Well ... I didn’t make it to the APF. I am still hobbling as a result of my fall, which I mentioned last month. Then came the alarming thunderstorm, which was of Biblical proportions. It didn’t just pour, it was more of a deluge, complete with hailstones the size of golf balls. This all took place a mere 30 miles or so from the show. So perhaps I wasn’t meant to get there.

All very disappointing. I had counted on being there. However, in this topsy-turvy world, it is unwise to take anything for granted, especially the weather. Today it is Indian summer. We’ve enjoyed a warm, mellow autumn and I allowed myself a short walk, with a sturdy hazel walking stick and a dog or two, which I claim is part of the cure for my dodgy back.

I found myself musing as to how all this change will manifest itself in Forestry England’s oakwoods where, just up the hill, my walk took me. There seems to be a current craze for tautology surrounding the oak. Oaks are being credited with all kinds of supernatural powers in a number of learned books. They can, it seems, predict the best time and conditions to come into leaf, flower and fruit, as well as the ability to gang up to face insect and mycological threats. 

WANT MORE DIARY? 

Personally I am far from accepting these airy fairy notions. Aren’t you?

Your diarist has never been renowned for sticking to the point. What is the point, then? Will oak trees react to this brief episode of seasonally deciduous weather by rearranging leaf fall? Oh yes, that reminds me. 

A major national newspaper recently chose to devote a two-page feature to half a dozen crabby oaks shown propped up against the ravages of time and environment, asking readers to select one individual as tree of the year. Tree of the year? You must be joking. As much as we may love and respect 500-year-old organisms of any kind, lionising moribund trees is surely misguided. The tree of any year should be able to demonstrate at least good health and visible vigour, don’t you think?

How, then, if we have nothing better to do, should we choose our tree of the year? It is unsafe to attempt a measurement of dimensions these days. We used to. Do you remember Diameters at Breast Height? Quarter girth tapes? Hoppus feet? Hypsometers? In the Garden of Eden stood the Tree of Knowledge, which was certainly reliable, but labelling this (was it an oak?) as the tree of the year would surely be cheating. Count the pathogenic fungi and again, it doesn’t really fit the bill, but these are uncertain times, aren’t they?

The only other forestry storyline to feature recently in the national press concerned wildfires. We’ve got a bit used to that lately, haven’t we? So seeing blazing managed forests in the west of Canada or the USA has become commonplace. When we see that 10 per cent of Greece’s national forest has joined the rest of those victims, it comes as something aofs a novelty. I didn’t know there were incendiary forests in Greece, did you? I expected olive groves, but do those qualify? Or perhaps it is my lack of exploration (plain ignorance) of Hellenic land use which is missing something.

Will these lost woods, or groves or whatever, ever be replanted? Or, indeed, will natural forests ever be managed and replaced in the Pacific Northwest? And while on the subject, are we in our small way able to prevent wildfire losses, here in the UK? That is, if you can include the Sitka of Kielder in a broad classification of native forests?

The problem could lie with the way such statistics are trotted out. There are three kinds of information, they say. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And haven’t we been bombarded with all manner of nonsense in disguise over the past 12 months? Complementing our own rather curious first-past-the-post election system have been elections in our neighbours France, Germany, Italy and others as well as the one pending in the USA. But unfortunately forests and forestry seem to represent a very minor contribution to the polls. It is hard to set the needs of the ill, the broke and the aged when prioritising the expenditure of public money. Then there is climate change, about which enough said.

That’s where we came in, at the beginning of this diary, isn’t it?