This is derelict hazel coppice with oak standards. There are banks on two sides with big oaks that show signs of having been cut and pleached. Top edge is a busy A road, east side is a line of trees with a ruined barbed wire fence deeply grown into the trees, no sign of a bank and much flatter ground than in the wood. Has woodland been felled in the past to create the heavily deer-grazed field beyond the derelict fence? There are a few ancient woodland indicator plants in the wood but ground flora is generally sparse and poor due to heavy shading and extreme deer browsing – the population of introduced sika hereabouts is huge.
The tree canopy here includes a lot of well-grown self-sown birch and some waiver-sized self-sown oaks. There are also older oaks including at least one coppice stool with 4 huge stems. The hazel stools are all cycling down with few stems per stool. The wood has had large numbers of oaks planted in tubes underneath the existing canopy and hazel sub-canopy in an apparent attempt to convert it to oak dominated high forest. The attempt has failed because only a few of the planted oaks are still alive and they are all very spindly and of poor form. There has been no other apparent management apart from the act of planting and there are many empty tubes still with their stakes and more just lying around the wood where they have fallen. Planting money (a grant?) has been wasted.
We are being urged to plant trees to offset the greenhouse effect. There are videos on YouTube that tell us that trees sequester carbon. They don’t but they do capture it and store it whilst they are alive. Given all the pressure to plant, why don’t we manage our existing woodlands better? We have twice the area of woodland we had at the end of World War 1, but 40% is unmanaged, we are told. Is this wood managed or unmanaged? Would this woodland be plantationised now? Or is there a better plan that would provide income for the owner, biodiversity benefits and woodland products? We look quickly at this question. We don’t look at how much the ‘better plan’ would cost or where the money might come from….. What do you think?
2 Comments
Very interesting. So if you took that woodland on as a project, where would you start? Do a few of the standards need to go to let in the light and coppice the rest? It would be interesting to see if deer fencing would even work with those pests that have fed there for generations. The time factor is so daunting especially as we grow old ourselves. Here on my homestead the realization of never seeing what I am plantng this year to come into its own is a melancholy cud chew. Yet, it is so fun. Just starting to gear up here.
I'm just getting into woodland management. I live in Surrey and would like to rejuvenate some of the 100s of acres of forgotten amenity woodland and bring the hazel back into rotation.