A number of our native plants contains toxic chemicals.  One reason that plants produce such substances is that they help protect against herbivory, i.e. being eaten by various grazing animals (these may vary from sheep, cows, horses to a variety of phytophagous (plant eating) insects).  Some white clovers (Trifolium repens), for example, contain a chemical that releases cyanide when the leaves are crushed or eaten  (under the influence of an enzyme, linamarase) - this affords some protection against being eaten by slugs and snails.   Read more...

The big butterfly count is up and running for this year.  It was launched in 2010 and has become one of the world's biggest survey of butterflies. It is a nationwide survey and is aimed at assessing the ‘health” of our environment, and that of butterfly populations.  Butterflies and moths are good indicators of biodiversity, and reflect changes in various environmental parameters. In 2014, over 44,000 people took part; they counted some 560,000 individual butterflies and day-flying moths across the UK (view the 2014 results). Read more...

Dead hedges are piles of branches and twigs arranged to form a barrier which are increasingly used as a way to dispose of the material that arises from thinning or clearing operations in woodlands. Tree surgeons call this waste material of saplings and side branches "arisings" whereas foresters tend to call it "lop and top". Using surplus branches in this way is good for wildlife - especially for small mammals and birds - because it gives them somewhere to shelter that is protected from predators and from the wind and rain. It's also good for insects: dead hedges in effect create a linear eco-pile. Recently we at woodlands.co.uk have been using dead hedging as a way of guiding the public to stay on public footpaths and to discourage people from walking across sensitive areas of a woodland. In many situations the dead hedge needs to have gaps left in it for deer paths and for managers and owners to get around the woodland. The idea is that the material in the dead hedge will rot away in ways that are good for ecosystems but this takes quite a few years as the branches are largely off the ground - it is becoming quite common to keep a dead hedge maintained by regularly putting more foliage and saplings on top. When constructing one of these barrier hedges you soon realise just how useful it is to build it very near to where the branches are, as an enormous amount of time and energy can be taken up in moving branches around your woodland. Depending on the site, the alternatives to creating a dead hedge are often unattractive - smelly bonfires, carting material off-site or leaving a forest-floor that is impenetrable by foot. Visiting a heavily used council woodland in Highgate in London recently I saw how effective dead-hedging can be in protecting areas of woodland from being trampled. Circular dead hedges were also being used to protect ponds from dogs - I saw a tightly built pile of cut branches woven between hazel posts which had created a barrier so that the tadpoles survived being persecuted by dogs - in this case labrador-German-wire-haired crossbreed. Dead hedging is also a very useful activity for volunteer groups in woodlands because the activities involved are fairly safe - hand cutting of small diameter branches and arranging these into piles. Such projects have a clear purpose but also a very visible result so volunteers feel they have achieved something useful in building a dead hedge. Brambles that have been cut can also be put on top but often the dead hedge becomes a lattice work which will be colonised by brambles that are very much alive - much depends on how much light there is and whether brambles are already established in that part of the woodland.

Coniferous plantations are found throughout the U.K.   There are some 300,000+ hectares in England, 900,000+ hectares in Scotland, and circa 106,000 hectares in Wales.   Large scale conifer planting ‘took off’ soon after the First World War.   At about this time, the woodland cover had fallen to 5% (in Britain) so the Forestry Commission was established. This had the aim of ensuring that there would be a strategic reserve of timber. Vast areas of ‘low grade’ land were pressed into service.   Areas around Thetford and Kielder were used, as were some sandy coastal sites (e.g. Holkham in Norfolk) and many large tracts in Scotland (including the use of some natural peatlands). Read more...

Visiting the Woodland Trust headquarters in Grantham, Lincolnshire, immediately gets you thinking of trees - it is surrounded by young silver birch trees and the walls are clad in wooden panels and even the reception desk is a sawlog that has been cut into planks for seasoning   The footprint of the building at Kempton Way is C-shaped, said to be in the shape of an unfurling fern enclosing a sheltered woodland garden.  Inside, about a hundred people, predominantly young, sit in open plan offices in front of their screens, avidly organising and tapping out the Woodland Trust message mostly fundraising or campaigning – the other staff are out in the field managing their estate of over 1000 woods or working with landowners. We met the chief executive, Beccy Speight, who has been at the helm for a year and is clearly immensely capable and knows woodlands inside-out - her previous job was managing a chunk of the National Trust Read more...

Anything can happen in the woods. There’s something uniquely primal and mysterious about being surrounded by ancient trees, dense undergrowth and hidden, scurrying wildlife – a sense of freedom and disorder that we’ve pretty much lost in our neatly sterile towns and parks. But how often do we actually make the effort to go into the woods, to leave the order behind and lose ourselves under the beautiful, chaotic, living canopies? How many of us even know where our nearest woodland area is? As a child growing up, the local wood was a second home, a playground and a school all in one. My friends and I would spend whole days climbing trees, jumping in the streams, building forts with fallen branches and letting our imaginations run riot. Read more...