a woodland tour

I went on a guided walk around part of the woodland site at Fordham today, west of Colchester.  A swathe of arable land was donated early in the millennium to be used for woodland creation. Since then I've followed tales of its development, some early conflict between dog walkers wanting access to the whole area and the woodland manager trying to protect the new plantings from rabbits and hares, barn owl breeding success, the return of otters to the Colne, but not actually been for a walk around.  The Stour woods at Wrabness, ancient and beautiful, are easier to get to starting from here, and visually more appealing than a new wood still at the muddy field of twigs stage.  Twelve or fifteen years on, however, many of the young trees at Fordham are two or three times my height.

Quite a lot of the five hundred acres are taken up with grassland for various reasons.  Electricity lines run over the site and gas and water mains under it, and there is enough evidence of Roman activity at one end of the estate to discourage digging and tree planting, while the inhabitants of the village of Fordham which was set to be surrounded by the new wood were understandably anxious about having full sized forest trees pressed right up against their garden fences.  It's not really a problem, since grassland is good wildlife habitat in its own right, as is woodland edge.  In conservation terms you don't necessarily want five hundred unbroken acres of solid tree cover.

The area of planting we looked at first was doing pretty well, apart from the large number of dead or dying ash trees.  So far no ash on the site have recovered once they showed the first signs of ash dieback, which does not bode well for hopes that a reasonable proportion of the UK population might turn out to be resistant.  Behind the scenes in the UK, rows of thousands of ash seedlings are being grown at research stations in the hope of finding some that are proof against ash dieback, so that we can start to develop resistant strains.  Let us hope.

Over the brow of the hill was a different scene, compartments of trees planted a year later but only a quarter of the size, and full of gaps.  We were invited to hazard a guess at what might have caused the difference, but none of us came close.  According to the present operations manager, who had previously notched up thirty years of experience in commercial forestry, the secret lay in the soil.  The more successful trees were planted on what had been the less productive fields, which had frequently been left fallow when it was a farm.  The fields where the trees were struggling had been ploughed to within an inch of their lives, and had developed a plough pan, a hard layer of compacted clay that tree roots couldn't penetrate, and that on the sloping part of the field sent rainfall rushing downhill.  The trees had then been mechanically planted using a type of plough that smeared the sides of the planting rows, the resulting lines in the clay acting as mole drains so rain rushed away even faster, and cracks opened up along the rows in summer. What with the effort of trying to penetrate the solid lines created in the clay, the pressure of water running past them when it rained and the drought when it didn't, many of the trees had barely managed to grow any roots a decade after planting.  The best solution was going to be to clear the worst performing areas of the new wood, till the soil deeply to break up the plough pan, and start again.

The topic of bracken came up, though there isn't much at Fordham, and I payed attention since we have it at home in parts of the wood, from which it is advancing out into the meadow.  The best way to get rid of bracken, it turns out, is to break and bruise the new stems just before they have finished uncurling in spring.  This is what was meant by the term bracken bashing, in the days when physical damage was the way you controlled it.  The crushed bracken was said to poison itself so that after three seasons you are virtually clear of it.  I don't understand exactly how bracken would literally poison itself, and maybe the effect of bashing is simply to weaken the plant by depriving it of viable leaves over several years, but apparently bashing is about equally effective as spraying the bracken with a strong salt based treatment which is what you would use if you had the right licence for that sort of thing.  I am sure it is not available to amateurs, and even professional landscape managers are starting to look for alternatives to chemical weed controls.