The Old Man of Wytham

The River Roding flowed in the small valley below our house and in winter regularly came halfway up the fields, leaving behind, a week or so later, ribbons of dried hemlock and reed, old bottles, dead fish and bits of baler twine. Those childhood scenes came back to me in the last month as I… Continue reading Floodplain forest

Oak pollen is found from about 8-9,000 years ago at Wytham and oak has remained part of this mixed woodland through to modern times though never becoming very abundant (Hone et al., 2001). Then as now it was presumably pedunculate oak, the main species present today. After the Norman Conquest (1066) the Woods were part… Continue reading The once and future oaks in Wytham

The State of Europe’s Forests has just crossed my laptop (Forest Europe, 2020) and it seems an appropriate time to look at our woods and forest in this broader context. The paucity of our woodland cover (shared with some other parts of the Atlantic seaboard – western France, Ireland, Denmark) at 13% compared to a… Continue reading Our forests in a European context – the odd one out now

Put together the plant lists from the 164 permanent plots in Wytham Woods for the five occasions that the plots have been recorded since 1974 and there are 235 species. However just 12 of them provided 47% of all the species occurrences, they make up 82% of the recorded vegetation cover and 87% of the… Continue reading What are all these species doing?

Some kids at our primary school came from Collier Row: a name commemorating sturdy Essex pitmen perhaps? Hardly; while most people today think of a collier as a miner or deliverer of coal, the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is actually a ‘maker of charcoal’. Collier Row was on the edge of Hainault… Continue reading One day, there came that way, a sooty collier…

I started thinking about this because of two comments from recent conservation discussions. In the first planting was argued to be less desirable than natural regeneration because ‘unnaturally high densities’ of trees were being planted. In the second natural regeneration was being promoted as better than planting because the much higher numbers of seedlings produced… Continue reading Natural regeneration or planting – does it matter which produces a denser stand?

Boar are rootling in the Forest of Dean, Beaver are swimming in the River Otter in Devon. Now another B, for Bison, is being considered for various conservation projects, such as in the West Blean Woods, as reported by Countryfile, the Guardian and others https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/wilderblean. Coming across large animals such as bison roaming the countryside… Continue reading Another B… Mammal Re-introduction?

We tend to focus on the more natural aspects of Wytham Woods, but quite a lot of the trees are planted or the descendents of planted trees from the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, although there is no evidence for earlier planting we cannot rule out that acorns might have been collected and dibbed into… Continue reading The plantations in Wytham Woods

Suddenly it is mid-summer’s day. Where did the spring go? I have hardly been in the woods in the last  four months which has made me realise how much I have missed the changing patterns of wild flowers. They have been part of my life from childhood, starting with the patch of celandines and cuckoo-pint… Continue reading Wild flowers in my past and present

Woods, especially ancient woodland, exist over much of the country as small patches surrounded by a totally different habitat, whether lowland farmland or upland moor. During the 1970s and 1980s it became common to compare such patches to real islands surrounded by sea and to apply island biogeography ideas to terrestrial conservation questions. The continuing… Continue reading No wood is an island