Somewhere in your travels you have read a short story called The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono — or, if not, then you should have, or will do, as I hope. It is about Elzéard Bouffier, a man who, after a family tragedy that leaves him alone, settles in a hillside hamlet in a remote and desolate part of upland Provence, a treeless and waterless landscape. Every day, on his walks, he plants 100 acorns, dropping them into holes prodded with his stick, and from them grows a forest that slowly transforms the area, with running streams and villages regenerated by woodcraft.
This compelling fable was originally commissioned for the Reader's Digest series "The Most Unforgettable Man I Ever Met". It was, as Giono later admitted, "a generous lie", and the Digest, checking his place names, turned it down. Giono then offered it free to publishers, and Vogue, of all magazines, printed it in 1954 as The Man Who Planted Hope and Grew Happiness. Within a few years the story was in a dozen or more languages and read by a multitude as the truth it deserved to be. Everywhere, including my own acre, it has helped to plant more trees.
Giono’s inspiring fantasy comes to mind as a raking autumn sun makes Henry Moore sculptures of the western hills. They have an affecting grandeur that the summer tourist never sees. Unfortunately, there is high ecological cost to keeping the uplands shorn of their natural vegetation – “sheepwrecked”, in George Monbiot’s memorable word for the comparably bleak hills in Wales. A great landslide scar on the scarp of the Sheeffrys, at the head of the Killary fjord, reminds me of one consequence.
Upland habitats, above the last farmland fence, make up a fifth of Ireland, and the “loss and degradation” of large areas is described in a detailed national survey commissioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Changes in the plants, fragmentation of their communities and the loss of rare species are, predictably, among the findings.
Despite the wide destocking of commonage sheep over the past decade, the most severely damaged slopes “are likely to continue to erode without practical intervention”, thus prompting landslides and pouring more smothering silt into rivers and lakes. And as conifer forestry and harvesting improve in planning and management, wind-farm development threatens new degradation of hills and streams.
A gesture to “rewilding” is Coillte’s abandonment of forest in the Nephins of north Mayo to the tangled and invasive sprawl of lodgepole pine. Only in planting trials in Killarney National Park has there been much thought of native broadleaf trees to clothe the uplands.
Back in the early 1990s the eminent Scottish ecologist Dr Adam Watson offered a plan for a natural reforestation of Irish moorland. In a study commissioned by the Irish Red Grouse Association he urged division of the hills between natural reforestation, which need cost the taxpayer nothing, and moorland managed for recreations such as dog trials and grouse shooting.
An expert on the natural Scots pine forest of the Cairngorms, he proposed that the Scots pine forest destroyed by the early Irish farmers could be revived over large areas, using seed from old and naturalised Irish trees, or those in Scotland. Oaks, birch and holly could be encouraged to spread from the many small remnants of native broadleaf woodland.
Little of this vision has survived except in heather restoration to support local grouse-shooting projects. The Irish Uplands Forum, an energetic national voluntary group, promotes discussion of “sustainable” development. The Wicklow Uplands Council balances sheep management and heather burning with birdlife and Dublin ramblers, but it likewise finds no role for native trees. The Native Woodlands Trust sticks to community projects in the lowlands.
Agricultural policy, meanwhile, is greatly concerned with the dwindling number of hill farmers who actually use the commonage, and the upward spread of gorse and rhododendron, with hotter summers drying out the peat. The worry is not so much ecological as the abandonment of hectares eligible for EU farm payments.
Helped by the Native Woodland Scheme and the fostering of broadleaf trees in national parks and special areas of conservation, the fragments of native woodland now amount to about 2 per cent of Ireland’s land area. Upland habitats, wet and dry, total 10 times that.
Should we borrow from Giono and pay hill farmers to march forth with their sticks, and pockets full of Irish acorns, to seek out patches of hospitable mineral soil? It would mean, of course, fencing out the sheep, hares and deer that would make short work of the seedlings, once storms had blown away their saving plastic tubes.
I have a quite suitable stick but have left it a bit too late. There goes, I’m afraid, the promise of a modern Irish fable.