In open space no one can still not hear you scream!

Further to us post of 24 January the FC are persisting with their policy of wiping several decades of earnest forestry endeavour from the map of Britain and subsuming the memories of several generations of foresters under the media-friendly correctness of rare grass and tiny slithery things.

We at at Ebor Forestry urge you to look at http://www.forestry.gov.uk/website/forestry.nsf/byunique/INFD-7LZKKA and take part in its self-destructive survey before it`s too late and our beloved Forestry Commission become the Vast Useless Bits of Grass and Heather Commission or even worser disappear into the maelstrom that is Natural England altogether.

After all, since when was forestry ever natural?

Ebor Forestry have a funny turn or something

This poem is oft` recited by Mrs Ebor Forestry after too many Pino Ebor Grigios during swanky shareholders do`s in the style of Stanley Holloway after Albert and The Lion with much gesticulation and the appropriate props and usually wearing nothing but a threadbare pair of Simpsons boxer shorts.

It seems to sum up EborForestry.com

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest's ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

'Is there anybody there?' he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and

Shaken by the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:-

'Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,' he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

For more on Stanley Holloway start here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUVzki2j87k with this great Roy Hudd performance!

London Plane sailing

There has been some criticism recently of the treatment given to these planes in Parliament Street in the centre of York.

Ebor Forestry would like to point out that these awful trees were specified amidst some pomp and ceremony in the early `90s by some now long forgotten landscape architect working from the same planning office which also specified the hated building which became known as the "splash palace" seen here in the middle distance. Instead of becoming an iconic feature of one of the few open spaces left in central York, one of the most intact and extant medieval town centres in Europe, it is in fact nothing more than a public toilet.

Apart from being inappropriate specimens for such a plaza, these trees have been nailed, stapled, plastic-banded, garroted and tied for countless ephemeral reasons dreamed up by the passing whims and fancies of even more forgotten city-centre managers and ward members trying to respond to the latest political vagary.

The bastards.

What would YOU do in the city`s poor arboricultural manager`s shoes?

Exactly.