Let the Land Lead

Ingrid, a visitor to the website from Germany, asked me to write more about the woodland I’m planting. Thank you, Ingrid. I am happy to do so. 

The first work I did was to dig two large ponds. I left them unlined. The water rose in its own time from the ground, helped by the rain. Then the frogs came. I really love those little critters. Today, they live alongside birds and insects. A heron occasionally visits, but there are no fish, so she doesn’t stay long. The ponds changed the way the land held itself. They drained what was heavy and opened up space. They also helped me begin. 

When I first arrived, the land had been worn by years of cattle grazing. It wasn’t ruined, but it was shaped by heavy hooves. The ground held water unevenly where the cattle had stood. Rushes had taken hold. They were the only thing thriving.

I began by walking the same loop often. No clipboard. No plan. Just noticing. Learning where the water pooled and where the land held firm.

Then I started planting. A few trees at a time. I didn’t apply for a grant. I bought bare root saplings. There was no schedule and no push. I planted small. When you do this, the trees have established root systems by the time they’re vulnerable to the wind. I chose pioneer species that could live with rough conditions. Dogwood, willow, hazel, alder, rowan. These trees prepare the way for others to follow. Three years on, the change is visible. Willows have formed their own quiet gatherings and some now stand over six feet tall. The dogwood is thriving. Alders and hazels are rising above the rushes. Some of the rowans are taller than me.

In the early days, I looked online for guidance. The internet is full of experts. Many are people with content to push, techniques to sell, opinions wrapped as rules. I remember watching one video where a man claimed, very seriously, that mulch must never touch the bark of a young tree. That was his niche of authority. I learned quickly not to listen to people like that. Instead, I read books. I check in with a wise old grower I trust. And mostly, I watch the trees. I’ve come to believe that learning how to care for land means finding your own way through, slowly, with your hands in the soil and your eyes open.

A winter storm passed through earlier this year while I was away. It brought down several old trees along the boundary, and I lost around fifty saplings. I came back to broken branches and torn ground. It was hard to see. But not everything was lost. Most of what I had planted held on. I cleared the damage, replanted where I could, and kept going. That’s the work.

This is not a woodland yet. But it is becoming one.

I do not think of this as land management, and I found myself recoiling when someone referred to what I’m doing as a project. I think of it as a relationship. I watch and listen. I adjust. I return. I let things grow slowly. There is a kind of spirituality in that. Something very quiet. Something rooted in care and rhythm. 

I have experienced some amazing things in my life. I watched dawn break over the Himalayas. I listened to choirs sing in ancient cathedrals. Only last summer, I stood on a cliff top and felt the roar of the Atlantic echo through my chest. I have known awe, the kind that arrives without warning and changes you just a little.

But what I feel here is different. It is less fleeting. A kind of steady attention. A feeling that comes from staying close to one place and doing what you can to help it come back to a fuller life.

Given my age, I am unlikely to see this become a full woodland in my lifetime. That thought is never far from me when I plant. There is something honest in pressing a sapling into the earth, knowing it will reach maturity long after I am gone. But that does not weigh heavily. It steadies me. There is a kind of serenity in it.

It reminds me that not everything we do needs to be completed within the span of our own lives. Some things are worth beginning simply because they are worth beginning. The work matters, even if the outcome belongs to someone else.

There is something Stoic in that, I think. You act because the action is right. You plant because the land needs trees. You give yourself to something larger, and let it take its own course.

For over thirty years now I’ve been returning to and contemplating the root of the word care. It comes from the old Germanic karō, meaning “lament.” Henri Nouwen once reflected that our capacity to care is shaped by our willingness to mourn. We cannot truly care, for another person, for the land, even for ourselves, unless we are in touch with our own places of loss and longing.

This is a hard but beautiful truth. When we allow ourselves to feel what has been broken, to name what we have lost, or missed, or never fully held, we become more available. We become more open. Our care becomes less about fixing, and more about presence. Less about effort, and more about connection.

That understanding lives here, in the trees, in the land, in the little house I have renovated. This work has grown out of grief. Out of things I could not carry forward. Out of letting go. And perhaps that is why it feels true. Because it is rooted not only in hope, but in loss as well. Not only in what grows, but in what passes.

I sometimes think the only part of us that truly endures is the part that gives something away. Not loudly, not with any big gesture. Just quietly, without needing to own whatever comes next. That is what I try to offer this place. A kind of attention. A kind of care. A willingness to act, and then step back.

And over time, I have come to feel the land responding. Not in a way that asks to be noticed, but in a way that makes itself known. In many Aboriginal traditions, the land is not scenery or property. It is kin. It holds memory, story, personality. It watches. It teaches. I would not claim to understand that fully, but I have caught glimpses. I have felt the land take me seriously.

Some mornings it feels open, receptive. Other days it turns inward, offering nothing, asking only for patience. It has moods. Boundaries. Intelligence. Not unlike myself. And in its own way, it is beginning to meet the care I offer with something like care of its own. 

This is not a transaction. It is not a fantasy. It is not what modern psychology would call projection. It is a relationship. And being in relationship with land, real land, tired land, recovering land, changes you. The soil here holds more than roots now. It holds a kind of conversation. And every day I learn to listen more. 

Thank you for your message, Ingrid. I send my best wishes to you and to all who read this.

Cathal