Nothing stays the same
I was brushing and cleaning up at a friend’s place on the hills while cursing myself for not being better prepared for the task at hand. The brush was mostly wild rose and black locust, known around here as devil’s club for the nasty thorns on it. Wild rose is also a prickly plant and i only had one leather glove and light pants on. Chain saw pants would have been more appropriate especially as i was using a chain saw. There were also wild plum trees and they too have a barb on them but easily avoided, i picked a few branches for bouquets. A pitch fork would have been useful on this job for piling up the cut brush but i only discovered it today at another place where i do yard work.
Black locust is a legume tree which doesn’t grow higher than 20′. I hadn’t noticed it when i first moved up here 40 years ago but now there are thickets of it in a couple of places. One is at this place which also has the oldest dwelling in this area, a squared log cabin which is always being renovated. When it was built, the area had been logged off so it probably stood by itself overlooking Lake St.Peter a couple of miles away. The whole area had been cleared and turned into fields by generations of settlers starting a century and a half ago. These days, the bush is everywhere but years ago it wouldn’t have been seen except off in the distance beyond the fields. Judging by aerial photographs, the forest started reclaiming the land in the sixties as farming became less and less viable as an income generating proposition. The rich soil around the cabin was a result of sheep which had been kept there. Apple trees dot the property and all the old farms. Stone fences going through dense bush are a testament to all the hard work by people trying to make the best of the land. If the numbers of humans had kept decreasing at the rate they had been, in another 50 years you would have been hard pressed to find signs of human habitation. Recently however, folks have started leaving the cities and re-discovering the beauty of the land.
