The Old Man of Wytham

  The principles around introducing wild flowers to new sites were explored in the 1980s in relation to creating species-rich grassland from scratch or through enrichment of existing fields (Wells et al., 1981). Grassland introductions have since developed to the point where there are a wide variety of wildflower mixes available from commercial seed firms.… Continue reading Introducing wild flowers to new woods

My first visit to Oostvaardersplassen, in the Netherlands, was in 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oostvaardersplassen. At that time ideas around rewilding were still relatively novel to me and to the conservation sector in Britain generally and my colleagues and I came away excited by what we had seen (Hodder et al., 2005). I was not sure how much the reserve had changed in the meantime and whether my reaction to the place would be the same after a further fifteen years of rewilding discussions.

Conservation policy and practice usually value native species of plant over introductions: they are our particular responsibility just as Eucalypts are the Australians’ and Sequoias the Americans’. Native usually means those plants that arrived under their own steam after the last glaciation and formed part of our natural vegetation. However, while the nativeness concept seems… Continue reading Where does it come from and how long has it been here?

Most autumns when I worked for Natural England and its predecessors, I would get at least one letter, phonecall or email from a student who wanted to do a project on woodland. There was often an assumption that there was a standard survey method that would give them ‘the answer’. Some were rather put out… Continue reading “I’d like to do a woodland survey”

The conservation sector is quite used to the idea that one wood is not necessarily the same as the next; that a site in Kent will be different to one in Gwynedd. We need to remember to apply this principle to how woods change over time as well as space, right back into pre-history. Some… Continue reading Every wood has a different history

Autumn is here and the heatwave of the summer a distant memory, although in Wytham the ground is still quite dry and ponds and streams have not yet filled-up again. Time to start looking at results from the Dawkins Plots surveys, to see what they might suggest for where the Woods are going now that… Continue reading Ash Dieback in Wytham Woods

I recently attended the Native Woodland Discussion Group’s conference with this title at Perth  (http://www.nwdg.org.uk). It was a fascinating day, kicked-off by Frans Vera, talking about the role that large herbivores might have played in shaping such forests. My reflections on the day are set out below. A challenge to conservation thinking I first read… Continue reading The nature of the first forests in North-west Europe