Spruce and storms

Light shining through the treeline gave a clue that the neighbouring forest had undergone storm damage.

There was a sense of trepidation when we visited our sites after the recent storms - our trees are still young but we still anticipated some storm damage from neighbouring spruce plantations.

Recently planted with primarily native Irish species in March 2024, we were delighted to see the trees on Cloudforest Four were doing well. The neighbouring Sitka spruce forest unfortunately didn’t fair too well in the recent storms, but the majority of their trees toppled into their own land, causing minimal damage to our newly planted trees.

We were amazed at the scale of devastation within their forest, observable even from the distance due to the sunlight coming through the normally dense forest’s treeline. It was clear the centre of their forest had been downed in the storms.

We got a good opportunity to look at a tree that had toppled right at the edge of our boundary, taking part of our field with it! Spruce are generally a shallow-rooted species, but this was likely further restricted by the high water table in this area. Understandable then, how it struggled to hold its own in the strong winds of Storm Eowyn!

A toppled Sitka spruce at the edge of our land gave us a good opportunity to look at the root plate.

Our favourite hawthorn, holding up a stack of fallen trees on its spiky shoulders.

While the majority of windblown trees fell away from our site, we were sad to see that one of our favourite trees - the scruffy, twisted hawthorn festooned with mosses and lichens that you’ll have seen on several of our previous blogs - was valiantly bearing the weight of several fallen Sitka. Its low, sturdy nature means that it stood strong even with the trees falling upon it - but we expect it will unfortunately suffer damage when the foresters remove the spruce from on top of it.

The impact of the storms on our neighbour’s forest was significant, and the shallow roots highlighted the value of planting native and mixed species forests which offer a variety of root depth.

As we look to a future with more extreme weather events here in Ireland, it also speaks to the importance of Continuous Cover Forestry, where selective thinning could give neighbouring trees an opportunity to adapt to windier conditions, and reduce windthrow by limiting the clearing of blocks of trees when thinning.

It’s certainly something Cloudforests will take learnings from and consider in our own woodland management.