Say my name

When I was at Knepp, I asked their excellent tree guy about the red marks I regularly see on oaks. He expressed utter non-comprehension, just like the Woodland Trust people I asked. To be fair, I didn't see many at Knepp - maybe just a couple of the myriad oaks had these marks.

Howevere, - lo! and behold! - as soon as I am back in Northamptonshire, walking through a village and park I have visited just once before, there they were.

This one was so high up that it certainly was not caused by an animal.

Astonishingly, this tree, which was very large, was only planted in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of George V. Just 110? That dramatically decreases my age guesses for the trees at the Reserve. Maybe Kairos is only 150. Maybe the Oldest Oak is only 300. Mind you, this one was on a village green in good light.... It may have been in better soil for a tree than secondary woodland. I don't know.

Yesterday, I attended a talk on the state of British woodlands. It's not an entirely happy story. The biggest issues seem to be not enough structure (meaning the lack of megafauna or humans felling some trees to open glades etc) and excessive deer and grey squirrel damage.

I am somewhat ambivalent about the squirrels, as I think that sufficient regeneration would lessen the impact of their bark stripping. The problem really comes down to the lack of regeneration and that is even more complex, in my view, than numbers of deer. Oaks only grow in good light, so they can't grow in closed canopy woodland. They grow in the glades and sides of rides. Problem is, when humans do create glades or rides, they want them to stay in the same places. This is counter-productive. The woodland is a tide that flows out and then returns in to fill up places that have been cleared by megafauna/felling. You can't, as that ash said to me three or four years ago, fence it in.