Tullynally tree expert is ‘glass half full man’

Thomas Pakenham of Tullynally Castle hadn’t had time to assess the full extent of the damage Storm Éowyn had caused to his trees when the Westmeath Examiner spoke to him on Sunday morning, and though he thought hundreds of trees were down, he remains optimistic.

“I’m a glass half full man, and if I had to guess, I’d say 90 per cent of our trees have survived – that wouldn’t be the way some others might look at it, glass half empty people – they would say ‘we’ve lost hundreds of trees’,” said Thomas.

Tullynally has almost certainly lost hundreds of trees, but Thomas, who was up with the daylight on Friday to monitor the wind on the oak tree he can see through his kitchen window, is not overly concerned. “I think 200 years is a good life for a tree and we shouldn’t complain when it comes to an end,” he said.

Compared to commercial plantations, which have much shorter life spans and where yield is a priority, ornamental planting is a different matter, Thomas said.

There is commercial planting at Tullynally, and the team there hadn’t managed to gain access to that part of the estate to see how many trees were down, and the extent of any consequent damage to the neighbouring garden that Thomas has created in his time there.

“We think of commercial trees as unnatural, because they’re planted six foot apart and then they’re thinned – that isn’t what nature does,” he said; “however, the only time I’ve seen a really natural forest myself, in Tibet, was at 15,000 feet, near the tree line, in 1995, and we came to a point far enough from the nearest village where nobody had removed any trees for firewood, and it was a total jungle, hardly any upright trees at all. Trees blew down and were supported by adjoining trees, and you could hardly walk in it.

“We think of trees as a series of verticals, but real, natural forest is a complete muddle.”

Thomas gave an example of why he remains optimistic for the future of the trees on his estate; when he arrived at Tullynally in 1961, a series of storms had caused considerable damage in one area. “You couldn’t walk there, so we cut up the trees and one particular lime tree, a big lime tree, we flipped the stump back, dug a large hole, which became a little pond, and then took the soil and put it on top of the stump.

“The stump regenerated with a mass of young lime; we chose one to be the new tree, and the old tree became the new tree. So there’s a sort of moral about that, and the fact is trees will regenerate spontaneously from stumps, if they’re deciduous trees, but not if they’re evergreens, and that means in planting for ornament, you can often get a new tree from an old tree without having to start again.”

Thomas, despite his 91 years and a fall that fractured his leg just six weeks ago, was keen to take the Examiner on a short tour of part of the Tullynally grounds, where he described and pointed out some of the fallen and damaged trees and their histories.

“You can’t go wrong planting beech and oak, sycamore often plants itself, and as you see, they have a 200-year life ahead, maybe more, and obviously some trees grow for far more than 200 years.

“But that’s a good aim to have – it won’t be you, or your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren, it might not even be your great, great grandchildren, who’ll see that tree in its full glory. You’re giving something to posterity.”

Asked if he had advice for people who live in towns and suburbs and don’t have large gardens, Thomas said small trees in small gardens won’t have been much damaged in this storm, but he would like to see more interesting trees planted in housing estates: “We get too little variety, I think.”

His message to the people of Westmeath regarding trees, “would be very simple – plant, baby, plant!”