Episode 7 - George Peterken and woodland ecology

In this episode, we hear from George Peterken, who lives in the lower Wye Valley in Gloucestershire, and has probably done more than any other living person to protect Britain's ancient woodlands. We talk about his time with Nature Conservancy, and his time as specialist woodland ecologist there. 

Transcript

The Green Pledge Podcast from Gloucestershire Archives

Episode 7 - George Peterken and Woodland ecology 

00;00;14;04 

Christina

Welcome to the Green Pledge podcast from Gloucestershire Archives.

Meet people from across our area committed to protecting and respecting nature and the planet.

We'll be sharing stories from the past and the present, and imagining what our future could be.

In this episode, I'm talking to George Peterken, who lives in the lower Wye Valley and has probably done more than any other living person to protect Britain's ancient woodlands,

00;00;49;03 

George

I realised that the places which were rich in wildlife were the places which had been part of the landscape for many hundreds of years, not the recent shelter belts, scrub conifer plantations. They were the places which at the time we thought were inherited from the original wild wood. You know the remnants of the original wild wood brought into management as part of the British countryside. We called them ancient woodlands.

00;01;17;03 

Christina 

George began working for the Nature Conservancy in 1969, and became the senior woodland ecologist.

He started the Ancient Woodland Inventory, which was designed to maintain native woodlands in a managed condition and to give special consideration to those woods which are ancient, because biologically they're likely to be richer places. He engaged in meticulous research about the history of ancient woodlands through using local archives. George continues to be involved in woodland research, including the unique study of Lady Parkwood in the Wye Valley, ancient woodlands set aside for seven decades

George, can we begin talking about your early life? When and where were you born?

George

Well, I date from 1940. I'm a Londoner, so living out here, I'm a bit of a refugee from London, and that's deliberate. I couldn't possibly go back and live in London again. I'm definitely a countryman. My father was from the East End of London. My mother from the New Forest. And, I've clearly gravitated to my mother's interests. every one of my childhood holidays was in the New Forest. So countryside and forests and such like were always associated in my mind with good times and summer. And I can see why I sort of got fixed on them. And I've run a career based around woodlands.

00;02;49;15 

Christina 

What would those holidays be like, what kind of activities?

George

My grandparents lived in Ringwood, on the edge of the New Forest. quite a large family that which always live there and thereabouts. In my mother was one of six children, so they were quite big family gatherings when summer holidays came around. And the recreation was always either to go up into the new forests, which was easy either on the doorstep or to catch a bus and go down to the sea at Christchurch or Bournemouth, up in the New Forest, one could roam anywhere. I

Yeah, it was enchanting place to go when you alternative was London suburbs.

00;03;29;05 

Christina 

tell me a little bit about your early childhood. What kind of school did you go to a little bit about your parents?

George

My parents were conventional. I'd call them lower middle class, My father worked as a clerk for the Metropolitan Water Board. My mother, when she wasn't bringing up myself and my brother, was, a a primary school teacher.  They were very much into church life. My father was very keen on scouts and the scout group I was in, and he was one of the leaders of, was associated with the church. So life kind of revolved around that. And this was all in suburban London, Middlesex. 

I did manage to get to one of these, direct grant schools, Haberdashers Askes School in Hampstead, or at 11 plus, which is a real step up in educational terms. And I was with people who were generally pretty clever, cleverer than me, a lot of them. And, it certainly forced me to raise my standards simply to keep up. But I went through the Haberdashers School for six years,

 Christina 

The haberdashers?

George

Haberdashers was one of the company schools. It used to be a Coopers school, a merchant Navy school, a Stationers Company school, that sort of thing, academically pretty good.

Christina 

Essentially you became a woodland ecologist.  Do you think, looking back, that as a child you were particularly interested in what was going on in the woodland.

George

No, no, no, I don't think I did actually. And I've always been intrigued by that. I mean, the influence which got me into the, into ecology was essentially a schoolmaster, a very familiar story. But, a really enthusiastic schoolmaster who was a natural historian, an ecologist. He was actually, appointed as a botany master at school. And, I always associated ecology with botany and that sort of thing.

00;05;35;19

George

But, he had the brilliant notion of taking his sixth form groups to camp in the New Forest at Beaulieu Road. We went there and just simply watched birds, chased bugs, identified flowers, and generally roamed around and enjoyed ourselves whilst doing quite a lot of solid natural history. It's been written up actually. I don't know whether you know Roger Deakin in this book, Wildwood and Water Log and that sort of thing and Wildwood, there's a whole chapter on these, these, school camps in the New Forest. And I was part of that. Roger Deakin was someone I knew as a school boy, that sort of thing. Anyway, he left me with a distinct enthusiasm for ecology, which I associated with botany. So when it came to a question of what do I do next, as it were, after school, I applied for a botany degree as it happened at King's College London.

I applied there because they took people at 17 on, which was lower than most. And, I was born in October, so I had to start while I was still 17. And I didn't think waiting a whole year just because of 2 or 3 weeks of October was a very sensible idea. Anyway, I didn't fancy being called up in the Army, which was a distinct possibility around that time. Still, when I got to King's College, I discovered that botany didn't consist of ecology at all. It was all sorts of extremely boring things, like wood anatomy and, and biochemistry and the like. So I struggled a bit to get a degree, but I got a degree, and then I got, came across in the library of King's College London, the Journal of Ecology, where someone I've written an article about the bogs in the New Forest, and I realised this was someone at University College London.

00;07;31;24 

And being a rather simple, naive sort of person, I just simply got straight in touch and said, can I do a PhD with you, please? He said, yeah, if you can get funding. So I did manage to get one of the Nature Conservancy studentships that they did at the time, and he gave me a choice of studying either something to do with the woods or something to do with the bogs. I chose the woods.

Christina 

What was your research for your PhD?

George

I studied the growth and ecology of holly in the New Forest. Thing about the New Forest woods is that they got one hell of a lot of holly in them, and it manages to grow in both the deepest shade and out in the open. And to do that, it has to have quite substantial physiological adaptations to grow in 100% daylight or 2 or 3% daylight. It has to change its mode of growth and that sort of thing. And he thought this was an interesting subject to study. So I thought, well, why not? As a time passed. So I discovered the, although he was my supervisor, he rather left me to my own devices, which was a bit disorientating at first, and then very much the right thing for my temperament, as it turned out. But being left to my own devices, I started developing, different interests, to the ones which he'd asked me to study in the first place. And in particular, we were doing a study of the rate at which holly trees grow, it involved cutting a few trees down, sampling them, seeing how old they were.

00;09;08;25 

And when I started looking at these ages, I realised that these are all come up just after 1851 when Parliament passed the deer removal Act, and they actually went out and removed all the deer from the New Forest. I thought, that's interesting, these trees are simply, were a response to the sudden reduction in grazing in the New Forest. So I started studying the history of grazing in the New Forest and the age structure of the woodlands. And I did this with Colin Tubbs, who was the local Nature Conservancy member of staff, who was also interested in ecological history. And the two of us pieced together a story of how these woodlands had evolved. And, it's not a matter of sort, as it were, ecological things. It's a matter of how the farming, the free range grazing and public attitudes to woodlands had changed over the last 3 or 4 centuries and how the woods had responded to this. And I thought, this is just fascinating, that the interaction of people and woodlands was, as it were, writ there large. You could go into a wood and actually see this once you got your eye attuned to it, the ages of the trees, the shapes of the trees, the composition of the woodland and such like, and I ended up being much more interested in that kind of thing than the rate of photosynthesis of holly leaves in different light conditions.

00;10;37;21 

George

So much more research now is very heavily planned. And, you start on a project, you have a plan, you do certain things, you then reach some conclusions and then stop. And there's no, as it were, free range inquiry about it, which could take you anywhere. We had really quite deep philosophical discussions about this in the Nature Conservancy at one stage, because we had a conflict between two people in who were in sort of senior management positions, one of whom was, a computer enthusiast who thought research should be planned, And another director who is obviously the one I followed, or who said, right, what we do, we appoint people who we think we are good and interested in the subject, and we let them get on with it, if they’re any good, they'll produce a lot of interesting things. If they're no good, there's no point in directing them anyway.

I must say that's the attitude which I preferred and which has been very much downgraded in ecological research now. So I come from a philosophy of, following your nose, seeing where it leads you and making what inferences you can from what you observe.

00;12;04;11 

Christina 

Yeah, that's really interesting. Can you explain exactly what the Nature Conservancy Council is? Was that a government?

George

Yeah. The government after the Second World War was keen to restore nature in various ways. And, and there were various government reviews of wildlife in Britain and its future and its conservation and access to the countryside. Out of that was formed the Countryside Commission, the Nature Conservancy, National Nature Reserves, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty all came from the same broad trend which started in the Second World War. To me, it's kind of amazing that, people were thinking about this sort of thing while they were still trying to win the war,

The Nature Conservancy was set up to find and look after nature reserves and also to do research on the management of what I would call semi-natural woodland or semi-natural grassland and relatively wild habitats, so that they could advise anybody else who wanted to manage their land for nature. There was always this hope that more people would, the system of Sites of Special Scientific Interest was set up as well, so a lot of people, owned land which was known to be good for wildlife, but which wasn't at that point a nature reserve. This organisation became really quite influential and caused the government's attitude to pesticides, herbicides, that sort of thing to change substantially. Silent Spring was the book in America which triggered this. And I think a government is all is happy enough with an organisation which is a quango paid for by the government but not directly controlled by the government, but by committee.

00;14;09;29 

George

They're happy enough with this kind of arrangement until it gets too influential, and then they aren't. So in the early 1970s, it was split up into separate conservation and research organisations, and since I was in the woodland management section, which dealt with research and conservation more or less equal, I was, as it was, straddling an ever widening gap and had to decide which side to jump. I jumped to the conservation side because I thought doing just research as well, you can keep on doing research til your blue in the face, but if you want to have some effect on the ground, you've got to be on the conservation side of it. So I joined the Nature Conservancy Council, which was the, the conservation side of the Nature Conservancy as it was originally set up. But as one of the science specialists dealing with the woodlands who were meant to as it were maintain scientific standards of what the Nature Conservancy Council did, and that endured until 1989, when the government again started getting concerned about how influential the organisation was. And started reorganising at the same time as they were trying to devolve certain parts of government to Scotland and Wales.

00;15;40;06 

So they actually broke up the Nature Conservancy Council into English, Scottish and Welsh components with a linking body called the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. And that became for England, English Nature and then Natural England as it is now. But it kept on being reorganised and combined with other organisations. So the Welsh bit became the Countryside Council for Wales, which was then merged with the split up Forestry Commission and the Environment Agency to become Natural Resources Wales. And now the, the Natural England, which is the lineal descendant of what I worked for in England, is now very much part of the Defra and is controlled by Defra is not an independent voice. And is having has had its funds slashed around whatever it is, 30 to 40% of what it was equivalent when I was working for it. So it's now a much less effective organisation, which I take it, is exactly what the government wants. When in the 1980s, we started opposing extensive afforestation in the uplands, especially on peatlands. They was, we were seen as a brake on government, other government policies. And of course, they did their best to neutralise effectiveness. I mean now, of course, all the bogs in the north are valued for their carbon, that the plantations are being hauled out, the bogs are being rewetted, it's getting back to exactly what the Nature Conservancy Council said it should be in the early 1980s and and resisted change of.

00;17;39;27 

Christina 

It's like a source of frustration for you that.

George

Yeah, it is I mean, the same thing with hedges. Hedges were being ripped out, in the 1960s and 70s, and then later they're being paid to put them back again. I consider this to be stupid, but, at least in the long run, it's collectively stupid we were advising against this sort of thing or campaigning against it. And clearly there was going to have to be some modification of the design of the countryside and field systems and the like, but, it didn't need to be so wholesale rip out, which it was. And now we're trying to put them back again. In the case of hedges, it was simply that this made farming more efficient and the farmers had more influence in government than anybody else. In fact, I think the National Farmers Union office is right next door to the agricultural office or was any case, a lot of MPs will actually own farms. So I'm reasonably cynical about this sort of thing. But, later on, as the consequences became obvious and Nature Conservancy's voice was heard more and more along with other conservation organisations like the RSPB, of course, the balance of influence shifted and it keeps fluctuating. But, people have got more and more worried about biodiversity. I mean we were considered cranks and zealots. It was explicit those words were used, and what I would consider the right wing papers and journals, to describe our activities and our pressures.

00;19;18;01 

Christina 

Tell me about some of the places that you worked

George

As a woodland specialist, I covered the whole of Britain I drove a huge number of miles, heaven knows what my carbon budget was. By the mid 1980s I could more or less instantly if told you've got a lecture on the woods of somewhere, give a lecture on the woods of somewhere , be it Caithness and Sutherland, Cornwall, Kent, Nottinghamshire, the lot I just I was in a unique position of knowing woods more or less evenly throughout Britain. There was 1 or 2 other people now have had that opportunity to since, so I don't say that I'm unique now, but if anyone actually was, a broad brush knowledgeable about British woods all over the country, it was me. Simply because that was the job I was given, I enjoyed it, I mean, I'm a bit of a geographer at heart anyway, so it was great to see how woodlands changed geographically. I thought, I need to concentrate on something to get us a different dimension on this. So I spent a lot of time in the 1970s in central Lincolnshire, which is not the place which most people think of as a famous place for woodlands, but it's a place where there's a lot of scattered ancient woods.

00;20;51;15 

George

A lot of them have a high proportion of small leafed lime, which is a rarish British tree, native British tree in the composition, and in those woods I was very interested to test out the idea that there were plants, which, well, we call them ancient woodland indicators. This takes a bit of background to explain that, but, when I started in nature conservation of woodlands as a professional woodland person in 1969, we were trying to work out a way of selecting the best woods in Britain as a representative of the whole. It was called the Nature Conservation Review. It was a big, big effort at the time. And this tension I'd told you about, about the different approaches to conservation and research, impacted on that. One group wanted to do some sort of random sampling of all British woods, and then some numerical analysis of the variation between the woods, and come up entirely out of a computer, in effect with a list of types and select the best representative of that type. The result of that was that they came up with a really bizarre places, which no conservationists would consider worth looking at a second time. So the shelter belts, it was a I remember the wood in the Lake District, which is full of caravans.

00;22;39;23 

George

It's just the sort of places you wouldn't make nature reserves. So we had to sharpen up our thoughts as why we thought going around and judging it by the wildlife and and its general features. why that was superior. And this made me think again of the or my history interests because I realised that the places which were rich in wildlife were the places which had been part of the landscape for many hundreds of years, not the recent shelter belts, scrub and all that sort of thing, plantations, you know conifer plantations. They were the places which at the time we thought were inherited from the original wild wood. You know the remnants of the original wild wood brought into management as part of the British countryside. We called them ancient woodlands. And you may have heard the name Oliver Rackham. He and I were contemporaries, but he, he and I were jointly interested in all these of things. We were both interested in this tie between history and ecology and what it signified. Now, if you wanted to find a rare plant, rare woodland plant, the first thing you would do is look at the first Ordnance Survey maps and see if the woods you were thinking of looking in was on it. If it was, it might well be a wood, which was a medieval wood which had survived in the landscape, and it would be worth a search. If it wasn't you might just as well not go. And I wanted to test this whole idea in Lincolnshire by studying the history of the woods, and also surveying the flora, and seeing where there was a correlation.

00;24;23;19 

George

And I studied the history of all the woods, even the scrappy little corner plantations, fox culverts and the like. And Lincolnshire happened to be very good because the Record Office was excellent, and the survival of records from the Middle Ages was substantial. There was a lot of monastic ownership in the Middle Ages, and they really looked after their woods and that sort of thing and left records. So there's a lot to work on. And it was because of that that I chose Lincolnshire to do an in-depth study, which sort of, as it were complemented my wide and shallow knowledge of British woodlands.

00;25;03;07 

Christina 

What my ears are picking up now because you used archive.

George

I spent a lot of time in record office. I waded through calendars of Inquisition's post mortem and great detail for days and days, I've had trouble justifying this to people who thought I was doing scientific research. And I was doing research, obviously. But you have to use historical sources sometimes. We tried to crystallise this when I worked at Monks Wood. There were several of us who were keen on this element of combining history with ecology and applying it to conservation ideas and priorities, and we formed the informal group of people called the Historical Ecology Discussion Group, up to 60 or so people at some of these meetings. In the end that it would be kind of subject would be what ecological information can you get out of 19th century Ordnance Survey maps? And we bring in someone like Brian Harley, who was the authority on the Ordnance Survey and its techniques and limitations and methodology and so on. And we would have, someone who studied English place names that derivation. What ecological information can we derive from place names and their changes? How reliable is it? What does it indicate? If you have a wood called Holly Wood, does that mean holly abundant or was the only holly tree for miles around that sort of thing? here was a bunch of ecologists listening to people with architectural history,

00;26;39;29 

George

documentary expertise, cartographic expertise. We had the archaeologists, they were really interesting occasions.

Christina 

was taking that approach. Was it kind of quite revolutionary?

George

yeah. It was. I mean, almost nothing is new under the sun, but, it was certainly a new direction. And, it was obviously violently opposed to the other general direction of increasing quantification, statistical analysis. And, also quite contrary to the developing method of funding and doing research, which is to plan ahead, as I was talking about earlier it was almost like a sort of rebel clique in the way. But it got results, partly because some it had considerable meaning for the distribution. I mean, I could tell you the history of a habitat. And so when you've got a habitat in front of you like a wood how should you manage it in future? It's always useful to know what it's managed to withstand or come through in the past, because it's developing. It's part of a history.

00;27;52;12 

George

that was very useful. It's not a purely mechanical exercise. Also, you got a very clear idea of the influence of people on this, and that was quite salutary because scientific ecologists were always interested in the natural or the natural processes, soils, climate, that kind of thing. And that same influences. Whereas in fact, if you look around anywhere and ask, what is it that influenced the development of its current condition? It's a mixture of these natural processes and people's influence. And we were studying the people's influence side of it as much as anything else. They’re both important.

Christina 

Can you explain a little bit more to me about ancient woodland indicators?

George

I called them ancient woodland indicators because I was studying - could you walk into a wood and if you saw plant A, B and C, that therefore was a medieval wood which had survived to the modern landscape

Christina 

What kind of plants would it be

George

That's the catch. I could give you a list for Central Lincolnshire. It would include plants like wood anemone. It would include dogs mercury, that kind of thing. Fairly common widespread plants. And individually they tell you something, but collectively those it will reinforce each other. If you get a lot of these species which are strongly associated with ancient woodlands, then it builds the case as it reinforces, it gets beyond reasonable doubt. However, species change according to climate and soil. So if I come here and apply the Lincolnshire list, I developed, I will come up with some bizarrely wrong results. so it requires far more interpretation than on the face of it it might seem. I mean, once we started, promoting these ideas, we had land use historians going out and surveying dogs mercury in hedges, which I thought was rather nice because dogs mercury doesn't spread very fast. And if you find find it in a hedge out in the countryside, especially in the English lowlands, there's a chance a hedge is actually an old woodland boundary where the woodland has been cleared away and in other words, a relic of a woodland.

00;30;23;06 

George

I've actually gone reasonably cool on the concept of an ancient woodland indicator. I don't use it to indicate ancient woodlands. I if I want to know if a wood is ancient, I look up whatever historical records are available. What I learned from studying this sort of thing is the capacity of particular species to react to habitat change, which is a really useful thing to know if you're trying to conserve them. So I use it the other way round, if you see what I mean. Yeah.

Christina 

It would be nice to bring Gloucestershire into the picture. How did you end up here?

George

I first saw the Wye Valley in, it would have been, as undergraduates at King's College, you had a field course at, in the Pennines. I was at the back seat of the car, and we came down through Staunton into Monmouth, and, I thought strewth I haven't seen anything like this in Britain before. Amazingly different landscape to anything I'd seen before. And it's stuck in my mind.

 The second main project I had as a woodland specialist was to survey the woods of the proposed Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with the Wye, lower Wye Valley. No one knew much about them, but knew enough to know that there are some quite interesting woods there.

 I spent quite a bit of time in 1970, wandering all the woods. Just the ones outside here, up and down the valley, identifying which were the which are the ones we should, as it will care most about, because at that time forestry was bent on cutting them down, poisoning everything that might grow up again, and planting conifers. And we wanted to, as it were, resist this. If it was in the wood, which was important for nature conservation, or better identify and let people know which are the good woods. So they would the their efforts at the other ones. 

There was project in the Wye Gorge at near the Biblins Bridge. The woodlands there are really interesting from ecological and nature conservation standpoint. And one of them, Lady Park Wood, There's the Biblins campsite on one side and the wood they look at as they look at the river up, up above them is Lady Park Wood and that wood there was actually set aside for ecological research in 1944 which when you stop and think about it with V bombs raining down on the population at the time is really quite amazing. In 1944, Oxford academic Eustace Jones set up permanent recording plots in there. It was set up as a long term ecological study, permanently recorded to see how it developed, and it was left unmanaged. And it was a deliberate, arrangement between Oxford University and the Forestry Commission to just leave it to see how it developed as a way of contributing to our knowledge of how woodlands develop when left to themselves. 

00;33;45;24 

The 1976 great drought happened. Very hot for a dry. The leaves came off the trees in August, Anyway, this project was set off and became the Nature Conservancy responsibility, and because I was the woodland specialist became my responsibility. But because the drought killed quite a lot of big trees, the Forestry Commission thought this is a waste of timber. We must cut these down. We said, well, you can't do that because the whole purpose is to study what happens when this kind of natural event takes place. 

A lot of argy bargy. But the net result was that I got deeply involved with this project at Lady Park Wood. So that's become another strand of my local involvement in, first of all, in professional woodland ecology. And then since I've been down here, I've been basically acting as almost the reserve warden, because the Natural England haven't got the resources to look after the place.

I published a book on. Let me show you a book on the whole thing. Now.

00;34;49;04 

Christina 

Tell me a little bit about the story of Lady Park Wood

George

Lady Park Wood is a wood which historical records show has existed as woodland since the early Middle Ages. And may well be almost certainly is a remnant of the original pre Neolithic forests, of this part of the world. You can never really prove that because you can't, as it were, prove an absence that it never got cleared But, lots of it's on very steep ground and part the cliffs surrounding down to the Wye and the ground up above. It's, got a great variety of trees in it. The trees in it are a strange mixture, very distinctive for the Wye Valley. It’s large leafed lime and small leafed lime in it, with sessile oak and beech and hazel, maple. What we've learned is that natural woodland is not something which just stands the and does nothing, you know, as it were, static. It's constantly changing and it's constantly changing in response to events. 

The first major event, as far as we can discover from the records, long before I was involved, was that grey squirrels became very abundant in the mid 50s. And debarked a lot of the youngest trees and you can still see deformed trees in the woods which would be debarked by the squirrels. Then that was relatively unimportant in the development of the wood. What was really important was 1970, when elm disease arrived. And a lot of the wood lower part of the wood was actually rich in and elm. So, that was a big change when the big elms sort of basically all died within 2 or 3 years of each other. And then a few years later, in 1976, was this great drought and that had the effect of killing a lot of big beech, as well as a lot of birch, which was quite abundant in the wood. But since then, the hasn't been such an extreme drought. The beech started to recover. They spent seven years when they didn't grow at all. You couldn't detect any growth in the trees at all. And then they suddenly perked up. I mean, they got over the shock, basically. But meanwhile, the oak in the woods suddenly got less competition from the beech. And that burgeoned, grew faster, branches grew everywhere sort of thing. And meanwhile all the limes, which were fairly small in the wood at the start, were getting bigger and bigger because they were not affected by disease and they were not affected by the drought.

00;37;36;29 

George

They rode out all these disturbances. And now in in recent years, 20, 30 onwards, ash diseases arrived. Now ash like, quite like lime had ridden out all these previous disturbances. But of course this is now suffering substantially. So what you find is that this wood is although it gets described as a so the beech, oak, lime, ash, woodland, that sort of thing. What you realise is it's constantly switching from one trajectory of development to another one, This is a new way of looking at how woods developed the. I mean, if if you look at a lot of the ecology and conservation literature, from about 20th century, you'll find that there's a kind of implication. This is a beech/oak wood. This is, lime/ash wood and so on. And they're classified as such. What we know is that this is not fixed naturally. It might be fixed by management, but it's not fixed by nature.

00;38;46;19 

Christina 

In that case, is some of the lessons to be learned, that we don't need to worry as much if we have increasing drought or something like that,

George

Change is built into to woodlands naturally, you can go about stabilising it by management if you want it to be, the exact composition you first saw. Then you have to do some forestry, which is cutting down trees, which are getting too dominant or, planting or facilitating the regeneration of trees species which are suffering a bit. And if you want oak woods to stay with an oak component, you're basically going to have to do some felling. So the enough light is getting in and then plant the oaks and protect them until they're established.

00;39;39;07 

Christina

But what's the latest thinking in terms of conservancy about what's best for woodland? Would you would you say that actually allowing the woodland to do its own thing is. Superior

George

No, and this is all bound up with the current rewilding debate. By studying a wood and getting really interested in how natural woodlands perform. What it's taught me is that's not the way to manage most woodlands as nature reserves. Essentially you, if you let nature take control, you've lost your own control, which may or may not matter at all. But, it all depends on what actually happens. I mean, to take the example of Lady Park Wood, if one of the storms in 1987 and 1990, which were stand destroying strong storms, had happened to pass down the Wye Gorge, it would have flattened Lady Park Wood, it wouldn't be a big woodland. The big trees, as you see now, it would have been match wood. I mean, it really does mean if you ever saw the 1987 storm in the South east England, you see the woods which are well, like basically 200 years old, that sort of thing, and mature and stable and that sort of thing were simply levelled.

The other thing is that, much of Britain and not the Wye Valley, woodlands have been reduced to small island habitats in a sea of farmland. And that's been so for probably since before the Romans. The effect of that is that they're ecologically isolated species, which are were once able to spread slowly through woodlands and new places, adjust the climate change by slow movements. Now can't move because they can't live with pasturage or arable cultivation outside the woodlands, they’ve become isolated ecologically and also woodlands, when you actually look at them traditionally or at any time really, are not just trees covering the ground. They are lots of clearings, they’re rides, because any managed woodland has to have access, even in the upland conifer plantations, only something like 90 to 92% of the ground is covered in conifers, and quite a lot of it is actually recently cut down because they've harvested. So there's a lot more open ground temporarily. And then that open ground is a lot of the biodiversity which is associated with woodland. If the big woods were allowed to be run naturally, what would happen is that, the grassland within the woods would become covered in trees.

00;42;36;05 

George

But more than half of the wild plant species in the woods would disappear from that. wood. And because these are island habitats, and these species can't exist outside the woods, they can't exist in arable fields and the like, they would be extinct in that immediate locality. And if you suddenly realised there was a problem and cut rides and opened up the woodland again, there wouldn't be any population to come back and restore them so that, so that by allowing these woods to have a period when they were unmanaged, you actually impoverishment at the time and you permanently reduce the possibilities of them recovering because of the surrounding landscape.

So the I would advocate, that most woods in the interests of nature conservation should be managed, that is to say, trees are felled, timber is taken away, and other habitats are maintained within them. So no, I think leaving woods to run completely unmanaged is actually is suboptimal for nature conservation, which is why I'm always somewhat on the side of the foresters who, used to get badly badgered by conservationists whenever they cut a tree down.

00;43;58;04 

Christina 

before we leave, Lady Wood, what kind of biodiversity would we find there?

George

There was a rich flora, but that's very much reduced now because the wood has become it's basically covered in trees and it hasn't been opened up periodically. The Dean fungus group have surveyed it and found a very long list of species. There's a lot of bats and things which partly live in the caves in the cliff, partly live in the big trees, behind flaking bark, the butterflies are basically gone because there's no open space in the wood. Quite a lot of the plants have gone. The bryophytes, mosses and liverworts as far as we know, and there's not much work been done on these lately seem to be doing all right. Groups like, beetles, flies and the like. some of them need both old timber to sort of grub around in. But they also need nectar sources to fuel the flight of the adults. And, so I think the people who specialise in these things find there's quite a lot of interest in the wood from that point of view, but it partly depends on the managed woodland outside, because that's where the flora, the flower, the nectar sources still can be found. Natural woodland or it may be the wildlife within some has gained some has lost from this policy of letting the wood become more natural.

00;45;27;19 

Christina 

I think what you're highlighting really as well is that nothing is an island, is it?

George

The idea that you could set up a woodland where people have no influence at all, which is fundamentally what being natural is, is impossible to sustain. It's not just that there's a climate change, these or broad scale environmental changes, but as you say, that you can never exclude what's going on around.

I mean, if the Forestry Commission shoots a lot of deer and there's lots to get into this woods and so on, and, it might it's not just the function of what happens in the woods. It's a question of what happens in the landscape. If you cut down a plantation near this wood in the ordinary course of felling and harvesting timber, then the wind makes a bigger impact within the wood.

 You can't avoid that kind of thing. One of the interesting things about Lady Park Wood now is that in recent years had a collaboration between a group of professional artists and myself as an ecologist and in trying to interpret the woods in different ways. Given that my wife has an interest in landscape paintings . I got in contact with a group who'd exhibited various places whose specialism is trees and woodlands, a group of artists. They call themselves the Arborealists. So we ended up having 20 professional artists over two weekends in one year, 2017 I think it was, painting and drawing in Lady Park Wood and making a film. And this then became an exhibition in Monmouth. What impressed me was that they look at the woods in every bit of detailed way as I do, but then express their interest in quite different forms. It's not an I new idea to bring art into forestry and ecology by any means, but, I don't think there's anything quite comparable to this.

00;47;34;02 

Christina 

you feel you learnt anything?

George

The thing which was really interesting to me was the fact that they expressed conservation concerns at least as strongly as I would have done. They made me see the woodland in all sorts of different ways. But I didn't learn anything new on the ecology.

Christina 

I walk in woods every day, I live near some woods,  predominantly beech woods. I feel a very strong spiritual connection.

George

Yes. Yes.

Christina 

You never became a tree hugger.

George

I'm not that sort of person. No. I've. I've hugged an immense number of trees because I've simply put tapes around them to measure them. So I've. I've probably hugged more trees than anyone, but not not in that kind of, manner. I know that, I know this a tree of 147cm girth is is the maximum I can put my arms round.

00;48;27;23 

Christina 

George, it's been enlightening talking to you. You have done so much to advance our understanding and the way we treat ancient woodlands. What would you say is your biggest legacy?

George

I was the one who started the ancient woodland inventory. Which is very much part of forestry policy since the mid 1980s. Which is designed to maintain native woodlands in a managed condition, and give special consideration to those woods which are ancient because they're likely to be the richer places biologically. Now that applies to Gloucestershire as much as anywhere else, and one hopes it has had some benefits within Gloucestershire. But but that's nationwide. It's possibly the combination of, starting the inventory and negotiating the new forestry policy over native woodland with the Forestry Commission in the 1980s that's my main contribution to nature conservation, to be honest. I'm sure there are woods which are broadleaf now, which, wouldn't be if it hadn't been for this policy which came in in the mid 1980s, to which I had some sort of input.

Christina 

Thank you so much to George for talking to me when I was first put in touch with George. It was to interview him about the Parrish Grassland Group, which he instigated. This was the aim of raising interest in and knowledge of the grasslands on the former commons in the forest of Dean.

You can hear George talking about the importance of grasslands and of churchyards in the next episode.

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