May issue - Magazine - Page 49
Glenside
News
GlensideNews@mail.com
WITHAM ON
THE HILL WI
REPORT
The May speaker, Alan Stennett, broadcaster
and author, gave a fascinating account of his life
at the BBC, where he worked for 60 years.
The son of a Lincolnshire farmer, he joined
the BBC World Service in 1964 and was a script
writer for the science, industry and agriculture
unit for a couple of years and then moved on to
be an external services producer in Wales.
Returning to his home county, he helped to
get BBC Radio Lincolnshire on the air and
during his time on the staff he claims he
presented every programme on the station with
the exception of the religion and youth shows.
Among many other projects at the station, he
produced a series of Lincolnshire Farm Open
Days to help the broader community to
understand farming better.
He retired from the BBC in 1994 to go
freelance but continued to broadcast occasionally.
He presented his last show in 2021 but is still
working, providing voiceovers and writing books
on Lincolnshire, history and railways.
Frances Plummer gave the vote of thanks for
the talk before moving on to any other business.
The raffle winner was Jill Lessey and
competition winners were Susan Allen, Kaye
Mundy and Wendy Wooldridge.
The next meeting will be on
Tuesday 3 June at 7.30pm
in St Andrew's Parish Hall,
Witham on the Hill
The speaker will be Kenneth Moore giving a
humorous talk entitled You'll Fly Laughing
about his work as a navigator in the RAF.
Visitors and new members are always
welcome - entry fee is £5. For information
contact Jane Clark on 01778 590232.
COMMUNITY
News From My Bourne Care Home:
Filling the Gap
By Rose Bakker
The loss of one very important tree has made me look carefully at the
chances of one of ours. All trees are important, of course, but do you
remember the ‘Dead Ash’ in Holywell? Which was neither dead nor an
ash, but something far more unusual - an American Black Walnut. These
were introduced to France mainly, when fashion for walnut furniture was
deple ng the na ve stock. They proved difficult to rear and ours is extra
rare because this is the furthest north they can be induced to grow, let
alone flourish.
Nicknamed ‘Dead’ these trees are always very late to leaf up and they
do look ash-like. Just once in our 40 years at Castle Bytham did the Holywell
tree fruit - round, hard dark nuts about the size of tennis balls hanging on
Christmas tree bauble threads. Harry halved one with a hacksaw and inside
was a small, hard, tasteless nut in a dense shell. As the tree is on Council
land, we contacted the pleasantly sympathe c Tree Man, who knew about
it and had got whatever protec on is available for it. He guessed, as we did,
that it had escaped from Holywell Hall at some landscaping event. I wish we
had thought to try and propagate a nut, like a conker.
Children, bless them, do so like plan ng acorns and conkers and used
to pot up the ny silver birch seedlings that threatened to en-Spinney our
garden. All make good pa o plants in large pots surrounded by more
colourful pansies, and don’t outgrown the pots for seven or eight years
while the children find gardens, parks and hedges where they can plant
them on. Some even survive.
Other uses for chestnuts, if playing conkers is deemed too dangerous.
include pu ng suitable autumn tree trimmings into buckets with a li le
water to overwinter in the shed, then bringing indoors in spring for the
s cky buds to develop li le green leafy ‘hands’. And somewhere I heard
that during one of the World Wars school children collected sackfuls of
horse chestnuts. Cordite to propel ar llery from guns was made with the
acetone they yielded from their starch. This avoided the hazards of
impor ng wheat starch from North America and Canada, then more
important as food.
There were other infant trees in our garden, too. Apart from silver
birch I found young English walnuts - the crows didn’t get them all next
door roo ng around the rowan and a surfeit of hazelnuts. One year a
demented squirrel planted a whole copse as his inheritance. (We gave up
coun ng at 190.) We just could not find forever names for all those,
despite reasonable help from a neighbour’s grand daughter who was
plan ng 30 trees for the Duke of Edinburgh.
And, out of our garden this tree issue goes much further. Our
newspaper reports some West Country group that is rewilding an orchard
of young fruit trees found growing beside railway tracks or on verges
where people have thrown away fruit cores and pips. These are not true
to type, you don’t get Cox’s Orange or Jazz apples this way but you do get
some interes ng cul vars. This group takes gra s from trees too big or
too difficult to move and is running quite a large orchard now. You don’t
have to move to the West Country to experience this either. We have a
very nice, apparently self-seeded apple tree, growing nearly on the
footbridge between St Mar n’s and Perry’s Hollow. I once tried a windfall
from it and found it a delicious uniden fied eater, small, crisp and juicy.
Someone also must have enjoyed the apples, too, as the next year all
those fruit within reach had been harvested. A gra from that tree would
be really useful.
Gardening here at the home, even a er star ng a Garden Club and
plan ng sunflower seeds in li le pots, is not nearly so exci ng! God bless
you all and your green fingers!
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