I have watched with distress the recent beaching of whales along the English cost line. An event for me unique and unfathomable, how such a giant of the sea can come so unstuck when it meets the land? An animal so unique to its environment that it is helpless when confronted with change.

In the same week we have seen further unique weather events, helpfully now named in line with our American cousins, so we can place blame where necessary. It wont be long before we have all been implicated in some scene of destruction.

The high winds led to the felling many of our land giants, in the shape of mature trees. Uprooted and left laid down where once they stood tall.

Confronted with a fallen mature broad leaf tree you can really appreciate its scale, it is a majestic thing, like a cathedral of the forest. This giant occupied such a small amount of space as it reached for the sun but on its side you really can see the size of another of natures giants.

Unlike the whale becoming carrion or worse a Mexican explosion, the tree is adapted to this life, Once fallen it sprouts again with renewed vigor, its failure is the catalyst to the development of a whole ecosystem occupying the space it left behind. I wonder if the sea the whale left behind has a similar in bloom moment as a celebration to death

The regrowth of a forest is one of the remarkable things in nature, the fresh growth and vigor of competition for this new source of light is one, which many have attempted to capture in gardens over the years.

The woodland garden, which these attempts are charmingly called are increasingly becoming a label on planning drawings and design concepts, all over the country but what exactly does it mean?

The natural woodland so scarcely represented in nature doesn’t at first suggest itself as an environment for a garden. The darkness of light the suppressive nature of a canopy and the detritus littering the floor, the rapid frothy growth is quickly replaced by a dense ground cover to be replaced by understory and finally apex trees. The opportunity for garden and by this I mean people seems limited.

The gardens created tend to rely on the successional trees, birch and hazel, multi-stemmed for body, replicating the managed coppiced woodlands of 100 years ago. An herbaceous layer fills the spaces in between with a variety of color and texture and paths wind their way through taking you from one place to another.

In this way the woodland garden can become a glorified path, providing an opportunity to pause for breath between designed elements, but not necessarily a destination in its own right.

For me woods are a special place, I’m always most comfortable surrounded by trees, they are magic places, we would climb through the woods at home making our own stories as we went, bows were drawn from the hazel coppice, castles were made in the sky, we watched from or marauded through all the local woods as kids.

Occasionally we would see the evidence of other dwellers, fox, deer and pheasant rarely seeing the animal that made the paths but for fleeting glimpses. The wood was a place where we could all live without upsetting each other.

The challenge of woods was not just the feeling of being surrounded or crowded in a space dimly lit but the opportunity to stray from the path, the wind fallen branches and mature giants that would arise then be consumed to become their own ecosystem, were our obstacle course.

And its this that is often forgotten in the sanitized woodland garden that the label defines, The ecosystem of a wood starts well before the herbaceous layer with the fungi and moss parasites living of the corpses of these giants.

I have often wondered how one might include this into a garden setting, how you might make a case for leaving or even importing windfall? Artists have made their attempts involving treating the wood to make it into something new, by fire to create a material that although organic in its form stands apart from its original state and therefore exhibiting it in the setting from where it came.

On other occasions I have seen dead oaks still standing painted bright red drawing attention to something we take so for granted. Perhaps this is the way of incorporating these important ecological and sculptural forms back to the woodland garden.

Or perhaps I’m missing the point of the woodland garden. The nuttery at Sissinghurst is a perfect example of a garden held at a certain stage of its evolution but in doing this the Sackville Wests created anticipation as you walk along the very designated prescribed paths, the new growth builds anticipation of the onset of spring, this garden comes alive well before the manicured boarders and the famed white garden giving the garden a focus as early as possible taking the natural early growth of the woodland herbaceous layer.

David Nash the artist/sculptor has long worked with wood, ambling through the welsh hillsides of his home identifying new windfall for extraction back to his studio to become a new piece.

One such piece charted the journey of one of these pieces of wood. ‘Boulder’ charted the progress of a timber boulder cut on site from a wind fallen giant then transported along a stream to a river, to an estuary and finally to the sea, disappearing and then reemerging to be beached temporarily before setting off on its way again.

So the Tree and the whale are the same and whilst the tree moves on the whale cannot, both at the whim of their environment.