i will take some photos and post if we ever see the sun again. the trees are babies, 2-3 years old, most still within their tree guards, a good place to be this year, the biggest maybe 5 ft or so. scrub willow a bit bigger. i have a core of 20-30 mature sycamore trees at East Heddle that form the core of that section of planting. ----- Original Message ---- From: Norman Tulloch <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, 11 September, 2007 8:18:17 AM Subject: Re: [ORCADIA] Fw: Wind SIMON TREASURE wrote: > ...I use sycamores as my backbone trees as they are very resilient and > keep going when others fail. they are part of all my planting, which > includes Hawthorne and downy birch as well as those listed earlier. > > I use scrub willow on the western side (westerly gales are the > killing winds) together with elder, fuscia and ribes to create a > diverse shelter belt. I under plant with dog rose and rugosa to > establish a naturalised planting biodiversity as quickly as possible. > 35% of the planting is native orkney stock propagated from the most > ancient northerly woodland in the uk , the magical berriedale > woodland in hoy. Your planting certainly sounds very interesting, Simon. I had a look at your website but was somewhat disappointed to find that there were no pictures of your developing woodland — or none that I could find, anyway. What sort of height have your trees reached now? Norman Tulloch ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message