In some ways, you can't plant too many trees. But where you plant them becomes important as they shoot up. Yes, many trees grow fast. They make a good barrier or screen, but when you have sat back, looking in admiration for, say 15 or 20 years, you may have some second thoughts about their placing. For instance, you may find that the friendly light you used to see across the fields a mile or two away is no longer visible; certainly when the leaves are on the trees. And then, the lovely curve on the near horizon of that huge grass prairie is visible only here and there. You remember seeing whole posses of hares on the skyline in the mating season.
So you decide to cut some breaks in the regular line - it's about 50 yards from the main window - and you get logs enough for several winters (and summers). You think you could have been more sparing at the planting stage, but how could you know that all the trees would flourish? After all, when Oak Glen started out to reforest that huge slice of Glencree, the first tree of which was planted by President Mary Robinson shortly before her inauguration, if memory is correct, it was made clear that for your £10 not just one oak would be planted, but six, of which five would be thinned out as the decades rolled on by Crann & Oak Glenn, Crank House, Main Street, Banagher, Co Offaly.
Anyway, the cutting of gaps is effective for only a year or two. For the trees which have been spared broaden out, and the gap is closing again. The whole operation, by the way, is complicated by a plague of alders. They increase by airborne seeds, like dandelions, but more so by seeds borne down on the river. Each seed, the learned author of The Tree Key tells us, has two floats. So, suddenly, among your birch and willow, carefully planted, you find a tree - not a sapling - but a tree you never planted. And half way down the banks on both sides are giants which seem to have risen like mushrooms in the night.
A lovely tree, in so many ways, unique in being the only broadleaf to bear cones. But too vigorous by half. Not the best for the fire. It is a softish wood and, according to the same authority, was formerly used for the soles of clogs.