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

A belated 'Happy New Year' to all of our readers. We had some time off from running courses and have been uncharacteristically office-bound of late. Frankly, whenever I'm indoors I can't wait to get back outside and start soaking up the winter woodland atmosphere - even if 'soaking' turns out to be a bit literal at times.

Instant or Desperate?

December saw Christmas gift certificates flying out the door and some faintly panicky last-minute phone calls wondering just how late the last post could possibly be. As regular readers will know, we offer both 'regular' and 'instant' (downloadable) gift certificates for our courses. This year was the first Christmas for the 'instant' variety and we were wondering how late the last order would be. Well, it wasn't quite 6.00 AM on Christmas morning, but it wasn't far off. (You know who you are!)

Redeem Now!

On a more practical note, if you have an 'open' (undated) gift certificate - instant or otherwise - please don't leave reserving your place on a specific course for too long. A few dates are already full or approaching full, and it really is a case of 'book now to avoid disappointment'.

Things To Do In Winter - I

Although we run courses throughout the year we do hold fewer in winter for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean we're idle. This is the time of year when we source our local timber for the coming year's courses: woodland thinning is done during the winter when the sap is down and the trees are leafless. Of course, this doesn't just apply to people running courses - if you've been bitten by the green woodworking bug and are keen to find your own local wood supplies, now's the time to be looking.

If you don't know any local woodland managers, a good first step can be to get on the 'phone to local tree surgeons. Explain what you're looking for and they will often be happy to help. From their perspective, it's far more satisfying to see the trees they work on or fell being put to good use as opposed to merely chipped or burnt. This is their their normal fate as they can very rarely be machined into timber for seasoning.

Things To Do In Winter - II

And what do you do when you have some suitable lumps of tree? Well, in my case, I'm also undertaking commissions. I have two on the go at the moment - both using green wood.

The first is a ladder ... and although that may not sound like overly stunning, in fact it is a very interesting job. This is a commission to produce a 'proper' old fashioned ladder for a hay loft. The client is renovating a small estate locally and needs something in keeping with an historic barn. The structure of the ladder is similar to that of the stools that we make on our three-day footstool courses - i.e. I'm working with some dried components and some fresh, and using the natural shrinkage of the uprights to lock the rungs.

One of the joys of this project is that we needed some very specific diameter fresh ash, and so I found myself walking through a local sustainably managed woodland with the owner looking at small ash trees and selecting and felling the 'perfect' pole for the job, before dragging it back through the wood and on to the woodland workshop ready to start work. It is an awful long way from how I used to source materials when I worked in London. Then I used to pick up the 'phone and then wait for a huge lorry to pitch up along the Kings Road! I know which one I prefer - and it doesn't involve a lorry.

The other project that I am working on is a green wood domestic bar stool. This project is a response to a brief to design a kitchen stool that is both contemporary in design and as environmentally sound as possible.

As you can see from my computer model of the design -

it is made entirely of locally sourced green ash, with a leather seat from our local tannery - the last remaining oak bark tannery in the country, or so I'm told.

The design is still at prototype stage and will be ready for launch at an exhibition being curated by John Makepeace in April. The stool will be made to order and they will be numbered and signed. As they are handmade in the woods, each one will be subtly individual and will be made using no machines, electricity, glue or metal fixings - just like the old Windsor chairs. The exhibition is called 'Syzygy' and will be held at the Alpha House Gallery in Sherborne in April. I hope you can come along.

Back In The Press

Although I've not mentioned it for a while, I'm delighted to say that the press interest in what we are doing down here in the woods is (still) increasing. In the last month we have been featured in three publications - The London Evening Standard, Craft & Design Magazine and Wood-Turning Magazine. If you'd like to see what they've been saying about us, we have updated the website's 'In The News' section with the new publications, and look forward to welcoming the guests that have booked up as a result of these features.

And that's it for another month. The Christmas / New Year break is well and truly over and it's all go again now, preparing for the 2008 courses and, in particular, the three new ones we've launched this year. I hope to see you in the not too distant future.

Guy and the team

Tree of the Month - London Plane Platanus x hispanica

In this, the dormant season for trees, pollarding work is carried out on street trees before the sap begins to rise again in the spring. Freshly done, this work can look brutal, the trees reduced to stubs. But the work done ensures that we can enjoy large, mature trees in our city streets without endangering buildings, wires and pedestrians. As with coppicing, the work done prolongs the healthy lifespan of the tree, and as pollarding is repeated over a number of years the trees develop the characterful and handsome swollen bolls, from which the new shoots will arise, and which are so characteristic a sight in many streets and town squares in mainland Europe.

London Planes respond particularly well to pollarding, which usefully prevents this huge tree outgrowing its allotted space. Plane trees have the potential to be giants - and no one is quite sure how big they can grow. It is said that oak trees 'spend 300 years growing, 300 years resting, and 300 years declining gracefully'. The oldest London Planes in Britain are over 300 years old, and still in full, vigorous growth. Although they favour warmer temperatures, and do not thrive in the shorter summers north of the Pennines, some of the older planes in Britain have now reached heights exceeding 45 metres, and show no sign of stopping. The largest tree in Europe, however grows on the Greek island of Kos. The tree, known as 'The Plane Tree of Hippocrates' has a girth of 12 metres, and is revered by the inhabitants of Kos, who believe that it was planted by Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, and that he, and the apostle Paul, taught under its shade.

As well as being a suitable candidate for radical pruning, London Planes have other characteristics that make them the ultimate city-proof tree; the long clean trunk generally has no awkward low branches to worry the Tree Officer; the tough, leathery leaves easily slough off city dirt in the rain; it will grow happily in hostile, compacted and paved over soil; it is a safe tree, unlikely to shed its branches onto unsuspecting pedestrians. Mace, who worked as a climbing arborist in an earlier incarnation, says that it is renowned as a reliable climbing tree, with little risk of branches suddenly snapping when you are tied on and dangling with a live chainsaw many metres over a hard landing. It is possible that the characteristic 'camo pattern' bark of the London plane, a result of the tree regularly shedding large plates of old bark to reveal the pale patchwork of colours below, also helps the tree to shed pollution, but scientific types are now unsure that pollutants would enter the tree through the bark.

Although the most widely planted street tree in London, the Plane has a mysterious ancestry, and is often described now as 'of unknown origin'. It is disputed as to whether it could be a naturally-occurring hybrid of the oriental Platanus orientalis which hails from the eastern Mediterranean, and the American plane P. occidentalis, which was actually first noted in southern Europe, or if it originated in the famous Tradescant nursery in Lambeth, in the 1600's, where both the parent trees are thought to have grown. Further uncertainty attaches to the fact that the tree, unusually for a hybrid, produces fertile seeds, leading to speculation that it could be a particularly vigorous natural variation of either P. orientalis or P occidentalis.

The seeds, which are fertile even in the cooler climes of Britain, will germinate in astounding numbers given their ideal conditions of a long, hot British summer. They do, however, take a long time to mature; the ball-like flower heads produced in early summer one year stay on the tree throughout the winter, not releasing the seeds until the following spring. The pollen and the fine hairs of the seed parts are known to be very allergenic; the ancient Greek herbalist Dioscorides wrote that the little hairs or down from the leaves and seed-balls, falling from the tree in summer into eyes and ears "doth hurt the hearing and the sight". Children, rather enterprisingly, have utilised these qualities, and use the hairy seeds as a form of itching powder.

Carolyn Brightwater