FROM THE ARCHIVES:In this "Sounding Off" column John Healy explained how tree-growing had its roots in history. – JOE JOYCE
THE TOURISTS may complain that we are having a bad summer of it so far and those who take their annual holidays in August must be praying nightly for a change in the weather but for the people who are growing trees, 1985 has so far been nothing short of a great year.
Young trees of four and five years look as if they have “bolted” so fast has been the growth. Spruce and pine thrive in the west but the alder, oak and silver birch have done equally as well and have kept pace.
here is a legend that trees will not grow in Achill or Connemara which is something of a cop-out line. On the boggier part of both landscapes the evidence is there in the stumps of pine bogdale, called grúiseach in the Gaeltacht areas of the island. Why is there such animus against trees and tree-growing in the west? Is it because the tradition of tree-growing was one of the primary characteristics of the planters. Reading the typical Ulster covenant given by the Londonderry Company to the planters, one is struck by the methodical way in which that investment company went about the business of land management.
To this day the Ulster farmer has the name of being the best farmer in Ireland, thrifty, neat, with his farm well laid-out and well maintained. It is the legacy of the covenant under which his predecessors got their grants of land in The Ulster Plantation.
Land was leased for three lives, giving a security of tenure which the farmer in the south, or west, did not have. But, much more important, the company laid down in what manner each generation would husband the land. It specified how many out-buildings would be built, what trees would be planted, hedges laid down and maintained.
Where you have good plantings of trees in the west of Ireland the chances are that they occur on Protestant estates. By extension trees become Protestant trees. It is so in Achill. Up to this generation all trees were Protestant trees.
More than once you’ll be told that “the Protestants” had the best of the land in Sliabh Mór, the side of which was purchased by the Mission Estate and that it’s easy to grow trees when you have such good land.
The mistaken mythology is not all due to local origins. The idea that trees would not flourish in the west got a powerful boost when a planting programme carried out by the then Department of Agriculture in 1912, a reluctant response to a sustained campaign from the region, ensured its assurances would be borne out when the variety of tree planted predictably died.
In Galway a pilot planting failed just as predictably when the word got around that, if it succeeded, it would be the end of the dole money and every doler would be out growing trees for the Forestry Department. No soil will grow trees which have had their roots neatly severed in the planting!
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