Forestry Memories

The FC Postings of John C. Keenleyside

My 7th posting in 1979 was back to Research as Chief Forester based at Newton Nursery Elgin. The area of responsibility was all research work north of a line roughly from Aberdeen to Fort William. This covered the outstation at Lairg where I had been previously and the long established station at Fort Augustus which covered the North West Highlands, the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. The post became available due to the death of my colleague Major Geoff Bartlett.

At one time this post would have seemed like the icing on the cake but seven years at Ardgartan had changed my views. I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of Ardgartan Forest, the team spirit it took to keep the show on the road, the wide variety of tasks and the huge number of people one met and had to liaise with. The carrot the F.C. offered with this post was the opportunity to buy ones own house and receive a housing allowance. My wife was keen to move further North again as her father was getting older and living alone. Our daughter was at a critical stage in her education but had been at four schools already so accepted the challenge of another one. I started work at Newton in September 1979 but did not get entry to the house that I purchased until November. For this period I chose to stay in a caravan on a farm as I was likely to be away from home quite a lot in this vast area, something I knew well from previous posts.

Cultivation was still high on the agenda as was nutrition but tending to fade due to the high costs of fertilisers and distribution costs. Poor coverage by aerial application causing banding of good and poor growth of the trees on the hillsides and a survey found that on occasions up to one third of the fertiliser landed in drains. This worried the more than the environmentalists and methods of mixing the species to obtain mulching & heather suppression free of charge became fashionable. On mineral soil sites Japanese larch and Sitka spruce were planted together but on the peat lands Lodgepole pine and Sitka spruce were a better mixture. The actual provenance of the Lodgepole pine was crucial as South Coastal provenances grew too rapidly and the Sitka spruce did not get a chance to form the main part of the crop. I believe the last of the large replicated experiments was Teindland Experiment No111. Teindland Forest was famous for its cultivation experiments starting with horse drawn ploughs in the 1920s and having one experiment in each stage of development.

The second emphasis at that time was on the vegetative production of Sitka spruce.
Small amounts of very high tree quality seed were available from seed orchards at Newton and some of these were germinated, the seedlings potted up and grown on under polytunnels. The work then consisted of taking cuttings from the potted trees aiming to get around 500 cuttings per plant and rooting them in beds in polytunnels. The rooted cuttings were then lined lined out in the nursery for a year, following which they were sent out to planting sites. We had an excellent propagation team at Newton with Allan Green in charge but Graham Menzies and the rest of the staff were all involved. My role was to find ways in improving the cutting’s rooting percentage which was achieved by the introduction of composted pine bark to the cutting medium resulting in a possible 100% rooting success. I also had the task of handing over this procedure to the private sector and managed to get half a dozen nurseries involved from Elite Trees in the Black Isle, through the North East and one in England, Crowders in Lincolnshire, who were enthusiastic about this procedure. Over the years the nursery trade has consolidated. Christie Elite have survived but now incorporates the former Banff and Buchan, Aberdeen Tree Nurseries and Ben Reid Aberdeen. In England Ron Thurlow the nursery manager and R.Crowder were my contacts. I enjoyed this work and became a member of the IPPS (International Plant Propagators Society) whose motto was to seek and to share. I presented a paper on Propagation of Forest Trees at Lancaster University to the annual meeting of the IPPS attended by delegates from all over the world - this was a wonderful experience.

The other part of my work at Newton was to write up and write off many of the older experiments, many of them in the Fort Augustus area which eventually led to the closure of this long established outstation. The Head forester in charge was David Tracy who moved on to Lochgilphead. I was the one who had to make four workers redundant and turn the key in the office door for the last time, the saddest day of my career in the Forestry Commission. Writing up that I did enjoy was the measuring up and preparing an article on the original work done at Corrour on Rannoch moor. The remnants of the work at Fort Augustus came over to Newton and the Polyhouses, which were put up originally for the production of Tubed seedlings and later for Stock plants for the propagation programme, were sold standing with the purchaser having to remove them from site.

The work in Lairg carried on under Walter Paterson but I became responsible for the plots in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. The most northern plot was at Sullom Voe in Shetland (near the oil terminal). The exposure was severe, on the north side the first row of Sitka just got its head above the stone wall, the second row was 30cm taller each row gained that amount and so after ten rows in they achieved 3 metres but the edge looked like the roof of a house and inside was an impenetrable jungle. In the Western Isles our work extended out to beyond Lochmaddy in North Uist and Daliburgh in South Uist on very exposed sites and very wet conditions.

In the northeast the work in the forests had moved on to the re-stocking phase which took me back to my old haunts at Clashindarroch and Bin forests in the Huntly area and involved disposing of lop and top and cultivation. Many of these sites were ideal for red and roe deer as they provided Bed and Breakfast habitats and various methods of protection were trialled.

Time moved on into the 1980 decade with a Conservative Government and Mrs Thatcher in charge. There was a restructuring of the forester grades and forests with a combining of the former forester and district officer titles. Promotion boards were held at which I was successful and promoted to Forest District Manager and posted as F.D.M. Inverness June1987.


The photographs shows John Keenleyside in polytunnel with rooted Sitka spruce cuttings

Groups: Forest Nurseries, Forest Research, Forestry Areas

Group: Forestry in Action - 1908 pictures

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