Call of the wild

The Botanic Gardens I work at is an important green space in the middle of a city, so it is naturally a place where people go to connect with nature, wander amongst trees and watch birds and squirrels. However, of late I've really been missing the countryside.

Not that the Garden isn't beautiful in its own way. But it's probably a symptom of my inner countryside-lover that my favourite area is a Scottish Heath Garden, a wild corner hidden away from the main paths. Here is a place full of rowans, bird and wild cherries, alder, willows, pines; rushes, gorse, broom and heather jostle for understory space with bilberry and ferns. There's no evidence of weeding or edging, and hidden away in part of the undergrowth is the remains of a cottage (although I must admit I have a feeling this was deliberately placed there "for the feel"). I love it there - so many people walk straight past it without realising. The birds soon forget you if you sit quietly and begin to flit around, singing and squabbling. And the one remaining trace of storm damage is found in the this area - a wind-blown Pinus contorta that has been forgotten about (when I started we were due to clear it up, but that's fallen by the wayside) and remains with roots exposed and crown hidden in the growth.

As for the rest of the Gardens, its a different environment to what I'm used to. We take down a tree and spend more time tidying it up than doing the work. Every last leaf must be picked up and cleared. The lawns are protected by boards, lest a piece of wood fall on them. Deadwood on the ground is few and far between, something that may actually be reducing plant health by removing nutrients that would normally be recycled back into the plants? And this only applies to the days we are doing tree work. For an arboriculture job we seem spend the majority of our time weeding, strimming and making nice, neat lawn edges, and generally tidying borders.

Days spend pulling up geraniums and willowherb which aren't 'meant' to be there make you think. For me, it's helped me realise that whilst the Garden is an important place for science, for amenity horticulture, and as an escape for city dwellers, longer-term I'd rather be out in the countryside. I'd like to work somewhere where you can leave deadwood, coming back years later to find that discarded logs have been transformed into a home for bryophytes, lichens, invertebrates, amphibians and the odd small mammal. I don't care much for having nice neat lawn edges (I chuckled earlier this week at seeing badgers making short work of an edge that was in their way) and whilst I realise that invasive species need to be controlled, do we really need to remove every wayward plant or 'weed' (some of which are quite lovely in their own right)?

Of course, I am lucky to work here; I am learning about trees in a commercial-free environment, working on some beautiful specimen trees, and I am not for a second saying this is a bad job to have. And there is wildlife in the Garden - watching bullfinches on a lawn one morning as the sun rises, hearing woodpeckers drumming whilst you're working and seeing sparrowhawks flying with food in their talons all make you pause and reflect. But this job, for all its positives, has made me realise that longer-term I want to be using arboricultural knowledge and skills in a more "wild", countryside setting.