Nurture and torture

The little oak bush thing on the front page shows a "tree" who has been repeatedly "flayed". A hedge cutter goes around the Reserve To keep paths clear and these machines use horrible spinning blades that leave torn branches. But this little tree has risen again and again, only to be crudely cut back again and again. It's only managed to rise about 8 inches.

Just behind it, an ash and two oaks grow by a Scot"s pine.

These trees too are flayed, and the oak in front is in a bit of a sorry state. The ash and the other oak have their own battles to reach the light.

The difficulty for all the self-seeded trees is that it's dark under the conifers, so they grow out into the paths. Ideally, they'd grow in the paths, but then they get mown down. And as they seek the sun, they enter space which the human machines require.

Now, the idea is to gradually phase out the conifers, except for allowing some to remain for the sake of diversity - even though they would not have grown here for tens of thousands of years. It seems to me - and of course this is impossible given the need to get around the site to do work - that they should spread onto paths and new paths be created by felling the conifers. That would be a lot of work and they'd want to remove the stumps which would lead to big machines and the devastation of the soil.

What if people always went round on foot (it's a large site and tools are heavy) or on horseback!

What if people left it? That would not be ideal as with all the deer and no large creatures to push down trees or create wallows the whole site would be dense high canopy woodland with little understorey, no ground flora, and minimal biodiversity.

So, I guess the torture will have to continue.