Intimate Privacy

As the trees grow, the tents will be hidden away

The tents at Truffle Lodge have been positioned to minimize your awareness of neighbours, and this privacy will be enhanced as the trees grow.

This lot of trees is growing well. I say this lot because it is our third planting.

The first planting was a heart breaking and very expensive disaster.

We had lots of wonderful huge gums along the reiverfront, but very few on the flats where the lodge and tents were being erected. So we set about planting trees where we wanted them to be.

Me being me, I wanted instantaneous forest, so I bought 6m high advanced gums, an expensive undertaking, but one that was justified by the impact of the immediate ‘tall’ tree environment.

They were planted, watering hoses buried, irrigation systems established and support straps positioned in the autumn so that they had time to settle in before the heat of summer. As they were already 6m high, they were well acclimatised to the Tasmanian winter cold, so we thought that autumn, winter and spring would allow it to get settled well and truly before summer, at which stage we hoped that we would get a growth spurt.

Well we need not have worried about the irrigation as that winter was the wettest ever, with us having two 100 year floods in as many months. It just bucketed down, and bit by bit the gums started looking sick.

The experts were called in and they came to the conclusion that the heavily clayed soil was not letting the heavy rains drain, and the trees were drowning in their own holes.

We knew that we now needed to dig drainage channels for each tree, but the ground was still saturated, even in spring, so we knew that we could not bring in the heavy equipment except for the trees next to the lodge carpark.
The rest would have to be dug by hand, in heavily clayed mud. Back breaking work, and we employed additional hands.

Some trees were obviously doomed, and these were dug out and replaced … planting #2. More back breaking work and expense.

But by the end of spring, and $15000.00 down the drain, it was clear that the trees, including the new ones, were not going to survive.

So the whole lot were pulled out and we went to a different variety, the WA Peppermint, that we hoped would cope with the heavy clay, and wet winters better.

And I didn’t buy 6m high ones this time. I did buy advanced ones, but of a much more managable size if the plan went belly up again.

Planing #3 suffered a bit with the frost of the first year, but these trees are now going well, looking lush and are going to be just lovely in a couple of years.