COUNTRY LIFE
Bark Harvest Most of us, I suppose, think of hay-time as the first harvest of the year. But a chance advertisement, " flawers wanted for oak-bait harvest," reminds me that there is another, almost two month, earlier, with which Thomas Hardy was quite familiar. Oak is felled in spring, when sap is rising and leaf and flower are just making green. Woodsmanship is seen at its neatest in the job of barking the tree, leaving it like a golden skeleton on the rich May grass, and in the grading of every top twig and foot of cordwood. Flawers strip the bark, which yields easily as the sap rises, with barking irons, piling it in green-brown stacks. The twigs, leaves singed after a day or two of May sun, are arranged into what are known in some parts as bavins or sprays. The whole job is an example of one of those expert conscientious crafts that are slipping out of the life of the countryside very fast. Spring oak also cleaves well, and cleft oak has remarkable durability- and strength and makes the finest fences, but I rather think that oak-cleavers, like flawers, are a rare and dying race.
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