Wellingborough Eco Group Nature Rangers
We want your saplings, the trees that have self set in random places where they either aren’t wanted or stand no chance of growing. Could you be a Nature Ranger Sapling Saver? Sarah can!
The plan is to save redundant or unwanted saplings to transplant them to places where they are wanted and can become mature trees. This is part of the More Trees Now campaign, which started in the Netherlands and has now come to the UK and Ireland. The aim is to accelerate tree planting initiatives throughout the UK to stop climate change and support biodiversity restoration.
Sarah kicked this off by dropping off 11 little trees off to us on 19th November, including one sweet chestnut and a mixture of English and Sessile Oaks. These will be plunged in at our Community Allotment Tree Nursery and redistributed from there. Here are some facts from Sarah, she says feel free to just pick out the good bits:
- The oaks are a mix of Sessile (Quercus petraea) oak and English oak (Quercus robur) also known as Pendunculate oak because the acorns hang on a stalk.
- The acorns these oaks grew from were collected by someone who was a colleague of mine at the Woodland Trust. She collected them in Woodland Trust woods and SSSI protected sites from Wales to Nottinghamshire.
- The sweet chestnut (introduced to Britain by the Romans) was picked up by me at Everdon Stubbs near Daventry – a favourite spot of families for visits at bluebell time. Everdon Stubbs (stubbs just refers to it being coppiced, like the more common name Copse) was for generations a coppiced sweet chestnut woodland.
- Coppiced just means cut down to ground level, then left to regrow for maybe 7 years or more, before cutting again. This is a fully sustainable way of producing timber, firewood etc.
- Amongst other uses, the sweet chestnut poles were used for cleft chestnut fencing. Instead of growing into the tall trees we’re familiar with, coppiced plants produce multiple stems.
- Everdon Stubbs has many of these multi-stemmed trees that are now full grown, after many years of no longer being cut.
- Sarah owns her own a very small piece of SSSI Ancient Woodland, in which she coppices the hazel. It is probably a small remnant of Rockingham Forest.
- Ancient woodland, like hers and Everdon Stubbs, has to be traced back to 1600 in old records and maps, with an uninterrupted history of being planted with trees, many pre-date 1600 by centuries.
- Only 1% of the UK land area is ancient woodland planted with native species of trees, and it is the most biodiverse habitat that we have. Think of it as the UK’s Amazon Forest, we should not be damaging it or cutting it down, any of it, ever.
So, join our Nature Rangers and be a Sapling Saver like Sarah!