Bog Myrtle & Peat

Every year or two I take the time to cut trees in the bog. This place has been shut away from livestock since I was a child, and I hardly remember it used. Too many sheep vanished into the drains (and for such small return) that the patch was ripped from the bosom of the farm and abandoned as hazardous. In the intervening years, the heather has leaped to the height of your waist in a junkshop of moss and cranberries; there’s always a woodcock or a greyhen carving a bowl for her belly and eggs at the end of May. 

In the absence of livestock, rowans have done well and the willows beside them. They’ve sown themselves, but whenever I can find a reliable source of alder or downy birch saplings, I plug them into the ditch-banks and gradually the driest parts of this place are becoming a wood. That’s fine by me, and if you want to find a blackcock or roe buck, here’s your best bet. But the fly in the ointment is shaped like a spruce tree, and more seem to come every year.

If you leave a place to go about its business, you can hardly complain when it turns up something you didn’t want. The ethos of rewilding requires us to stand back from expected goals or outcomes, preferring instead that we should be guided by nature. New spruces are entirely consistent with the fact that this bog is becoming a forest, and I’d even concede that small softwood trees are great for cover and scrub. However, spruce trees originate on the Pacific coast of North America. They don’t belong here, and they have a habit of leaping into the sky like fireworks. Once they reach a certain height, they crowd the horizon and drive away the wading birds. In ten or fifteen years, they’re big enough to sow seeds of their own without offering much to anything more than a cuckoo seeking a perch. After thirty years, they’re taller than most buildings in Galloway, casting long shadows for a huge decision that nobody made.

Nothing stands still in nature, but it often seems like the Southern Uplands are driving towards a climax of self-sown spruce trees which have little ecological or commercial value. I’ve begun to think of it as pollution, and the inevitable consequence of decisions made by my neighbours to plant their land and let the seeds blow as they will. If I allowed my livestock to roam freely across boundaries, I could expect to be upbraided. When I raised the issue of spruce seedlings with a forested neighbour, he implied that it was my fault for undergrazing my land, as if my choices had failed to accommodate his.

In some parts of the farm, spruce trees have begun to form thickets. Sheep will eat the seedlings when they’re very small, but they’re almost bullet-proof by the time they’re six feet tall. The only way to remove them is by cutting them out by hand, and that’s hard work. I hate the job, but there’s no way to avoid it. If I hadn’t started doing it in 2009, I would have lost this bog altogether by now. Curlews still nest here sometimes, but only because I slog it out.

There are major frictions between woodland expansion and wader conservation, and the conflict gets fuzzier when you realise that plantations do not stay where you put them. They continually creep and expand, and that comes at the cost of open land that we need for wading birds. If you’re a woodland nut, you could say that’s all for the good – but we need to be clear that this is not natural forest expansion; it’s a mass-produced commercial crop gone feral. You could also say that spruce trees are now so heavily sown and sowing themselves in Galloway that they’ll never be gone, so any attempt to manage them as an invasive species is idealistic naivete. Perhaps that’s true, but it has a dramatic impact on our understanding of self-willed land. The future of native woodland in Galloway certainly has more to do with American spruce than Scottish pines, just as surely as curlews will soon become a flat irrelevance in the southwest.

So much of what I do will all seem daft and petty one day soon, but for so long as we continue in this middle ground, saying we’re trying while selling our final hopes to the highest bidder, it’s maybe a note worth making.