Varazdin Valley

Friday March 4 - Mark in Varazdin County, CroatiaI met Stjepan outside my hostel just after 8am.  He’d been able to secure the company car for our day trip to the city and region called Varazdin where we were to meet with two fine forestry consultants who work for the European Forest Institute and provide consulting services to private forest owners in this region.

It took us about an hour to reach Varazdin in the eastern part of the Croatian ‘panhandle’.  Along the way, Stjpean shared some of the unique qualities of this region - namely the dominance of private forest land (70% private vs. 30% state owned).  As is the case for many parts of south east Europe, the average private landholding is very small, totaling about 1 hectare (2.6 acres).  And because of the fragmented nature of the landscape due to land inheritance tradition, the average plot size is just 1/3 of a hectare.  Varazdin has the highest population density in the country and possesses a sizable mountain range.  Typically people occupy elevations up to 300-400 meters, which is generally characterized by oak and chestnut forests.  

Many people maintain small vineyards here - often plots are located up in the mountains/hills where they have a small cabin that they visit on weekends.  The typical settlement pattern features homes and agricultural fields on the lower slopes and bottomlands, vineyards on the south facing slopes and woodlots on slopes facing north.  Most of the wood produced in these private woodlots either goes for some type of agricultural use - garden sticks/fence posts/vineyard use - or fuel.  Today even some of these needs are changing though, with more and more vineyard owners converting to concrete posts instead of oak or chestnut.  

We arrived at the forest office and headed up to the second floor where we met Miljenko Zupanic and Goran Habus - both kind men eager to share their work with interested souls.  Though it was ten or so in the morning at this point, we started things off with a welcoming warmer of local schnapps - a unexpected but welcome tradition.  I shared a bit about my intentions and interests with them, and they told me a bit more about their work and the clients they work with.  Basically, their role is to develop forest management plans for private property owners and educate them as to how to manage their land in a sustainable way.  It took me a while to realize that while Goran seemed to completely understand my English, he didn’t quite have the vocabulary to converse, so he was relatively silent unless I asked him a specific question.  

There are 41 associations of small woodland owners organized at the municipality level, and together, they have collectively established the 'Union of Croatian Forest Owners'.  There are 8 associations in Varazdin County with 30-40 members.  In Croatia, all felling on private land must be approved by the government as detailed in a forest management plan unless you only cut 5 cubic meters per hectare per year or less.  Miljenko and Goran connect with forest owners and help them develop these plans.

We headed out into the field, taking a brief tour of some of the sights their city had to offer on our way.  Our first stop was a private, mixed woodland that featured minimal coppice management.  With an uneven aged structure and a mix of conifer and broadleaf species, it was a healthy-looking, well-managed forest but didn’t really reflect my desire to connect with small scale coppice management.  Standard trees included Scots pine, wild cherry (Prunus avium), hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), black locust (Robinia).  There were a few coppice stools mixed in as well including hornbeam, locust, and chestnut - all cut on short rotation.  Hornbeam will tolerate this to a degree as it is a shade tolerant understory species.

It was a similar experience at our second site visit.  They brought us to a well-stocked, robust, natural-looking forest though it was only a 1/3 acre parcel.  While I could appreciate the management planning that has gone into the parcel, I was more actively drawn to the hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) copse that bordered it to the south.  The hornbeam copse was relatively poorly stocked with wide spacing between stools - perhaps 12-15’ - and seemed like it was just too small and inconsistent a property to be properly managed with a regular coppice rotation - at least given the fact that fuelwood was the only product they seemed to be looking to produce.  We talked a bit more about the mixed stand we were there visiting and then made our way to a nearby cafe for a group coffee break.

Here I learned about the complexities of private property ownership in Croatia.  After World War II, the communist government made it illegal for individuals to own property larger than 5 hectares in size.  They nationalized these seized parcels, and as a result, Croatian woodlands were dramatically fragmented.  This legacy provides land use planners considerable challenge as they work to develop cohesive plans for the innumerable tiny private woodlots scattered about the countryside.  In reality, they typically treat private woodlands as part of larger complexes, making more sweeping planning recommendations despite the fact that the realities of each site and the needs of the clients are very much unique.  Unfortunately this is the best they can do do with their available budget and personnel.

From here, we traveled another 20 kilometers or so to the town of Lepoglava, known largely because of the prison housed within the community.  The relatively modern prison has a far deeper history though.  Actually it’s located partly within a building in which 14th century monks established the first high school in the town.  At that point, the walls were made with willow wattle and daub.  We climbed up the hillside where we snaked in between compact private landholdings, most of them filled with parallel rows of grape trellis’.  Typically the villages lived at lower elevations but owned small vineyards and woodlots at these higher slopes - as mentioned earlier - south facing slopes were given up to vineyards and the north facing slopes reserved for woodlots.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about my experience in the Czech Republic, many of the vineyard rows were oriented running up and down the hillside (perpendicular to the contour).  Recently, my friend Edmund Brown wrote me with some insight as to why this is.  His brother and sister-in-law Garrth and Alanna spent time working on a farm along the French/Swiss border where they were told that orienting the rows vertically like this on south facing slopes provided both sides of the vine with equal access to sunlight, thereby encouraging more even fruit ripening.  Since then, I’ve had this corroborated by grape growers in Greece as well.  When I asked what they’d do on east or west facing slopes, Greek wineman Stefanos simply replied - ‘Don’t plant grapes’ (well, to paraphrase him at least).  Obviously this pattern won’t achieve the desired effects in all circumstances, but it definitely makes sense on south facing slopes, despite the way it accelerates erosion and soil loss.  (Apparently Garth and Alanna were told that people would historically bucket eroded soil back upslope to compensate for losses during the season.)

Amidst these parcels, we parked the car and started to explore the woodlands on foot.  To be completely honest, most of them were in pretty poor shape.  It appeared as if most of them were being aggressively thinned, most likely as a source of fuelwood.  This isn’t a problem in and of itself - in fact it could actually help to increase the productivity of individual stools overall.  The problem I saw was that the narrow parcels didn’t receive very good incoming solar energy and different management patterns made it difficult to maintain a more standardized treatment.  One particular chestnut stand we visited featured stools with 1-2” diameter stems that were very crooked and useless for little but fuelwood.  The stubs remaining after individual stems were cut had been aggressively hacked at with an axe leaving a very ragged wound that looked quite susceptible to invasion by decay organisms.  The stools were irregularly spaced with large gaps between one another. 

We looked at another few stands and saw similar patterns though this one had been the lowest quality by far.  It’s difficult to tell how accurate a representation this was of the state of private woodlands in the area but it did provide me with several useful insights - mainly that the small size of these parcels, their orientation on slopes, people’s steady need for materials and relatively crude management had created strained coppice stands that appear to be stressed and largely unproductive.  I don’t say this to be overly critical as I don’t truly understand the social, economic and ecological context for these systems.  These observations do help me see why forest practitioners seem to have a negative view of coppice and aim instead to steer the system towards a more dynamic, uneven aged, high forest structure.

On the other hand, I could see how, especially on this scale, coppice systems would be much better suited to provide useful materials for individuals, families and villages in their concentrated production, utilitarian form and intensive yield.  In my mind I came to recognize how coppice has been, and will likely continue to be a management system ‘of the people’.  And it’s with this in mind that I see it most relevant to a locally-based, energy producing, post-petroleum culture of the future.

From here, we headed back through the town to a nearby village where our hosts had arranged lunch for us at a local family-owned restaurant.  This proved to be a unique treat in that the restaurant isn’t always open - you need to phone ahead during the daytime.  What this means is that they opened up the restaurant just for us and we sat down to a tremendous meal.  Starting off with Rackia - the regional term for locally made schnapps (made either from grapes or plums) and followed by white wine, we enjoyed a multi-course meal - punctuated by multiple cigarette breaks at appropriate stopping points by our smoker comrades.  Thoroughly stuffed, we made room for a desert dish that easily could have been an entire entree - a 15” pizza-like pastry dish that put us all over the top.  We grunted and groaned as we left the restaurant and got into the car and the car seemed to do the same as we drove away.

Miljenko invited us all over to his house to sample his award winning wine made from grapes he harvests in his vineyard uphill.  After several red and white samples drawn off from a couple of 500 liter stainless steel tanks, we said goodbye, returned to the office, where we dropped off Goran and headed back to Zagreb.  Stjepan and I had a lot to discuss on the way back.  Honestly, he had not had all that much exposure to coppice prior to my arrival.  His superior at the Research Institute had actually done most of the work planning our site visits.  In forestry school today, they more or less write off coppice as an antiquated management system and actively promote the high art of silviculture as it relates to uneven aged high forest management.  This isn’t to say that this management system doesn’t have its significant strengths but it does imply something of a bias against the simplicity of a rotational forestry based on the production of small diameter polewood.

Knowing full well that private landowners will likely continue to coppice their woodlands well into the future, Stjepan recognized a need to provide them with some type of manual to help guide their decision making.  We discussed the possibility of publishing our book in Croatian and other eastern European languages as well as the potential to create a series of simple, informative extension-style pamphlets covering a wide range of subjects that we could share with private landowners.  While our book would likely be very valuable to private landowners in Croatia, the depth and scope may be a bit beyond their available time and interest and so something more concise and geared specifically towards their needs and circumstances may well prove appropriate.  It was great to already begin to start planning future collaborative projects and also look for ways to translate our insights and experiences so that they are useful to a wider audience.

Stjepan and I returned to Zagreb and checked on the travel details for me to make my way to Sofia, Bulgaria on Sunday.  It would be a long journey done in two segments - midnight Saturday until 7am Sunday to get to Belgrade Serbia and then 7:30am until 7pm Belgrade to Sofia.  At least there was train service and it wasn’t too complicated.

We dropped into a nearby ‘coffee bar’ for a few drinks and a few hours later headed back home.  Having yet to ‘go out’ in Zagreb, I found out that a local bar hosted an ‘open jazz jam’ so I crossed town around 9:30 to check it out.  Housed in a stone walled, cave like, vaulted basement space full of character, I arrived to a lively scene and a packed room.  It seemed to be a pretty international crowd with English resounding as a common means of communication.  A few minutes after ordering a beer the music resumed, and I soon found my toes tapping away to some solid instrumental jazz and funk.  The musicians rotated somewhat, taking turns on guitars, keyboards and drums.  It was entertaining and definitely the type of cultural outing I’d been in need of.  Unfortunately, just before 11, they bid us goodnight and packed up their gear.  I stepped out into the cool night air and caught a trolley bus back home.

I met Stjepan outside my hostel just after 8am.  He’d been able to secure the company car for our day trip to the city and region called Varazdin where we were to meet with two fine forestry consultants who work for the European Forest Institute and provide consulting services to private forest owners in this region.

It took us about an hour to reach Varazdin in the eastern part of the Croatian ‘panhandle’.  Along the way, Stjpean shared some of the unique qualities of this region - namely the dominance of private forest land (70% private vs. 30% state owned).  As is the case for many parts of south east Europe, the average private landholding is very small, totaling about 1 hectare (2.6 acres).  And because of the fragmented nature of the landscape due to land inheritance tradition, the average plot size is just 1/3 of a hectare.  Varazdin has the highest population density in the country and possesses a sizable mountain range.  Typically people occupy elevations up to 300-400 meters, which is generally characterized by oak and chestnut forests.  

Many people maintain small vineyards here - often plots are located up in the mountains/hills where they have a small cabin that they visit on weekends.  The typical settlement pattern features homes and agricultural fields on the lower slopes and bottomlands, vineyards on the south facing slopes and woodlots on slopes facing north.  Most of the wood produced in these private woodlots either goes for some type of agricultural use - garden sticks/fence posts/vineyard use - or fuel.  Today even some of these needs are changing though, with more and more vineyard owners converting to concrete posts instead of oak or chestnut.  

We arrived at the forest office and headed up to the second floor where we met Miljenko Zupanic and Goran Habus - both kind men eager to share their work with interested souls.  Though it was ten or so in the morning at this point, we started things off with a welcoming warmer of local schnapps - a unexpected but welcome tradition.  I shared a bit about my intentions and interests with them, and they told me a bit more about their work and the clients they work with.  Basically, their role is to develop forest management plans for private property owners and educate them as to how to manage their land in a sustainable way.  It took me a while to realize that while Goran seemed to completely understand my English, he didn’t quite have the vocabulary to converse, so he was relatively silent unless I asked him a specific question.  

There are 41 associations of small woodland owners organized at the municipality level, and together, they have collectively established the 'Union of Croatian Forest Owners'.  There are 8 associations in Varazdin County with 30-40 members.  In Croatia, all felling on private land must be approved by the government as detailed in a forest management plan unless you only cut 5 cubic meters per hectare per year or less.  Miljenko and Goran connect with forest owners and help them develop these plans.

We headed out into the field, taking a brief tour of some of the sights their city had to offer on our way.  Our first stop was a private, mixed woodland that featured minimal coppice management.  With an uneven aged structure and a mix of conifer and broadleaf species, it was a healthy-looking, well-managed forest but didn’t really reflect my desire to connect with small scale coppice management.  Standard trees included Scots pine, wild cherry (Prunus avium), hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), black locust (Robinia).  There were a few coppice stools mixed in as well including hornbeam, locust, and chestnut - all cut on short rotation.  Hornbeam will tolerate this to a degree as it is a shade tolerant understory species.

It was a similar experience at our second site visit.  They brought us to a well-stocked, robust, natural-looking forest though it was only a 1/3 acre parcel.  While I could appreciate the management planning that has gone into the parcel, I was more actively drawn to the hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) copse that bordered it to the south.  The hornbeam copse was relatively poorly stocked with wide spacing between stools - perhaps 12-15’ - and seemed like it was just too small and inconsistent a property to be properly managed with a regular coppice rotation - at least given the fact that fuelwood was the only product they seemed to be looking to produce.  We talked a bit more about the mixed stand we were there visiting and then made our way to a nearby cafe for a group coffee break.

Here I learned about the complexities of private property ownership in Croatia.  After World War II, the communist government made it illegal for individuals to own property larger than 5 hectares in size.  They nationalized these seized parcels, and as a result, Croatian woodlands were dramatically fragmented.  This legacy provides land use planners considerable challenge as they work to develop cohesive plans for the innumerable tiny private woodlots scattered about the countryside.  In reality, they typically treat private woodlands as part of larger complexes, making more sweeping planning recommendations despite the fact that the realities of each site and the needs of the clients are very much unique.  Unfortunately this is the best they can do do with their available budget and personnel.

From here, we traveled another 20 kilometers or so to the town of Lepoglava, known largely because of the prison housed within the community.  The relatively modern prison has a far deeper history though.  Actually it’s located partly within a building in which 14th century monks established the first high school in the town.  At that point, the walls were made with willow wattle and daub.  We climbed up the hillside where we snaked in between compact private landholdings, most of them filled with parallel rows of grape trellis’.  Typically the villages lived at lower elevations but owned small vineyards and woodlots at these higher slopes - as mentioned earlier - south facing slopes were given up to vineyards and the north facing slopes reserved for woodlots.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about my experience in the Czech Republic, many of the vineyard rows were oriented running up and down the hillside (perpendicular to the contour).  Recently, my friend Edmund Brown wrote me with some insight as to why this is.  His brother and sister-in-law Garrth and Alanna spent time working on a farm along the French/Swiss border where they were told that orienting the rows vertically like this on south facing slopes provided both sides of the vine with equal access to sunlight, thereby encouraging more even fruit ripening.  Since then, I’ve had this corroborated by grape growers in Greece as well.  When I asked what they’d do on east or west facing slopes, Greek wineman Stefanos simply replied - ‘Don’t plant grapes’ (well, to paraphrase him at least).  Obviously this pattern won’t achieve the desired effects in all circumstances, but it definitely makes sense on south facing slopes, despite the way it accelerates erosion and soil loss.  (Apparently Garth and Alanna were told that people would historically bucket eroded soil back upslope to compensate for losses during the season.)

Amidst these parcels, we parked the car and started to explore the woodlands on foot.  To be completely honest, most of them were in pretty poor shape.  It appeared as if most of them were being aggressively thinned, most likely as a source of fuelwood.  This isn’t a problem in and of itself - in fact it could actually help to increase the productivity of individual stools overall.  The problem I saw was that the narrow parcels didn’t receive very good incoming solar energy and different management patterns made it difficult to maintain a more standardized treatment.  One particular chestnut stand we visited featured stools with 1-2” diameter stems that were very crooked and useless for little but fuelwood.  The stubs remaining after individual stems were cut had been aggressively hacked at with an axe leaving a very ragged wound that looked quite susceptible to invasion by decay organisms.  The stools were irregularly spaced with large gaps between one another. 

We looked at another few stands and saw similar patterns though this one had been the lowest quality by far.  It’s difficult to tell how accurate a representation this was of the state of private woodlands in the area but it did provide me with several useful insights - mainly that the small size of these parcels, their orientation on slopes, people’s steady need for materials and relatively crude management had created strained coppice stands that appear to be stressed and largely unproductive.  I don’t say this to be overly critical as I don’t truly understand the social, economic and ecological context for these systems.  These observations do help me see why forest practitioners seem to have a negative view of coppice and aim instead to steer the system towards a more dynamic, uneven aged, high forest structure.

On the other hand, I could see how, especially on this scale, coppice systems would be much better suited to provide useful materials for individuals, families and villages in their concentrated production, utilitarian form and intensive yield.  In my mind I came to recognize how coppice has been, and will likely continue to be a management system ‘of the people’.  And it’s with this in mind that I see it most relevant to a locally-based, energy producing, post-petroleum culture of the future.

From here, we headed back through the town to a nearby village where our hosts had arranged lunch for us at a local family-owned restaurant.  This proved to be a unique treat in that the restaurant isn’t always open - you need to phone ahead during the daytime.  What this means is that they opened up the restaurant just for us and we sat down to a tremendous meal.  Starting off with Rackia - the regional term for locally made schnapps (made either from grapes or plums) and followed by white wine, we enjoyed a multi-course meal - punctuated by multiple cigarette breaks at appropriate stopping points by our smoker comrades.  Thoroughly stuffed, we made room for a desert dish that easily could have been an entire entree - a 15” pizza-like pastry dish that put us all over the top.  We grunted and groaned as we left the restaurant and got into the car and the car seemed to do the same as we drove away.

Miljenko invited us all over to his house to sample his award winning wine made from grapes he harvests in his vineyard uphill.  After several red and white samples drawn off from a couple of 500 liter stainless steel tanks, we said goodbye, returned to the office, where we dropped off Goran and headed back to Zagreb.  Stjepan and I had a lot to discuss on the way back.  Honestly, he had not had all that much exposure to coppice prior to my arrival.  His superior at the Research Institute had actually done most of the work planning our site visits.  In forestry school today, they more or less write off coppice as an antiquated management system and actively promote the high art of silviculture as it relates to uneven aged high forest management.  This isn’t to say that this management system doesn’t have its significant strengths but it does imply something of a bias against the simplicity of a rotational forestry based on the production of small diameter polewood.

Knowing full well that private landowners will likely continue to coppice their woodlands well into the future, Stjepan recognized a need to provide them with some type of manual to help guide their decision making.  We discussed the possibility of publishing our book in Croatian and other eastern European languages as well as the potential to create a series of simple, informative extension-style pamphlets covering a wide range of subjects that we could share with private landowners.  While our book would likely be very valuable to private landowners in Croatia, the depth and scope may be a bit beyond their available time and interest and so something more concise and geared specifically towards their needs and circumstances may well prove appropriate.  It was great to already begin to start planning future collaborative projects and also look for ways to translate our insights and experiences so that they are useful to a wider audience.

Stjepan and I returned to Zagreb and checked on the travel details for me to make my way to Sofia, Bulgaria on Sunday.  It would be a long journey done in two segments - midnight Saturday until 7am Sunday to get to Belgrade Serbia and then 7:30am until 7pm Belgrade to Sofia.  At least there was train service and it wasn’t too complicated.

We dropped into a nearby ‘coffee bar’ for a few drinks and a few hours later headed back home.  Having yet to ‘go out’ in Zagreb, I found out that a local bar hosted an ‘open jazz jam’ so I crossed town around 9:30 to check it out.  Housed in a stone walled, cave like, vaulted basement space full of character, I arrived to a lively scene and a packed room.  It seemed to be a pretty international crowd with English resounding as a common means of communication.  A few minutes after ordering a beer the music resumed, and I soon found my toes tapping away to some solid instrumental jazz and funk.  The musicians rotated somewhat, taking turns on guitars, keyboards and drums.  It was entertaining and definitely the type of cultural outing I’d been in need of.  Unfortunately, just before 11, they bid us goodnight and packed up their gear.  I stepped out into the cool night air and caught a trolley bus back home.