Friends of Kaliwood

A few of us were fresh back from Folk East, so we untangled Rachel’s string, and then choose which of the luggage labels of ‘Where did you come from’ deserved an outing. The poets Caroline and Virginia made the choice, a few of them here.

As we did last year, we counted the sapling species in the tree nursery. These would replace those which have died in this years unexpected drought. So we brushed up on our leaf ID knowledge, with help from the phone App. With 3 scribes, Caroline, Hazel (checker) and Michael (label writer) we sorted over 300 tree saplings into species. Hazel planted about 20 seeds of Pride of India, which we hope will germinate and grow into magnificent climate resilient Pride of India trees. The seed is beautiful, a close up below. They were donated by Andrew Eastaugh in whose garden this great tree grows.

Species	Number
Apple	1
Dog Rose	42
Willow	5
Elder	19
Pride of India Seed	20
Crab apple	38
Whitebeam	2
Alder	1
Small leaf lime	3
Walnut	1
Wild Cherry	1
Silver Birch	4
Spindle	4
Holly	1
Cucumber tree	1
Gelder Rose	5
Rowan	39
Field Maple	8
Hazel	21
Watch Elm	3
Oak	30
Sweet Chestnut	3
Princess Tree	1
Hornbeam	18
Yew	20
Dog wood	30
Fig	4
Pear	1
Horse chestnut	3
	329

After our packed lunch and some very lucky French Onion soup (made of onion and a French), we filtered the day by closing our circle with what we remembered:

Beauty and impressiveness of a wasp spider
A song to 400 trees – which Caroline and Nickie may yet work on.
Planting Pride of India into pots
Playing with the dogs
Tallying arithmetic
Peter getting wet
Counting then forgetting what I was counting

Some of us found our way down to the community garden to witness the extraordinary contortions of knots the pumpkin plant created, weaving itself around the fence wire.

Quote of the day: “In my next life, when I’ve married Peter Knight, I’m going to study genetics”