Fields and bureaucrats

The house and gîte here are enclosed by fields on three sides and by a small road on the remaining one.  On the other side of the road is a field of a couple of acres that is also part of the property, but, being apart from it, is not constrained to integrate with the garden.  It can form a space of its own, separate, but part of the whole.

I don't really have a strong idea of what to do with it, except that it would be nice to have some trees there.   With this in mind, I organised, with help, a meeting with a person from the région engaged in management of the site classé that surrounds the property, and a landscape gardener available to the local community.   The purpose was to get some outline ideas on what might be a sympathetic and attractive way of managing the space to best fit in with local scenery and aesthetic values.  Null points.  Those august personages seemed to engage in a power struggle, and did nothing but argue about what might be permitted.    I think the best idea that came up was an orchard.  "How many apples do you think my customers are going to eat?"   So I'm doing what I feel like.

Last year I mowed the field once in the Autumn, taking care to avoid the yearling walnut trees that had sprouted, in the hope that they will get their roots deep enough to survive the inevitable weeks of Summer drought.   They still seem to be there, although they're not much taller than I remember them.   I have not mowed the field this year; I understand that tall grass helps to shield young trees in their early years as they establish, so it's staying.

However, I have decided to give Nature a helping hand.   I have cleared a strip of grass parallel to the road, a few metres into the field, to transplant some Hazelnut saplings that had self-seeded in the garden.  I figure that once they grow they will help hide the inner area of the field from prying eyes of passers-by, and give me a bit more freedom as to what to do there.  There are nine small trees of various sizes, 5 paces apart, along the mowed track.  Fingers crossed.