How to Build a Forest

Puddock Hill Journal #71: Eight(ish) precepts for establishing a wooded area.

The greatest reforestation challenge we face at Puddock Hill lies outside the deer fence in the east woods and along the road.

When we erected the tall fence four years ago, we decided to leave a corridor that would allow deer to past east-west—their historic daily pattern—without being driven into the road. This seemed like the fairest thing we could do for the wild deer herd and local motorists while achieving the goals we’d set for ourselves inside the fence.

Portions of what I now call the east woods were wooded and shady when we started. I’d characterize other areas as degraded woods with inadequate tree cover. The section along the road, while it boasted a few mature trees, had been maintained for many years as a mowed meadow.

The current fad with regard to reforesting involves planting saplings by the dozens in translucent plastic tubes. I resisted this approach for a number of reasons. First, the tubes are hideous and unnatural looking. Second, they introduce more plastic into the environment when I want to see less. Finally, they make it difficult to monitor progress until the trees have substantially outgrown their tubes years later.

These tubes have the virtue of being cheap to install, but in places where I’ve seen them used, I have not come away impressed. The failure rate seems high. I surmise—admittedly unscientifically—that young trees don’t like spending the first few years of their lives confined to a tube. There is no condition in nature that I know of analogous to forcing a tree to grow this way.

My approach began by contemplating what healthy woods look like. Dead branches rest on a bed of leaf litter. The shade is too dense in places to allow much understory, but where some light penetrates there are woody shrubs and young trees. In rare sunnier spots, herbaceous plants thrive. And vines are few.

Most of our part of the world was once forested, but few old-growth forests remain in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, notably in Maine and some other mountainous regions. The woods we see around us today are generally secondary growth—the consequence of abandoned fields.

In nature, succession normally occurs after some kind of disruption—wind, flood, fire—that creates an opening in the forest, maybe even a substantial meadow. After the grasses and other herbaceous plants stabilize the soil, certain first-succession trees and shrubs move in, usually smaller, faster-growing trees. Eventually, taller trees come to dominate.

In the old bit of meadow along the road, I wanted to jump-start this process by following eight precepts:

1. Let dead trees stand. A healthy forest has two and a half standing dead trees per acre. These snags feed insects. Their cavities host birds and mammals. But there are other reasons I advocate leaving them where we’re working to establish woods. Even as they slowly disintegrate, they provide vertical structure, the essence of a forest. When they come down, they host more wildlife and return their nutrients to the forest floor, feeding other plants, including the next generation of trees.

2. Let fallen trees lie. It amazes me how quick people act to clean up fallen trees in the landscape. I find fallen trees interesting—especially large ones. No unmanaged woods is without them, and backyard stewards managing their woods should remember and respect that. In addition to the assets cited in Item 1, fallen trees add visual complexity to a forest. The sooner we can have that feature, the better.

3. Plant trees. Of course, it’s not a forest without trees, and waiting for nature to reforest under deer pressure is like waiting for Godot. Although only one or two tree species dominate most forests, here we plant a variety of species because we don’t know what will be happiest in that exact spot and, in any case, we need insurance against the changing climate and the increase in pathogens and extreme events it brings. Some species will inevitably make out better than others in future, but it’s impossible to predict which ones. Inside the deer fence, we mostly planted whips—saplings. Outside, we started with some bigger trees because I wanted them to grow beyond browsing height as soon as possible.