Is wasteland a waste?

Recently surveyed an old allotment site in relation to a housing development that is proposed to go on it. As housing development goes, it's not too bad - apparently, they're willing to maintain the same proportion of the site in active allotment use as there is currently, albeit different plots, which they will clean up and make suitable for use as part of the overall works on site.

However, it raised a bigger issue in my mind. Which is - when is a site wasteland, in need of development as it is just underused, and when is it nature reclaiming what it had lost years before?

It was certainly an interesting place to wander and wonder in. About a third of the site was still in cultivation, with the rest having been left to go to waste about 20 or more years ago. Apart from the fact that I thought allotments were in short supply (and, admittedly, the selfish annoyance that people don't use them when many people, including myself, would love one), it was also an interesting slideshow into what happens to land left for twenty-odd years.

A scrub woodland was forming, with plenty of ash, birch, sycamore, hawthorn and the like spreading in from trees already present on the site and well as adjacent to it. There were scattered large poplars, willows and huge old hawthorns, in varying states of collapsing - yet in no way useless because of it. Brambles were choking every bit of ground they could cover (note to self: must get a billhook for such survey jobs). But most exciting were the remnants of what grew before - mature apple trees, once pruned into a neat and fruitful state but now going feral; branches going wherever they pleased, and yet still laden with fruit. Plum and cherry trees growing side-by-side with their thorny wild relative. A pioneer woodland coincidentally involving the growing trend for woodland gardening. And hidden away here and there - the remains of old huts, now with leaking rusted roofs and rotting timber. How long ago were they in use, busy with people sowing seeds in trays in early spring, warmed by a small fire in the corner?

Which makes me think - is this land truly abandoned, wasted, ripe for development because other the plots are just empty, useless space? Or is it an ecological experiment, combining the cultivated with the untamed, a boost for biodiversity in the middle of urban areas? Imagine such an area becoming a wild park, the antidote to manicured lawns and lollipop trees; somewhere where children play hide-and-seek or capture the flag, and foragers climb fruit trees with pockets increasingly laden with apples or clamber through collapsed trunks collecting oyster mushrooms.

However, on such an overcrowded island can we afford the luxury of 'allowing' such land to revert back to some semblance of nature? (Is it 'allowing' - who gave us the right to dictate such terms?) Should we leave urban, ignored areas to re-wild whilst claiming greenbelt land to "develop"? Which is more important to conserve, which has more value ecologically, and which is socially, economically, politically a better option? As always, no easy answer - but worth some thinking about.

In consultation

Ardkinglas Woodland Garden

Occasionally I lose sight of why I started to blog. In fact, why did I start to blog? Partly to blab on and on about trees and woodlands and my love of all things arboreal. That hasn't stopped. But also just on the off-chance, the slight possibility, that there is someone out there in a similar position to the one I was in (namely, wanting to get into this sector without quite being sure of what options are available) and might stumble across this collection of ramshackle vaguely-related posts whilst looking for inspiration on the world wide web.

So I've started a new job recently and I'm back into the arboriculture sector, this time as a consultant. I found in my previous job as a warden, doing practical forestry work, that I was getting frustrated with the lack of thought required. It seems that the jobs I wanted to do when I started out, where it involves it all - practical work, management planning, ecology, education - are slowly disappearing. Councils are a good example - more and more, there are now rangers to do community work, practical teams to do hands-on work, and ecology teams do surveying. And although I loved - and still sometimes long for - those sunny, clear, frosty mornings in the woods with a saw in my hands, more and more I wanted to be making decisions about how trees are managed. And that's not really an option when you're out doing the practical work. Perhaps I would have been content to do practical work a few more years if I'd been doing it in nicer sites (more coppicing, woodland crafts and dry-stone walling instead of litter picking, strimming and watching the very infrequent interesting jobs be contracted out), and for more of a conservation charity than a forestry organisation, but even so the wholesome fun aspect of practical hands-on work has to be balanced with the yearning to learn and apply more.

So I applied for a job as a consultant arboriculturalist, down in my home county of Yorkshire. The job looked interesting - all about trees, that's a winner; I'd get to be using my brain (one of my favourite aspects of my warden job, albeit an infrequent one, was the safety inspections I did); and a few aspects of my personal life had changed so a fresh start away from Glasgow would do me good. And, astonishingly, I got hired.

So now, two and a half years after that Basic Tree Survey & Inspection course that got me all fired up about tree surveying and the whole sector, I've ended up a consultant. A very different role to those which I've done before. It's in the private sector, as opposed to charities and public sector - so I need to think about clients, not just the trees. This will take some compromising, as I'm naturally tree-focused ("it's dangerous? Move the target. It's hollow? Keep it, good habitat") and depending on the situation, a client might have different desires to mine. But hopefully I can stick to my principles and still do a good job - after all, we're hired to inform people about decisions relating to trees. It'll be a challenge, but I'm glad to have made it to being in a position to influence how trees are managed, as opposed to being out there doing the practical work and wondering why some quite shaky decisions are being taken by those up high!