Many wargames are enhanced by miniature woodlands as scenery. The first stage to building woodland scenery is to start building model trees. Generally these are either plastic trees or homemade trees, made of wire, lichen and flock. In contrast to other tabletop scenery  - such as scale houses, 40k bunkers or warhammer watchtowers, trees are difficult to assemble. There are, however some easy methods for making cheap model trees as well as buying realistic tabletop forests. Read more...

It's not often you meet a person who has set up an organisation just to make sure land is used more constructively.  Mark Walton, of sharedassets.org.uk, is such a person and today he told me about how he plans to change the way land is used.  He's been able to set up this new social enterprise because he has a Clore Social Fellowship, which funds and supports aspiring leaders in the social sector.  These fellowships last one year full time or two years half time, and Mark has used the freedom this gives to investigate how public, private and charitable landowners can be helped to use their land more productively.  He also has support from the Tudor Trust. Read more...

There have been various articles that comment on the decline in numbers / variety of bees and butterflies, now a recent study reported in the Journal of Applied Ecology comments on a worrying decline in the numbers of ground beetles or carabids.   Scientists at Rothamsted Research, working with the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology have found that some 70+ % of ground beetle species have shown a fall in numbers.  The scientists monitored beetle populations at many locations throughout the U.K. over a time scale of some fifteen years. They found the decline in the abundance of ground beetles was comparable to those reported for butterflies and moths. Read more...

December 2012 will see the final visit to Glede Wood by the Small Woods Association’s (SWA) social forestry project ‘Branch Out’.  Participants of ‘Branch Out’ have been successfully visiting Glede Wood since June 2011 but our association with woodlands.co.uk’s Glede Wood has been ongoing for 6 years.  Small Woods was first offered use of the wood to help train NEETs, youths “not in education, employment or training”, helping them to learn new skills, to work as a team and to then progress to further training or employment. Our ‘Branch Out’ project has been funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation and is a partnership project between the South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Mental Health Unit and the Small Woods Association.  ‘Branch Out’ aims to reduce social isolation and improve the health and wellbeing of adults from black and minority ethnic groups (BME) living across Telford and Shropshire. Read more...

Every year Tilhill produce a report on the state of the forestry market and this was just launched. What their Forest Market Report 2012 shows is that UK forestry is dominated by Scotland where about 3/4 of transactions by value take place and the market is currently very buoyant - so much so that the average selling price in 2012 was almost double the average guide price. Even for these larger conifer woodlands the price reached about £6,500 per hectare. According to the Tilhill figures the average size of woods that come to the forestry market in Scotland is 157 acres (387 acres) whereas in Wales it is much smaller at only 66 hectares (163 acres). The report calculates that over the last 10 years average forestry values have gone up steeply and have increased by almost 17% per year. Read more...