energy from leaning for a period against an old oak? And in Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders, the girl Marty, planting young pines with Giles Winterbourne, claimed that trees, on planting, sigh. She put one of the young pines into a hole dug by Giles and held up her finger: "the soft musical breathing instantly set in which was not to cease day or night till the grown tree should be felled - probably long after the two planters had been felled themselves." Y