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The joint Crann – Trees for Ireland and Birr Castle Giants Grove Project at Birr, Co. Offaly is the largest Redwood Forest outside of the USA. Already in its fifth year, one thousand redwoods have been established amongst native broadleaves on...

It’s a lot more than you might think! The Giants Grove project is a partnership between Crann – Trees for Ireland, and Birr Castle Estate. On the surface it’s basically an 8 hectare (20 acre) green-field afforestation project in the heart of Ireland that was launched...

With Autumn here and Halloween approaching, the Sequoias of the Giants Grove are settling in to their long sleep for the winter. They deserve it. They survived frost, flood, storms, drought, deer and thistles, taking it all in stride. Like us all, they’ll probably...

The Giants Grove is a forest like few others, for many reasons. It is the largest Redwood forest outside of its native California, a gene-pool to protect the Redwood species from climate change, a symbol of the Irish diaspora, and a continuous-cover eco-forest that...

The worlds first forest management school was founded in the University of Giessen, the Holy Roman Empire, in 1778. For the majority of those almost 250 years the basic forest management tools were the humble pencil & paper. Data collected in the field was...

While sequoias are the ‘stars’ of the Giants Grove, the project is about so much more than just the Redwoods. The Grove, planted and managed for forest biodiversity, is an ecosystem that will continue to develop and improve as the Giants grow bigger and taller over...

Phew! 2020 is over. While all our lives are changed dramatically in 2021. The virus had very little impact on the Giants Grove. I saw the site a lot less, and an interesting Trinity College University study had to be postponed, because of the lockdowns, but nature,...

The Giants Grove is a remarkable project – the establishment of an 8 hectare woodland dominated by the world’s largest trees, the worlds largest organism by volume, that will take 1200 years to mature, is really something special. But the Giants Grove is so much more...

Well we are almost ready to begin planting of the Giants Grove, as scheduled, in late March/early April. The ground clearance carried-out in the autumn was a huge success, and we are now ready to begin the establishment works. The Planting was always scheduled to be...

The trees at the Giants Grove have now completed their first growing season, and I am delighted at how the site performed. All of the little Giants are alive and well, and showed good growth and vigour, while the inter-planted nurse species have a 97% strike-rate....

I predicted a challenging summer 2018 for the Giants Grove, but who could have foreseen the form it would take – the driest June in nearly 80 years, and no end in sight. Ireland is experiencing a heatwave, and while most of the Irish are enjoying the sunshine, I’m...

Over 500 years ago Chaucer wrote that ‘an ook cometh of a litel spyr’, and although the language has changed, it is still true that tall oaks from little acorns grow. Of course it’s not only oaks but all the majestic trees we see today had humble beginnings, and it’ll...