Woodland Flowers

Our lives are generally much richer and easier than they were 100 years ago, and we should not expect people to have to go back to living as they did then. However, if we do not alter our lifestyles, we cannot avoid continued losses of habitats and species.

Looking to the future – a monument commemorating the Women’s Timber Corps.

Recent reports from the International Panel on Climate Change are clear that we are not doing enough to head off major damaging impacts from increasing global temperatures, changed rainfall patterns and rising sea levels. We, in Great Britain, should play a greater role in reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases, since we often claim to have started the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off the current rises. Reducing emissions substantially will mean changes in how we get our energy, farm the land and seas, manage water supplies, move about Great Britain (road, rail, bicycle, foot) and the world (the number of flights we take). We need to bring our consumption down and manage our waste better.

Changing how land is managed over the next few decades is a critical part of that process and is likely to involve a substantial increase in tree cover. There are places, such as peatlands, where it is not appropriate to plant trees or even encourage natural woodland regeneration. However, if we are to make any progress with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee (up to 1.5 million hectares of new woodland by 2050, increasing woodland cover from 13% to 19%), increased woodland creation rates are needed. Woodland expansion, for commercial, environmental and social reasons, has been part of successive Government strategies for forestry across Great Britain, but finding the right incentives and locations to make it happen have proved difficult. However, if recent calls for a shift to a more plant-based diet lead to large-scale reductions in livestock farming, there may be much more space potentially available for new trees and woods, and fundamental changes in our landscapes are probably unavoidable (Committee on Climate Change 2018).

How this expansion of tree cover happens, and how we manage both this new resource and our existing woods, will determine which, and how many, of our woodland species will be thriving in the landscapes of the 2050s. We must, in the short term, maintain and improve the woodland that we have through traditional management techniques such as coppicing as well as new approaches such as ground flora introductions (chapters 9, 15). At the same time, we must develop a more dynamic, expanded approach to conservation for the medium to longer term, which may involve both more and fewer interventions according to the mix of objectives that we seek to achieve in any one landscape.

Nature reserves and ancient woods will be affected by the changing environment (chapter 16) just as much as their surroundings, so need our protection and nurturing more than ever. Within them will develop the communities and assemblages best suited to future conditions. They can also be the sources from which species spread to new woods, particularly if these are developed next to an existing woodland.

Small woods (less than 5ha) are particularly vulnerable to clearance, or to the loss of tree and shrub cover over the whole site through disease, pests, exceptional droughts or storms. They generally contain fewer species than large woods and the populations of the species they do contain are limited by the size of the woodland. Making small woods bigger allows more species to survive in a patch and there can be more individuals of each species. There is also more space to include a sheltered glade or ride with the additional benefits to the flora and fauna that come from creating this new habitat in the wood (chapter 14).

For very small woods such as this, just increasing its size would improve its potential for woodland plant diversity.

Adding 2 hectares to a 2-hectare wood obviously doubles its size; adding 2 hectares to a 20-hectare wood, however, adds only an additional 10%. With increasing woodland size, each hectare added makes less difference to the number of species that the wood can contain and how big their populations can be. So, for medium-size woods (say 6–30ha) the most useful way of adding to their extent is to focus on new strips of woodland and scrub (between 20m and 100m wide) as buffers around the edges of the wood. Using the new woodland allowance in this way reduces potential nitrogen enrichment from adjacent farmland and the drying out of the ancient woodland edge (chapter 16). This new edge strip can be rapidly colonised by woodland species because all of it is in contact with the existing wood. Even slow-moving specialists stand a chance of spreading into the new area once soil and light conditions become suitable.

The relative benefits from creating buffer strips round woods decline as the wood size increases, because most of the woodland is already some distance away from the external edge. The priority for new woodland and trees is then in creating more connections and stepping stones through the countryside, in effect re-creating the sorts of treescapes that existed before the ravages of Dutch Elm Disease and farming improvements removed small woods and hedges from many landscapes. New small patches of woodland by themselves are of only limited importance as habitat for woodland specialist plants, although a surprising array of species can turn up even in small woods (chapter 15). However, small patches do benefit the ‘common’ woodland generalists, not all of which are now common in intensively farmed landscapes, and should also increase the ease with which woodland species can move through the landscape.

Most of our woods have been managed in the past (chapter 9), but a large amount (perhaps between a third and a half) of broadleaved woodland does not appear to be actively worked at present. Encouraging more woodland management, alongside forest expansion, has also been an aim in successive woodland strategies for England, Scotland and Wales, but with only limited success. The recent rise in the price of firewood has provided an incentive for some owners to fell trees again, reversing a trend towards increasing shadiness. However, if felling is not done carefully, the woodland specialist flora may be damaged, while only weedy or competitive species benefit. We need to monitor whether practices such as coppicing continue to produce the expected carpets of spring flowers now there are more deer, more nitrogen in the soils, a warming climate and more extreme weather. If not, what are the alternatives?

Most woods have been clear-felled (or coppiced) in patches from about half a hectare up to many tens of hectares, but there is increasing interest in what is termed ‘Continuous Cover Forestry’. Under this system, only individual trees or small groups are ever felled at any one time, so that there is always some canopy left to maintain shade and higher humidity at ground level. There is less disturbance to the soil surface and slower breakdown of litter after felling, and more opportunities to develop mixed age and mixed species stands. Preliminary indications from the woods in Cranborne Chase are that much of the typical woodland flora survives well under this form of management, although some of the more light-demanding species may not benefit as much as under a larger fell. Grey Squirrel control will also need to be addressed if we want woods to produce quality broadleaved timber as well as biodiversity. New woodland surveys will be needed to determine whether the initial promise of Continuous Cover Forestry is maintained as far as the woodland soils, plants and animals are concerned (chapter 2).

Continuous Cover Forestry approaches will also have a place in the restoration of the ancient woods that existed in the 1930s, and which were, by the 1980s, plantations mainly dominated by coniferous species (Spencer & Kirby 1992) as a result of previous forestry policies (chapter 18). The woodland ground flora under such crops was often reduced to a thin scatter of woebegone-looking plants. However, much of the flora can be, and is being, restored in places. When, in 2014, I visited a restoration scheme carried out in the late 1980s at Dalavich Wood in Argyll (Kirby & May 1989), it was not at all obvious which areas had been under conifer plantations in the early 80s and which not. In Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire, and Bernwood in Buckinghamshire, areas of Oak from which the Spruce nurse crop has been removed, or which were felled and replanted with broadleaves, now have similar richness to the mature Oak stands that were left alone (Kirby et al. 2017). There are still questions about the best ways to carry out restoration: when and where is it appropriate to clear-fell the conifer element all at once, or better to open out the canopy gradually by thinning (Brown et al. 2015)? The likelihood of getting a good response from the ground flora also depends on how much has managed to survive under the planted crop. However, in most circumstances any action is likely to be better than none, provided that the deer are sufficiently managed that any regeneration or sensitive ground flora will not just get immediately eaten.

Thinning of Oak as part of Continuous Cover Forestry conversion in Cranborne Chase – Bramble certainly benefits.

Restoration of broadleaved woodland following conifer removal at Bernwood Forest.

In the woods around Orielton in Pembrokeshire, deer are scarce. On my annual visit to these woods I am struck each year by the abundance of ground-creeping Ivy, herbs and ferns, and lack of grasses compared to similar woods in eastern England where deer are common (chapter 11). Similarly, on the Isle of Wight, which remained largely deer-free until recently, coppice grows rapidly in the first year after cutting without the need for fencing; herbs rather than grasses predominate in the ground flora, and most woods have a well-developed understorey.

Ungrazed ferns and Ivy in the Orielton Estate woods.

Kate Holl, a woodland ecologist with Scottish Natural Heritage, looked at ungrazed or only lightly-grazed woods from the French Pyrenees to western Norway and Iceland to get a feel for what might be missing in the heavily-grazed woods that she deals with in Scotland. Her conclusions were that Scottish woods largely lacked a ‘filling’: the tall flowering herbs actually in flower, climbing and scrambling species such as Ivy and Honeysuckle, berry-bearing shrubs, and tree regeneration. She concluded that many woods in Great Britain would benefit from a grazing-free period to allow them to recover that ‘filling’ (Holl 2017).

Deer management is not easy. The two main approaches, fencing and shooting, may be opposed by people who object to killing animals or limiting their movements. Where control is successful in bringing numbers down there are still likely to be fluctuations in the vegetation cover. For example, Bramble cover tends to increase as deer are controlled, but this makes the deer harder to shoot, so numbers build up again. Variability in vegetation structure across sites, and over time, allows for greater diversity overall at the landscape level but should not be used as an excuse for not trying to keep deer numbers down. If deer control is not acceptable or possible everywhere, some woods will continue to have a high-deer, grazed composition and structure in the future. The flora will be mainly grasses, Bracken and moss, with fewer herbs such as Dog’s Mercury and dwarf shrubs such as Bilberry. Tree regeneration is likely to be very limited, unless the deer numbers crash periodically, for example through starvation in very bad winters or as a result of a disease outbreak. Such events become more likely the larger the area being considered.

To some extent much conservation management, sometimes called conservation ‘gardening’, is only necessary because we are dealing with very small reserves. The current population of Starved Wood-sedge at Godalming, Surrey (chapter 10), is spread across about 6 square metres and so has to be managed at the microscale – the gap in the canopy immediately above it needs to be kept open; a gap 20m away is no use. If woods in the vicinity, on the right soils, were all managed as coppice then it would be possible to re-establish a series of local populations of the sedge that would come and go with the open coppice phase; micro-management of conditions around each sedge clump would no longer be necessary. If even more of the south-east were under woodland, it might not be necessary to have to coppice to create gaps for the Starved Wood-sedge because there would always be disturbed open patches, formed following wind-storms or tree deaths from disease, somewhere on suitable soils. Large-scale conservation may therefore mean that less intervention/management is needed.

Reduced intervention is being trialled in various rewilding schemes. These seek to reduce direct management, preferably in a planned way, so that natural environmental processes have more scope to shape the composition and structure of the landscape. The result should be a more resilient and sustainable form of land use that is also richer in wildlife. It is not an all-or-nothing approach, but a gradation of actions. At one extreme it could be trying to have a reserve large enough that populations of large carnivores might be reintroduced, and all human management removed from that reserve (a hypothetical case!). At the other it is letting the park grass grow up as a hay crop rather than being regularly shaved to a few centimetres high (this can be done almost anywhere).

We are starting to see what happens with rewilding in practice, if we put fewer restrictions on where animals can graze by removing fences, or allow rivers to move their channels rather than constraining them via embankments. Well-publicised projects across the country include the Knepp Estate in Sussex, Ennerdale in Cumbria and at Alladale in Sutherland. A recently established project in mid-Wales seeks to rewild an area from ‘Summit to Sea’, while a proposal to rewild native pinewoods in the Cairngorms has also received funding.

Trialling rewilding at Knepp Estate, Sussex – scrub developing on former intensive farmland.

To some, fencing and deer control to achieve regeneration are against the ethos of rewilding.

Promoters of rewilding in Great Britain generally see an increase in tree cover and woodland regeneration as one of the beneficial outcomes. The assumption is that once woodland cover has been restored there is expected to develop some sort of dynamic equilibrium between the ongoing effects of grazing and tree growth, although this might be apparent only at a large scale and over long timescales. However, James Fenton, a Scottish ecologist, argues that the open, largely treeless landscape of the Highlands maintained by deer is the natural state and that the assumption that there should be a lot more trees and woodland in the Highlands is wrong. Putting in exclosures and heavy deer culling to re-establish trees is then the antithesis of rewilding because it is managing towards a target vegetation type (woodland), rather than accepting whatever develops (open moor).

Fenton may or may not be right about upland vegetation, but in the lowlands, the prospects for tree and woodland spread in rewilded areas are much better. Trees grow faster, and there are more thorny species to give protection to saplings, allowing a cohort of regeneration to get away if there is a temporary downturn in grazing levels. This should provide opportunities for woodland plants to benefit, provided they can spread into the area and are not disrupted by cattle grazing or the rootling of pigs. The vegetation communities that develop in these new lowland wildwoods may be more like the flora of wood-pastures, grassier and with fewer massed displays of vernal flowers. This is not a ‘bad thing’, just a change in the nature of the cultural landscapes in which we live.

Woodland plants may be sheltered by developing scrub under rewilding.

As a teenager, I was a member of a traditional folk music club. We attached a special virtue to songs that had come through the ‘oral tradition’ and imagined ourselves as the inheritors of that tradition. With the naivety of youth, we roared out songs about fox-hunting, whaling, the glories of war, in the pub in the evening, while being heartily opposed to such practices during the day. In a similar way the conservation sector promotes what we call traditional management, but we cut the coppice with chainsaws, and unwanted tops are burnt or left in habitat piles for invertebrates. There is little scavenging of twigs for kindling or leaves for animal bedding. More of the nutrients in the stems stay in the wood than in the past, leading to soil enrichment (chapter 9).

We tend towards a simplified, often romantic, view of the past. We often say that there was little woodland planting before 1600, making ancient woods more ‘authentic’ than 17th-or 18th-century plantations. Yet in 1458, James II’s Scottish parliament passed a law exhorting landowners to get their tenants to plant trees and Broom. Presumably the law was not very effective, because in 1535 a somewhat stronger version was promulgated, and again in 1607 and 1661. Planting may have been more widespread before 1600, with a greater influence on the composition of our woods, than we appreciate.

Today, Wildlife Trusts cut back competing vegetation to allow orchids to flower more freely, and fence out medium to large native herbivores. Little cages may be placed over rare plants to protect them, and they are artificially pollinated to increase seed production (Marren 2005). Do such practices detract from the experience of seeing the plant, because it is less wild? I did feel something similar when I came across planted Hazel cuttings in Berriedale Wood on the Orkney island of Hoy. However, where we draw the line on what is acceptable changes over time. In the 1970s sowing wildflowers was anathema to much of the conservation movement: there is now increasing support for introducing ground flora species to new plantations. This becomes part of the ‘meaning’ of these woods in the same way that past coppice management is often part of the meaning of many ancient woods.

Where does conservation become wild gardening? Here fencing is used to protect a small orchid patch.

At present, conservation priorities often sharply distinguish native from introduced species, but that distinction is not wholly clear-cut (chapter 4) and will become more confused as climate change takes hold. Our woods are part of a broader European pattern (chapter 13), and species from further south on the Continent may find our climate in 2050 or 2080 perfectly suitable for their growth. Should we trial how these behave in combination with our existing flora in some new woodland plantings, just as foresters trial new crop trees? Conversely, if some native species start to decline, primarily as a consequence of climate change, should we shift our conservation efforts to palliative care only or explore their assisted migration to more suitable locations? We may not be at this point yet, but we need a wider discussion on how far we manage future species distributions, with decisions based on what species do, rather than on just when and how they arrived in Great Britain.

Given the extent of past woodland management, does the degree of future intervention in itself ultimately matter, provided it achieves the desired result? Concern for the ‘authentic folk voice’ did not prevent our club stalwarts enthusiastically joining in modern songs by Tom Paxton and Ewan McColl. Anyway, we may find that the traditional conservation sector no longer calls the tune.

In the 1970s, a relatively small group of scientists developed the philosophy and priorities in the Nature Conservation Review which would shape much of the next 30 years of nature conservation (Ratcliffe 1977). The relevant expertise outside the Nature Conservancy/Nature Conservancy Council was generally with individuals who were in close touch with the NC/NCC specialists.

For the next few decades woodland conservation benefited from both a strong voluntary sector and state agencies (the Forestry Commission, NCC and its current manifestations Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage). Meanwhile expertise burgeoned in the private consultancy sector. Relevant legislation expanded immensely, both through domestic efforts and also through the transposition of European regulations. Conservation initiatives became linked to a wide range of other activities including controlling pollution, water quality, people’s health and renewable energy amongst others.

It seems to me that the future for conservation may now be shifting back to local and individual activity. The efforts of the government agencies have become more diluted as their remits have broadened without concomitant staff increases (in some cases rather substantial staff reductions). Increased regulation and legislation have brought increased scrutiny and potential for legal challenge, which can put more conservation decisions into the hands of judges and inquiry inspectors. At the time of writing there is also much uncertainty about the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, for the economy, trade relationships, environmental regulation and funding. Social media have become a major means of influencing policy and practice. Defining what the countryside in 2050 might be like could be determined in part by popular demand (for example, Twitter-feed) and legal precedent.

Will conservation priorities and actions still be determined by the conservation professionals or by Twitter?

No-one predicted a storm as severe as that of 1987, and the impacts it would have on woodland in south-east England, but severe storms, periods of heavy rainfall and droughts are likely to become more common. We should expect further new tree pests and diseases, perhaps more forest fires, as well as the consequences of the changes in land use that are likely over the next 30 years. We need to increase the longer-term resilience of our woodland: that is, its ability to cope with major sudden disturbances as well as ongoing, more gradual, changes in conditions, but we must accept that there will always be much that is outside our control.

We can perhaps take heart that woods that seemed to have lost most of their interest under a conifer needle mat now show green and are becoming flower-rich. Heavily-grazed areas regrow if they are fenced. Rare species have been brought back from the brink of local extinction. We understand better now the opportunities and limitations involved in introducing woodland species to existing woods and hedges. There are exciting and ambitious countryside restoration schemes in progress.

Ideally, we should be moving towards a state where special conservation measures to sustain rich woodland ground floras are not needed because general land-use practices (including rewilding) do this as a matter of course. The conservation agencies’ role, and that of the voluntary sector, could be scaled down because they were no longer needed. We are, of course, a long way off this point!

The celandines and Lords-and-Ladies in the back garden of my childhood home disappeared in the garden makeover that happened after we left. However, each spring I am still excited to see their leaves pushing through in other hedges and woods as I jog by. Compared to the fate of flowers on farmland, woodland plants have fared reasonably well over the last 60 years and the new planting that has taken place should eventually produce more opportunities for them to spread. I am cautiously optimistic that we could reach the midpoint of this century with something like the variety of woodland plants we had 70 years ago. I look to a world where kids (of all ages) can enjoy the spectacle of a Bluebell swathe or Primrose bank, and if someone wants to pick a few, we do not need to feel concerned. The wood beneath the trees should and will continue to thrive, if we give it a chance and a hand.

As I walked out, one fine summer's morning, for to view the fields and to take the air,

Down by the banks of the sweet primroses, there I beheld a most wondrous fair.

A bank of sweet primroses.