Ancient Tree Forum

August Helen Read's diary so far Back to diary - latest Weeks 1,2 and 3 - click here		"At the beginning of August I started a three month study tour to find out more about the techniques that are used in different countries for pollarding trees. The aim is to find out information to help improve the management of newly created pollards in Britain, especially in Burnham Beeches, a Natura 2000 nature reserve where I work."

Week 6 Brandberg village, Zillertal valley: Ash pollards not yet cut this year Trees cut in the last week (and below) Karwendel Alpen Park: Old Sycamore trees Sycamore with trunk buried in gravels (+ Dieter Stohr) General view with cattle		Austria From Hungary I travelled into Austria and spent a couple of days driving through the mountains to the Zillertal valley which is just east of Innsbruck. There I had a few days to try and do some writing up which also happened to coincide with the weekend that the cows are brought back down from the higher pastures. All day Saturday cow bells were jangling as herds of cattle walked down the streets of Zell am Ziller wearing fancy head dresses of flowers and leaves. I had arranged to meet up with some foresters to look at spruce shredding and to try and find some ash pollarding, which proved very interesting. Dieter Stöhr arranged the day and we started off looking at spruce - a bit of a change from deciduous tree pollarding but fascinating none the less. Traditionally the lower branches were removed from the trees and then cut into small pieces for use as animal bedding during the winter. In the spring, when well mixed with the animal manure they were then spread on the fields as fertiliser. In this way nutrients were gradually stripped from the forests and applied to the fields. As a consequence the soil in these forests is very poor and it is difficult to grow commercial timber trees without some soil conditioning such as deep ploughing. Otto Mayr described how he remembered doing the work when he was younger, this involved getting from one tree to the next without climbing back down to the ground by swinging the tops of the trees! In the afternoon, after a few telephone calls we then managed to locate some recently cut ash pollards in a village at the head of the Zillertal Valley. Cutting ash for animal fodder seems to have been quite widespread amongst the villages at medium altitude in the Tirol, though clearly few continue to cut the trees. Despite being cut for similar reasons to the Norwegian trees they looked quite different. The trees seem to be cut a little higher each time so they were a very characteristic shape. They are also cut later in the year, just as the weather gets colder so that the leaves with all the leaflets break easily off the branches. The trees are cut every year but only those branches 3-4 years old are removed, the 1-2 year old ones are left on, so the pollards have a ‘hairy’ look. The following day I met up with Dieter again and we went to a valley in the Karwendel Alpen Park that can only be accessed from Germany. The valley is unusual in being very flat bottomed but with extremely steep sides and so a stunning setting for the 2000 or so sycamores that are growing in a park like setting. Some of the trees have been estimated to be 500 years old and have hollowed out to produce very characterful trees! The valley sides are subject to frequent avalanches that the sycamores seem largely to be able to cope with (avalanche pollards?), some of the trees are also standing in gravel that excavation has shown has buried their trunks for up to 2-3m. Due to concern about a lack of younger trees there have been various recent plantings (using seed from the trees themselves) and these have been fenced to prevent damage by the cattle that graze during the summer. There is a well surfaced path leading through the area and it is obviously very popular for visitors so the atmosphere felt like a 19th century landscaped park! After leaving Austria I travelled across Germany and France without stopping at any further pollard sites, and so had an uneventful journey back to England. I have a short time in England before heading off to France and Spain on 19th October. The diary will be continued then!

August Weeks 4 and 5		Romania and Hungary Mark and I spent some very interesting days in Romania. We found the people generally very helpful and kind and saw some interesting trees. The less successful side was that we did not manage so well to find people to talk to about pollarding and the tree management. I thought I had arranged for a translator – and in fact I had but the person organising our stay arranged the translator on the wrong days (or perhaps more accurately the wrong place). In other places we were staying with people who spoke some English but not really enough to ask questions about trees. We started in the Maramures area, the north west part of Romania. I had some beech pollards marked on a map for me by Hakan Slotte which proved very useful in getting our eye into where the pollards were. Maramures is very rural and the majority of people live from the land, most still travelling about by horse and cart (or occasionally ox and cart). The land is almost all used for something and was an amazing mosaic of fruit trees, hay meadows, vegetable gardens and woodland. The woodland cover must be quite high but most of it is managed for small scale timber by clear felling small plots and had very little dead wood – all is removed for fire wood. The beech pollards were at the upper edges of the villages, between the communal pasture areas and the woodland proper. Disappointingly they mostly did not look recently managed but some had a few branches lopped off in the last couple of years. The first trees were found (and probably the largest concentration) were at Botiza where we encountered the ‘small boy effect’. Eventually we had to give up looking at the trees as we were afraid that someone would break their neck while trying to impress us with their climbing and jumping prowess! In Maramures (and in many places) we saw recently shredded trees quite widely in the landscape. From Maramures we headed south to Transylvania, to Brasov and then to Brebu through the spectaular Prehova valley. This all took us longer than we had been led to believe by my ‘tour organiser’ and we had to stay an extra night on the way. This did give us a couple of hours to visit Bran castle however, which was a lovely fairy tale like castle with a stunning view! At Brebu we had a translator (actually an 18 year old school girl) and Adrian Ungureanu (who runs agrotour) took us to visit several different people. I had tried to explain what we wanted but by the end of the day he was assuring us that no pollarding happened in his area except for willow trees and street trees. They told us that the Romanian word for pollard was fasionare which Mark translated as ‘fashion for trees’ since they told us it was only to make the trees look nice. We spent some time with a forester and a farmer and learnt some interesting things (and met a lovely cow) but didn’t find out a great deal about pollards! The following day we left Adrian travelling back north via a village just a short distance from him (that we had learnt about in one of his ‘brochures’) and found some beech pollards! The village also had an extensive area of spectacular pasture on the more accessible side of the village. There we found a cattle herder who spoke some French and he did tell us a little about the trees. If I understood correctly, that they use the beech for firewood and cut at any time of the year using axes. We travelled north back through the mountains where possible and found a lovely road (actually the road surface was awful but the scenery was lovely!) between Alba Iulia and Lunca. There we saw more pollards and also recently shredded trees, both ash and also oak. Unfortunately it was Sunday so there were not even any people around to try and ask. And so to the Hungarian border... Our general impression of Romania was that here were pollards along the roadsides and odd trees in gardens that seemed to have been cut relatively recently but it was not clear for what purpose. Generally it seemed that the resulting branches/leaves were not used or at least were not clearly part of the economy. Willow trees were cut and the branches used seemingly for hurdles as well as presumably baskets etc. Most of the beech trees were not regularly cut, although I think that they are widespread across the country always close to the edges of the beech woodland. We did see them on most roads crossing the mountains when we approached the right height. It seemed partly that they were not needed so much and they perhaps date from a time when there was more pressure on the land but this is speculation on my part. Many/most were becoming enclosed by woodland and were hard to spot in the landscape, Everyone we spoke to said that beech is used as fire wood is not considered good wood for much else. The trees all looked as if they had the occasional branch lopped off as and when necessary. Mostly it looked as if very little care had been taken in the cutting, which had often involved an axe even if the branches were quite large (though we did see chain saw cuts). We christened the result of this ad hoc cutting Romanian pollards. They often have taller and thicker branches than we would expect to see on regularly managed pollards but the side branches had been taken off. We also saw several trees where a couple of large branches had been removed from one side leaving the tree very lopsided. The general shapes of the trees were very uneven and the very characteristic swelling at the top of the bolling was less evident as the cutting had been done to various different levels. In contrast the shredded trees looked very neat and tidy, even the shredded beech. Despite denials from many people it is obvious that the broadleaved trees are shredded for fodder but sadly we did not find a farmer near enough to a shredded tree to confirm this. We were less sure why oak might have been shredded as the dead leaves can kill cattle when eaten in quantity, but perhaps other animals can eat them? I dropped Mark at Budapest airport and then the following day met up with Zoltan Korsos. Zoltan is a millipede colleague of mine who I have known for many years. Together we visited a forester who took us to see pollards in the area around Kecskemet. First stop was inundation forest along the river Tisza where flood defences many years ago resulting in the felling of all the trees and then later in the replanting with Salix alba, S. fragilis, Populus nigra and P. alba. The trees had then been pollarded for some years and then left. The forester had re-instated the pollarding in the last few years, the local people doing it in exchange for the free firewood they obtain and they cut the trees about every 5 years. Several interesting points came out of this visit, one being that the poplars are not now pollarded as when they are cut they do not survive the seasonal flooding. In contrast the willows can be completely submerged (i.e. trunk, cuts from pollarding and resulting foliage) for one month with no detrimental effects. The next site was unusual in having lots of mulberry pollards. It was one of only two places left in Hungary where silkworms had been bred and the mulberry trees grown to feed the silkworms. Silk production has been abandoned for many years now but originally the trees were cut every two years throughout the growing season. It looked like the trees had been cut once after a period of lapse and then left again. Under the trees the grassland is now grazed by animals from a mule and Tarpan stud(!) and apparently the area is good for hole nesting birds especially hoopoes. Yesterday I met up with Peter Szabo who took me various places in the Balcony mountains just north of Lake Balaton. We saw beech pollards here just like the Romanian ones, with odd branches seemingly hacked off and the trees a bit more upright and rather unpredictable in shape. The trees have probably not been cut for many years except for a few recent branches, which followed the general cutting pattern expected from Romania. One area was part of a landscape management area, which seemed to have involved clearance of surrounding vegetation and introduction of grazing but as a consequence the next generation of trees here was lacking. The second area was extensive woodland with beech pollards hidden away probably in great numbers. The area is owned by something like 200 different people but a local NGO is interested in the trees and started counting and recording them. So far they have reached 250 but only covered a tiny part of the area. We approached from a different side and found hornbeam pollards too and a fantastic tree which looked like hornbeam but with one branch of field maple! Finally, as it was getting dark we went to a wood pasture with open grown oaks, mostly Q. cerris (sorry Ted but at least it is native here) and a few Q. robur. This does have some protection and seems to be grazed by deer and wild boar! Peter managed to answer various questions about Romania, which was helpful too. Tomorrow I will move on to Austria (perhaps via Italy but I have run out of time to get to the only place I know to have pollards and have no contact there either). Perhaps its time for me to try and do a bit of writing up somewhere too!
Back to diary - latest Weeks 1,2 and 3 - click here

A study of practical tree pollarding techniques in Europe - weeks 4, 5 and 6