Sunday 16 February 2014

After the Storm (s) - "Wind Pruning"?

Like a lot of folk here in the U.K. I've been outside catching up with some property maintenance during what appears to be a welcome break in the long sequence of Atlantic depressions we have been suffering from lately.

Fortunately for me (I do not wish to appear selfish but I can only state the facts, as I see them!) in my part of the world, North West England, we appear to have got off lightly compared to our our countrymen in the Southwestern corner of our island, so my "property maintenance" is basically the cosmetic job of tidying up the detritus left by recent storms using a stiff broom and a manual spring lawn rake.

What has been interesting to me is that whereas I have been used to raking and sweeping up last  year's leaves deposited by the wind, nearly all from neigbour's trees and not my own (such is life!), on this and recent occasions, this "detritus" has actually been in the form of small twigs as much as, if not more than dead leaves.

This has caused me to ponder whether, assuming that the weather eventually returns to something like normal, this
    wind pruning
of the trees will ultimately reap some benefit.

Mother Nature has a habit of being very resilient to disturbances in the normal scheme of thing - the regeneration of woodland following forest fires is perhaps a classic example of this - so I wouldn't be all that surprised to see renewed and vigorous growth when the warmer weather returns in a few weeks' time.

If the weather pattern steadfastly refuses to return to anything like "normal" then all bets are off, of course!