Mallinson Ltd - woodwork courses in Dorset. Perfect short breaks for everyone.

Last week saw our largest-ever bowl-carving course - with 11 guests instead of the normal ten. Yes, I know, we say we never have courses with more than ten guests but I made an exception for a couple who were very keen to come along while they were still in Dorset, before they left for a year. With the very able help of James Verner who co-presented the course with me, I'm pleased to say we had no problems looking after a larger group and all 11 ash bowls were finished at the end of day two. What's more, our global theme of last month continued, with two of the bowls heading off to Jersey and two to Kenya.

Totem Poles

Meanwhile, Karen Hansen has been preparing for our first totem pole course, coming up on October 18th-19th. Some additional specialist wood carving gouges are on their way from Switzerland and the poles themselves are being sourced - as ever - from local, sustainably managed woodland.

Although this course will be led by Karen, that doesn't mean I'm putting my feet up. I'll be in the 'teacher's assistant' role and that means I have to get fully up to speed myself. To that end, I've lined up a few volunteer novices to do some trial carving with me in the coming couple of weeks to get any unforeseen details ironed out. I think it will also be interesting to see if we get the same variety of end product as we get with the carved bowls. It always amazes me how each guest comes up with such a personalised response to what are essentially identical logs at the start of day one.

By the way, the October course still has some places, so if you fancy a very pleasant couple of days carving a totem pole for your garden or home (that will fit in the back of your car at the end of the course), please do book soon to secure a place.

The Things You Do

Longer-standing readers will recall our picture competition, announced last May. (In a nutshell: send in your photos and you might win a free course.) Well, pleasingly, we've had quite a few responses and they are now up in our 'Guests' Galleries' - a new page on the web site.

It's one thing for me to pick photos to show off the woodland workshop and the courses, it's another to have photos by guests. I hope these informal shots will prove interesting to everyone who's thinking about coming along (and, indeed, to anyone who's visited already).

Continuing that same informal theme, during the last course I took some short video clips of guests in action. They are NOT professional quality! But I think they do give a good impression of what goes on down in the workshop, and I particularly like the sound of 11 people carving away at their bowls. There are some very confused woodpeckers in the woods at the moment. So, I've added these to the "A Perfect Venue And Menu" page, to help illustrate what a course here is like.

Drying Out

No, just for a change, I'm not talking about rain, nor about alcohol! As well as the Guests Gallery web site development, on the 'Carving A Wooden Bowl' course details page we've now added some 'After Care' information.

The intention is to provide a reference source for anyone who's been on a bowl carving course but has forgotten what they should or should not do as their bowl dries out. The aftercare information sheets we send guests home with seem to get lost and this seems like a good alternative, to save people having to 'phone and admit they've lost the bit of paper! We've also added a bowl drying time graph for anyone who wants to get technical.

And I think that's all for another month. I'm due down in the woodland workshop to work on my wood carving.

Hoping to see you down here soon.

Guy and the team

Tree Of The Month: Elm

The elm in Britain, as most people know, has largely succumbed to Dutch elm disease, to a degree that it is difficult to remember the mature form of these trees that used to be so large a part of our landscape. Dutch elm disease, so-named because it was first identified in (but did not originate from) Holland, most recently reappeared in 1967, ruthlessly picking off these once-common giants of hedgerow and parkland, killing up to 25 million trees. This was a tragedy for the English landscape, but it is interesting to look at the wider historical perspective. The fungus, spread by a beetle which burrows under the bark, leaving a characteristic radiating pattern revealed as the bark falls off the dead tree, was not new. Localised outbreaks are documented in southern England in the 18th and 19th centuries; the dead elms seen in Italian paintings from around the end of the 15th century were probably killed by it, and it is implicated as the likely cause of an event known as the Elm Decline, traceable only from pollen records, when around 3000BC numbers of elms in Britain suddenly fell by half.

Our most recent major outbreak was in part caused by the enthusiasm for elms in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the English elm, Ulmus procera had been widely planted in landscaped parklands and in the hedges created after the Enclosures. Prior to that, the elm was an uncommon native in England, so to meet the demand for these new plantings, nurseries propagated saplings from the numerous suckers produced by a small number of specimen trees, resulting in a population of genetically identical mature trees, with poor disease resistance.

The suckering habit of elms that resulted in this vulnerable population is also their best chance of survival, until levels of infection drop once again. Elms can reproduce by seed, but more commonly spread by suckering, that is, sending up shoots from the roots to produce new plants genetically identical to the parent. The beetle that transmits the deadly fungal infection flies at an altitude of around 25 ft, so trees below this height are rarely attacked. As the trees become large enough to be attractive to the beetle before they become mature enough to set seed, suckering allows the trees to survive and increase, in numbers, if not in stature. A resurgence of the disease was noticed in the 1990s, as the suckers growing from old elm stumps themselves grew tall enough to come under attack.

Elms also hybridise freely, and prior to this most recent attack, had produced a huge number of named, and unnamed types; it is said that there are as many types of elm as places where they grow. Of these, the Boxworth elm, found in Cambridgeshire, and the Dengie elm in Essex, show some resistance to the disease as mature trees. Beyond these isolated tree communities, the largest surviving mature elm population in Britain is to be found in Brighton, partly a happy accident of geography, as the South Downs proved a physical barrier to the low-flying beetle, and partly a result of rigorous hygiene measures by the local authority, which ruthlessly destroyed infected trees and inoculated the healthy ones.

Perhaps this long history of death and destruction accounts for the associations of the elm in literature and mythology with death and melancholy; the trees were thought of as brooding and were known for a tendency to drop large limbs without warning - 'elm hateth man and waiteth' as the saying went -and Scouts were apparently warned not to pitch a tent beneath an elm, but I can't remember getting this advice in the Guides. That elm wood was commonly used to make coffins added to the association with death, but elm was used because it was durable in wet conditions, and so was also used for wooden pipes, boat keels, breakwater construction and floorboards. Traditionally elm was also used to make wheel hubs and the seats of Windsor chairs, as the dense, knotty wood is unlikely to split. Here at Brightwater Greenwood we use the bast, or bark of the wych elm, the hardier and more resistant ulmus glabra, to weave long-lasting and beautiful seats for lightweight ladderback chairs. The name 'wych' comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for 'pliable', and once soaked, the leathery bast does become pliable enough to weave beautifully.

Mace commented that he felt this was a rather gloomy tree of the month - more like an ex-tree of the month - but I think it's interesting to see the most recent spate of Dutch elm disease in the context of a balance between tree, fungus and virus that has existed for many hundreds of years. People now may think of the English elm as dead and gone, but historical records show that it is likely that in the future, great elm trees will once again brood over the countryside. Sometimes the disease is ascendant, but as the population of large trees diminishes so the beetle cannot find fresh trees within flying distance, or virus strains evolve that attack the fungus of Dutch elm disease, so events combine to allow the elms to once again grow to heavy, towering maturity.

Carolyn Brightwater

In The Woods This Month

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ... and all that. Mr Keats pretty much hit the nail on the head. 2007 has been an extraordinarily abundant year for tree crops and harvesting fruits and berries. The reason for all this fruitfulness is the 'unusual' combination of weather that we have suffered this year; a mild winter followed by an unseasonally hot April, causing abundant flowering, combined with a wet early summer (you may remember a drop or two of rain earlier this year) with a hot sunny end to the summer - ideal weather for tree-borne fruits and nuts. The trees and hedgerows are dripping with food, all waiting for an enthusiastic forager to come along - but leave some for the birds!

September is the month in which summer really starts to recede, evening become noticeably shorter and thoughts turn towards this winter's work. The leaves are starting to turn and drop, the sap will soon be falling again.

"Sap rising . . . Sap falling": a few words of vastly simplified tree physiology as to why this is important. In temperate regions broadleaf trees grow on an annual cycle. Through photosynthesis the leaf canopy has hopefully recouped at least the energy that it took to grow all those leaves, hopefully more. As the weather cools and the light begins to fade the tree 'cuts its losses'. Supply of nutrient to the leaves is cut off, they turn brown and drop off. Without the leaf canopy to evaporate off moisture, the sap in the vessels sinks back down into the rootstock taking with it all the nutrients that have accumulated in the canopy. Thus, over the winter the rootstock will tend to put on growth whilst preserving nutrient and slowly providing energy for the healthy development of buds, which is a huge investment of energy with no photosynthesis to sustain it. In the spring the buds break leaf and the whole energy cycle kicks off again. Simple.

What this implies for practical woodland management is that it is best, if possible, to plant saplings after they've recouped all their energy, but before they invest it all in new root growth, so that they can get off to a good start in their new position; also, for canopy work, it is far less stressful if branches are removed (pollarding, coppicing, tree surgery etc) for the tree when the sap and nutrient is down in the rootstock. Obvious really. Accordingly, September and October are the ideal time for planting out new trees, hedges and woodland. So for me, this, and the years' cutting and hedge-laying work, will be commencing shortly.

Mace Brightwater

P.S. All apologies for last month's absence from the newsletter; circumstances and busy-ness conspired against us.

P.P.S. A big 'hello' to friends new and old who I've seen at a variety of shows this summer. The show season is winding up, but I'll be demonstrating the pole lathe and greenwood furniture techniques at the River Cottage Festival on Saturday 29th September. Failing that, fare thee well and I'll catch up with you in the newsletter next month. M ;-)