Posts Tagged ‘forest’
Natural Medicine
During my drive to work earlier this week, I heard this inspiring story on public radio about an increasing trend for Forest Bathing, a practice that started in Japan back in the early 1990s.
It’s what we do almost every day at our place. Each time we walk Delilah along the perimeter trail through our woods we are breathing healthy phytoncides emitted by the plants and trees. This reduces stress levels and boosts our immune systems.
Wandering along the trail among the trees while listening to all the bird-calls and the sounds of rustling leaves is inspiring enough on its own, but add in some of nature’s medicinal forest air filling your lungs and you enjoy quite the bonus!
Forest bathing is a perfect complement for the workshops Cyndie leads with the horses and labyrinth. It has always been part of the experience here, but we never described it with as much clarity as the variety of published articles on the subject are now offering.
I believe that giving the experience some specific definition of what is happening serves to enhance the results. Thank you MPR!
In my mind, nature has always seemed the best when it comes to medicine.
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Other Views
There used to be two pine trees above the pond fountain, but they were outgrowing the space available and not really thriving, so Cyndie’s parents had them cut down. In a moment of inspiration that is very familiar to me, they chose to leave a few feet of the stumps as pedestals. It’s a perfect spot for a couple of flowering plants.
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With the trees gone, I was able to capture a rare view of the “cabin” from the back side.
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I arrived to the house from that direction because I had been walking through some of the trillium carpeted woods that surround us. This forest is one that feels so perfect for me. There are other natural landscapes over the world that are spectacular, but these trees and all that comes with them resonate the most profoundly with my soul.
I must have spent a few past lives in places just like this. I know the smells and the sounds, the colors, the critters, and the majority of growing plants somewhere deep in the cells of my body.
There are many a days when I dream of what this area was really like when the first tribes of people were able to call this home, long before the time when logging on an epic scale ravaged the growth.
I’m particularly pleased with the “Wildwood” name this property holds. It couldn’t feel more appropriate.
The stroll that brought me through these trees had started down at the beach, below the front side of the house. Camera in hand, I walked onto the footbridge that crosses our little boat lagoon and looked out at the lake and up toward the lodge.
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These are both views I don’t usually capture. As leaves open, the sight lines will become more obscured. The views are no less spectacular, but the camera doesn’t come close to what the eyes perceive.
I will never take for granted how lucky I am to be able to visit this space in person, where I can see, smell, hear, and touch a natural environment to which my soul feels so emotionally attached.
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Tree Down
Sometimes a simple walking of the dog through the woods feels more like a reconnaissance mission of surveying the ever-changing status of our property. Certainly, after a few days of strong winds there are changes to be expected, but I’ve been surprised more than once about how easy it is to miss what eventually seems to be obvious.
Did this tree make a sound when it toppled?
We didn’t hear a thing. I expect I may have walked past it one or two times in the days since the gale force gusts blasted us for hours on end last week, but yesterday as I joined Cyndie and Delilah for morning chores, I spotted it immediately as we approached.
It fell in a perfect direction to avoid getting hung up in any other trees and pointed away from the trail. With all the other downed wood from our days of tree trimming awaiting attention, it’s possible this old poplar will be left where it lays for nature to process.
If we were intent on cleaning up downed trees and branches throughout the full extent of our meager stretch of forested acres, it would be more than a full-time job for us.
In the last couple of years we have focused our attention on the patch of trees closest to the house by the barn and back pasture, picking up dead wood that has made its way to the ground.
This is the time of year, before green leaves obscure the view entirely, when the extent of branches brought down over winter is so easy to spot that it intimidates. There is so much to be picked up. It doesn’t give any impression of our having done so last year. That is, until one strolls through the forest at the west end of our land to see how much is on the ground where nothing has ever been picked up.
I wonder what a year-long time-lapse recording of the trees and ground in our woods would look like. Timed right, I bet it would appear to be raining limbs and branches.
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That Time
It’s that time again. Now is the time of year when it is very easy to see the common buckthorn leaves in the woods, because they stay green longer than our other trees. Buckthorn is a non-native invasive tree that makes a great hedge, but given free rein, can block out all others here and take over the landscape.
I let the buckthorn get out of hand on our previous tiny lot in the suburbs, so I have first-hand experience on what can happen, and what it takes to eradicate it. Now we have a LOT more property to police, which makes it a difficult thing to control, but I still want to put effort toward keeping it at bay.
There are still a few other plants that also have their leaves, so it isn’t as simple as pulling up or cutting down anything that is still green. Most of them are relatively easy to recognize as something other than buckthorn, but there is one in our woods with leaves that look surprisingly close to those of the buckthorn.
Usually, if I’m not absolutely sure, I just skip over it for the time being. Once you know what buckthorn leaves look like, it is pretty clear when you come upon them.
The saplings are rather easy to just pull out of the ground, and the area where I was working was very wet, so that gave me even more inspiration to try pulling most of what I found.
Some were just too big, obviously ones I hadn’t properly dealt with a year ago to have grown so large. Those I had to cut down with a saw.
The pulling is just so much quicker and more rewarding. I knock the dirt off the roots and dangle them over some nearby branches to wither and dry. Delilah loves to help with the root pulling. She claws away at the dirt and then grabs the roots in her teeth and pulls.
Sometimes we end up pulling against each other.
It is a serious full-body workout to pull the bigger ones. It ends up becoming a challenge for me to see if I can dislodge the next size larger trees by gripping them with my legs bent and then trying to stand up. I need my legs to do the bulk of the work, not my back.
At one point when I felt my legs tiring of the effort, I looked over to see how Delilah was holding up. She was sound asleep in a nap.
Yeah, it is really an exhausting exercise.
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Paving Paradise
We are experimenting with a new way to improve a particularly wet and muddy portion of one trail through our woods. Originally, I was hoping we could simply cover it with wood chips. It worked for a while, but we haven’t been chipping branches frequently enough to produce the supply needed to cover all of our trails.
The piles of wood blocks that I have been pulling off pallets salvaged from the day-job are suddenly proving valuable. Instantly, we have gone from having too many of these lying around, to not having enough to cover the muddy lengths of trail that need the most help.
It is interesting to consider the path (no pun intended) these pieces of former trees have traveled. Somewhere, trees are cut down and milled into boards. Then the wood gets cut into these shapes and nailed to pallets. The company that manufactures the products we receive at the day-job mount their units onto the pallets for shipment and charge the end customer for the wood.
We have asked if they wanted the pallets returned for reuse, but like so many other things in today’s world, since already paid for, they apparently weren’t worth the trouble. We end up with perfectly good, single-use pallets out of brand-new wood, albeit with four odd blocks nailed to the tops.
I’ve been pulling the nails to remove the blocks and using the pallets as a floor in my wood shed and beneath stored hay in the hay shed. I also claimed boards off some pallets to build hay feeding boxes for the 4 stalls in the barn. All the while, the odd blocks that were removed have been piling up.
When Cyndie started looking into a boardwalk as a way to get up out of the mud on our trails, we landed on the idea of using the blocks. She wanted to add some words of inspiration and enlisted Anneliese to join her in creating the enhancements.
Yesterday we laid down the first test run. So far, so good. Only a couple more miles to go. I hope there will soon be a lot of new orders for that equipment at the day-job.
It is poetic justice that we’ve found a way to ultimately bring this pallet wood full-circle, placing it on a forest floor once again.
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Different Look
Even though it happens every year, I still find it amazing to witness the change that evolves in a forest at this time of year. I look at it every day, but it seems to happen mysteriously. Space just opens up and all of a sudden you realize it is possible to see through to the other side of a grove of trees.
A couple of months ago, it looked like this:
Yesterday afternoon, it looked like this:
The forecast for temperatures tonight and tomorrow morning includes the possibility of frost. That means it is time to drain and coil our garden hoses, and blow out the buried line that runs down to the labyrinth spigot. I even heard use of the word “snow” in predictions for areas of northern Minnesota.
Regardless the overall general warming of temperatures around the globe, we still get cold enough here in the winter to have snow.
I love that our weather changes dramatically with each season, but it would be nice if just once, the seasons weren’t in such a hurry to come and go.
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Incremental Progress
Thanks to the added support of our son, Julian, I made it another step closer to bringing down the last two ‘widow maker’ tipped trees in our woods yesterday. He arrived in the morning to assist me in finalizing the installation of our new signal booster for cell phones and internet connection. In the afternoon, I had him out in the woods, lending a hand with tree work.
Just having him standing by boosted my confidence to attempt a cut I had only observed in demonstration videos to release the tension of a hung-up tree and get the base onto the ground.
After that, we started the tedious exercise of tossing a leader over a high branch so we could string ropes to pull the tree back from the direction of lean. It is a daunting task.
This morning, in a thick fog that has the forest dripping wet, I plan to attach a come-along in a test of geometrical physics. I have no idea whether I have the right angles and properly placed force to coerce this dead weight off its tangled perch, but I’m happy to experiment.
The final measure of success won’t be whether I am able to get it to fall. No, my celebration will hopefully be over getting it to topple over anywhere that isn’t on top of me.
One added bit of drama this morning is that I am hoping to achieve it in a narrow of window of time before a looming thunderstorm arrives from the west.
Never a dull moment.
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Springing Along
The season of spring is springing along nicely at Wintervale. The leaves have started making an appearance on a variety of shrubs and saplings. The raspberry bushes in particular have shown dramatic development in the last few days. It is hard to tell whether the recent rains triggered this, or it was just coincidental timing, and would have happened at this time, anyway.
It amazes me how quickly the initial sprouts of foliage obscure the view into our woods. Very soon, there will be so many green leaves, we won’t be able to see more than the outer surfaces.
I’m wishing I could remember this moment long-term in order to hold it as a reference for comparison with the other extremes of the stark bare branches of winter and the view-obscuring green leaves of summer. Every season seems to last just long enough that I mentally fall into a trap of perceiving views as if a present state is the only way it could ever be.
When the forest is fully leafed out, I find it hard to comprehend that just months earlier, it was the complete opposite.
Though most areas of our yard have yet to be mowed, I already needed to cut one section a second time.
I sense that summer is just a short blink away from replacing spring, and the expanding leaves on trees and bushes will be leading the charge in the days ahead.
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Deer Season
It is quiet this morning, meaning, there have been few gunshots echoing around us. Yesterday was the opening day of the deer hunting season and shots were heard with regularity.
Even though the majority of land around us is cultivated for crops, there remain a fair amount of forested lanes and steep slopes where deer herds tend to travel. The farming neighbors who surround us on every side all don the blaze orange head-to-toe uniform and ply the hunt.
It’s a bit nerve-wracking.
I don’t mind them thinning the herds. The other main predator of deer seems to be cars and trucks, as the sight of dead deer by the side of the road is a daily spectacle. I recall that there was one in the road ditch of this property years ago when we came to visit in the weeks after our purchase offer was accepted.
The previous owners told us that one doe came up to the house and gave birth to her fawns in the nook by the front door. We did see a pair of deer in our yard frequently that first year after we moved in. Not so much anymore.
I figure it is a combination of our getting Delilah and the horses. We did add a trail through our woods, which actually opened up a new path for deer, but we subsequently began using it regularly for walking the perimeter with Delilah. The deer traffic became less conspicuous.
I’m sure they are still passing through. We just don’t see them as often.
The neighbors must still see them. They found a lot of reasons to shoot yesterday. Across the road from us, as I was returning up our driveway from the mailbox with Delilah, the neighbor-hunter group shouted a greeting, waved, and showed me they were successful on opening day.
For us, it means the horses are edgy, the dog is on high alert, and the nearby woods are alive with scanning eyes and booming firesticks, sunup to sundown. It is a brief anomaly in the sedate ambiance that usually prevails.
It is deer hunting season, and the hunt is on.
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So Windy
Not today, please. It’s too cold. All night long the wind has been making its presence known with gusts that cause our log home to creak.
With a little sunshine and calm air, the bitter cold of arctic high pressure systems is tolerable this time of year. Sure, we would prefer to bask in the warmth of mild waning winter days, but we are still in cold-mode around here, and it is February, after all. We can do extreme cold.
But the wind, that is another thing. It literally puts the bite in biting cold. Today, that bites.
We have company coming to soak up the vibes of Wintervale Ranch, be with our horses, maybe do a chore or two, and definitely play with Delilah. I’m afraid the wind may just push the activities indoors where we will sit by the fire or work in the kitchen on something that involves baking in a warm oven.
Since taking ownership of a property that involves multiple acres of wooded land, I have gained a new awareness of how significantly the blowing wind impacts trees in a forest. I feel an increased trepidation about the well-being of our trails and fences.
Not a day goes by that I don’t find evidence of new pieces of trees laying in the snow. Usually, they are small, probably snapped off by the activity of an aggressive squirrel. After a windy day, the size of branches finding their way to the ground increases dramatically.
There is no mystery as to the phrase “winds of change.” Our woods are changing constantly from the gusts of moving air. That is a new perspective for me. The growth of trees happens slow enough that we often don’t even notice. I tended to see forested land as protected space, preserved from development.
On the contrary, the woods are probably developing more than the grassy fields around them.
Even the dead and dying trees have a little life left in them. Outside our sunroom door on the side of our house that I refer to as the front, there is a tree that is folded over in two, after the upper half snapped in a fateful wind. In even the slightest breeze, that tree wails and moans from the wound. It makes a wide variety of eery sounds, especially at night.
The ability of wind to change the trees of a forest causes me to feel increased marvel over the majesty of the oldest and most grand of our trees. For a hundred years or more, these trees have braved countless gusts.
It occurred to me recently that in the years of life I have remaining, I will not see any new trees on our property achieve the grandeur and majesty of a hundred-year-old tree. What we have now is all I get. It makes them all the more precious.
It also makes the gusting wind all the more ominous.
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Relative Something 