December report

The big news this month was the heavy snowfall on the night of 18th/19th December. We set off the next day, by which time of course the snow had turned to ice and we got stuck in Slaugham and had to be pushed off the ice by kindly villagers. After a long detour around Sussex we eventually arrived via Grouse Road, silent, icebound and empty apart from a large dog fox loping along the verge. The wood was completely magical - full of deer tracks and a curious robin who somehow crept into every photo frame.

A couple of days later we took four children and three adults for a pre-Christmas bonfire and picnic in the snowy wood. Using some kindling brought from home we created a lovely small fire on the remains of a rhododendron and toasted marshmallows in temperatures just above freezing. We were back on Christmas day by which time most of the snow had gone, leaving everything bare and flattened. The inevitable ancient litter was exposed and we collected a dozen jam jars, several bottles and half an old lavvy from under the yew tree!

Sunday trip with Nick, Sue and the boys

Better than computer games - the best comment yet!

Planning

As we have got to know the wood over the summer, beautiful as it is, the issues have become clear and possible solutions have evolved.

There are two main problems, both caused by the wood's history and recent lack of management. The first is darkness and overcrowding, which suppress the ground flora. The pines are overcrowded and in need of serious thinning. Growing so close together they are not nearly as robust as 50 year- old pines should be. The forester who came on Friday thought they had probably been thinned only once, whereas a plantation of that age would normally be thinned three or four times during its lifetime. In the spaces created where the pines were blown down in the 1987 storm, the new birch wood has grown exceedingly dense and needs drastic thinning to help the struggling oak, beech and rowan seedlings.

The second problem is a lack of variation in the woodland structure, in particular a lack of understorey. The remaining pines were planted all at the same time, and are consequently all more or less the same size. The new birch wood colonised the bare ground after the 87 storm, and that too is all of an equal age and height. There are some veteran trees, but not many, and very little understorey as all the growth rushes upwards towards the light.

We have known for a while that the answer will be to create a programme of thinning and glades. Our visitors from Natural England and the High Weald project approved, and encouraged us to be bolder in our thinking. We are now considering a more radical thinning of the pines, combining this with wide sunny areas where we can encourage oak regeneration. They agreed that widening the ride was a good idea, and also creating wide paths through the wood. We had already considered small paths to link favourite features, but these would be more ambitious. They also suggested coppicing the alder wood, which is probably a project for the future.

We have already started work on the ride, taking out the overhanging birch and thinning around the oak and alder. This will take several visits over the autumn and winter, not least because there is twenty-odd years of growth to dispose of.

Rhododendron

The common purple rhododendron, Rhododendron ponticum (L.) is a roaring success in its own terms. First introduced in 1763 as a decorative plant for estates and gardens, in the following 250 years it has rampaged through the UK's lowland woods, covering large parts of Snowdonia, western Scotland, Devon and Cornwall. It is a vigorous competitor - nothing eats the shiny evergreen leaves, the dense shade prevents anything growing underneath and the big purple flowers throw out millions of seeds every summer. Eventually dense thickets form. DNA analysis has shown that R. ponticum is a native of Portugal and Southern Spain, which makes sense as Conrad Loddiges, the original importer, had the seed sent from Gibraltar. Presumably its growth in hotter countries is checked by lack of rain - which might explain why it does so well here.

In Old Copse there are fewer than a dozen small patches of rhododendron, some small clumps in the birch on the east side of the ride, and two bigger ones in the SSSI down by the water. On the last weekend on September we had a go at rhododendron bashing. The Forestry Commission website is full of suggestions on how to tackle it, and we decided on the low tech method of hacking it down, applying herbicide to the stumps and piling up the old leaves and branches for burning later. We destroyed four of the biggest clumps in the birch wood, and at the same time chopped away at the thinner scrubby birch to widen the resulting cleared patches. The rhododendron has  colonised any sunny patch, so possibly the current dense birch growth has inhibited it from spreading further. As we thin out the woods, we will have to be vigilant to make sure we haul out any upstart seedlings which will otherwise flourish in the newly cleared areas.

New owners

On 16th July 2009 we became proud owners of 15 acres * of woodland - Old Copse in West Sussex. Old Copse is a lovely piece of ancient woodland running between a minor road and the edge of an old Hammer Pond created for the medieval iron industry. The land slopes down towards the water which shines through the trees. Roughly a third of the area is covered with a Scots pine plantation which is nearing maturity. The pines have been removed in the other two thirds - probably 10-15 years ago, and a new wood has grown up - mainly birch, with some beech, oak,  and rowan.  We are determined to manage our wood for conservation and diversity, and we hope that Sarah's Msc in Environmental Assessment and Management will come in useful . We certainly plan to learn a lot  and at the same time have a lot of fun.

 *P.S. We were fortunate to be able to acquire a further , neighbouring 15 acres  in late 2012