The Old Man of Wytham

Autumn turns me into a part-time forager, raiding the blackberry bushes on my morning walk by Port Meadow. It brings back memories of the fields behind my childhood home, the overgrown hedges, with their bramble thickets. The fields sometimes also produced mushrooms, though these grew fewer over the years, perhaps because increasingly the grass crops… Continue reading Mellow fruitfulness

What a difference a month makes; there seems to be a much more positive feel about the country, even though all the old problems are still there. A big one for the new government is the housing question. At this point I should declare my privilege; I live in a biggish house, with a long garden,… Continue reading Green, Brown or Grey?

There are friends and colleagues who became ecologists because they were keen naturalists as children, spending a lot of their time birdwatching, collecting things, identifying plants; but I think imaginary forests shaped my liking for trees and woods as much as real ones did. I may not be the only one: at a recent conference… Continue reading Forests of Fantasy

At the end of April I had a week in Scotland to re-visit some contrasting Scottish oakwoods: Loch a Mhuillin, just south of Scourie, Drummondreach on the Black Isle and Ariundle Reserve on Loch Sunart. Loch a Mhuillin (NC1639) is billed as the most northerly oakwood in Britain: oak trees are found further north, albeit… Continue reading A trio of Scottish oakwoods

The sun usually shone in my childhood memories, except that the Met. Office records say it did not.  Similarly, one step on from the myth of the ‘noble savage’, we may imagine that prior to 1945 or 1900 or 1800 there was a period when sturdy peasants valued their trees and woods as part of… Continue reading 1066 and all that

Earlier this month I spent some time looking at Oliver Rackham’s notebooks in Corpus Christi College (Cambridge). I had seen copies of his field notes previously when Paula Keen organised some re-surveys of woods in South Wales to go with the posthumous publication of Rackham’s researches there (Rackham and Keen, 2022). So I was interested… Continue reading The particular is as important as the general

Much of my field work these days is in Wytham Woods where oak trees grow quite tall, with straight single trunks, on fertile soils, in a benign climate. However, a lot of other trees can grow well in such conditions and oaks may find themselves being overtopped by beech, ash or elm. It tends therefore… Continue reading Oakwoods at the extremes

We refer to parts of our prehistoric past as the stone ages but people depended more on wood, for fuel, for tools and weapons, as building materials. Along with and sometimes predating the iconic stone monuments were wooden circles and avenues, revealed through the surviving post holes (Noble, 2017). Stonehenge and Avebury Ring are impressive… Continue reading Wood – the unsung super-material

The Old Man’s run-up to Christmas started as usual with the British Ecological Society’s Winter Meeting, held this year in Belfast.  Prior to the meeting I got the bus out to Belvoir Park on the outskirts of the city, to see the ‘Belvoir Oak’ reputedly 500 years old and possibly the oldest oak in Northern… Continue reading A trip to Belfast

The tree and woodland cover of the pre-farming landscape (some 6,000 years ago) are a source of debate amongst ecologists: what were they like: how did they grow; what beasts roamed under their shade; what influence did the Mesolithic hunters and the mammoth-killing Palaeolithic peoples have? Mostly we rely on the interpretation of sub-fossil remains,… Continue reading Really Ancient Forests