Why Treewitched?

The short and easy answer is that our place, The Black Wood, is primarily trees and they are beautiful, bewitching even, and this is our journey at The Black Wood and managing the arguably out of control tree growth.

Like many others, when I was a child I was often to be found up a tree somewhere. They were my forts, my cubbyhouses, my lookouts, spaceships, castles and hiding places. There was always something comforting about a tree, friendly and welcoming, a great place to sit and view the world around. My first tree love was when I was around 4 years old. A peppermint gum on the corner of our house split in half one night during a storm. The next day I was sitting on the downed half and it was a rocket ship. A few days later I was very upset to discover it was being chain sawn up and taken away, what was wrong with a fallen over tree in the front yard? I was playing in it! Fortunately for me, my mother who was always happy to support my active imagination took some branches out of the center of a multi branched small eucalyptus in the corner of the yard. It meant that I wasn’t off the ground so I couldn’t fall to my death but I had a tree that was to me like a cubby house and it would morph into whatever I needed for that days adventure. The advantages of climbing trees for children are numerous, click here for a great article, ‘Climbing Trees is Good for you’ by Bower & Branch.

I would have thought I was too old for climbing tree but recently I found a beautiful tree with a perfect branch for sitting on. I had missed that feeling of connecting to nature that one can get from climbing a tree. The feel of the bark, sigh of the leaves and calmness that seems to live under the canopy. The view that even a few metres of the ground can provide and I’m still not sure that trees don’t have a soul.

With nearly 200 acres there are so many trees here to get to know, each unique and beautiful. This journey will include learning the species, managing their health and planting new varieties for different purposes. I have tunnel erosion I would like to combat, coppiced regrowth that needs to be managed and favourite species I would like to plant. I am coming from a place of knowing nearly nothing about what I am doing. I am still trying to work out if ‘gum’ is a colloquial term for eucalypts and some just happen to have the word ‘gum’ in the name too, or if ‘gum’ refers to a particular genus in the eucalyptus family, it really seems to depend who I talk to. I always used eucalyptus and gum interchangeably until I had a very confusing conversation when someone asked me if it was a gum tree.

Me: “yes, they are all eucalyptus trees”

Other person: “but are any of them gum trees?”

Me: “huh?”

So, a big part of this blog will be identifying the trees that are here, and maybe learning the difference between a gum and a eucalyptus tree.

The second issue is the trees have been treated poorly in the past. The land has been bulldozed . . . repeatedly. This means that many trees have been snapped off at the ground, the delightful nature and resilience of eucalyptus trees means that they sprout again. However, the downside to this is that instead of a nice tall strong tree, we get a multi branched tree, crooked spindly. I discovered recently that this is called coppicing and is a great method for being able to harvest from the same tree more than once but that is when managed properly. The Black Wood unfortunately was left to its own devices between bulldozing so there was no follow up care for the trees. Instead of removing these trees, I want to thin some trees to give the rest the space they need and doing what is called ‘singling’ to the rest. This is the practice of choosing one stem to leave grow into a tree and removing the other competing branches.

200 acres is a lot of trees, however there is also a creek to look after, a sad dam to help flourish and hopefully, a home to build for me, husband and our dog. After that there are orchards to plant, chickens to raise and a self-sustainable lifestyle to aspire to. I will also share the occasional craft, recipe and random experience along the way. Stay tuned.