A bit of landscaping in my small Devon wood

When you are lucky enough to have a garden that backs on to your own little bit of woodland, it gives rise to thoughts about how one transitions into the other. Our garden is laid out to 3 sides of the house: a gently sloping area to the front looking out of the conservatory; a flat area to the side that rises up to a bank that skirts the property level with the house roof. Stone steps from the back and the side provde access to this grassed walkway and beyond is another steep bank, bordered by a deer fence with the wood lying beyond, rising steeply.
The top walkway has about 10 fruit trees (mostly apple)  set out along the front edge, staked with oak posts and trained in the espaliar technique. They fruited well in our first autumn here but the apples were sometimes difficult to get to as the trees had grown free of the careful espaliar training and branches hung over the slope towards the house. We thus lost many fruit which fell and got damaged.
A prioity job over the last week or so has been to try to rescue these trees: new posts, wires to re-train them, feeding them and some fairly aggressive pruning.

As we worked on that job we couldn't help but look more carefully at the raised bank bordering the woods behind us. Here, ash and hazel in the main, had taken hold and provided a perfect nursery for invasive bramble and ivy that was tumbling down into the garden. The brambles had thrown up 10' shoots entangling themselves in the trees. Where the bramble shoots had died off they remained in place: great thick brown-thorned things. 

The bank itself was a good 10' deep and, judging by the evidence of previous planting, was once part of the garden and not the wild thicket it had now become. For example, there are daffodils, a rhodedendron or two, a lovely but slightly overwhelmed mahonia. The deer fence marking the boundary between garden and wood has honesuckly and wild rose growing on it but these are obscured by the many self-set trees and bramble.

The access to the wood from the garden is through the hazel gate I made and wrote about earlier. Just the other side of this gate a path inclines up into the wood. The bank to the right was previously used to burn garden and other waste and was a convenient place to get rid of rubble and other building waste when the extension was built. 
Two projects presented themselves and both required hard work: clearing the bank on the garden side and replanting with insect-friendly shrubs and; on the bank just through the gate to the woods clearing and landscaping to create a positive feeling as you leave the garden and approach the woods.

I've enjoyed working with stone and have got better at the wall building with practice. I've learnt to use as many large pieces of stone as possible as this gives a sturdier appearance and they fit together better than the smaller pieces that leave an untidy appearance. Using a line is imporant to keep the wall straight and laying stones horizontally wherever possible looks good. I'll be ready to tackle the much bigger project of the retaining wall at the top boundary of the woods that has succumbed to the pressure form the beech tree roots growing above. Could be an all-day job so looking forward to getting a fire going, a pot of vegetable stew simmering and being outside with the dogs.