Bracken and Bramble are no-longer my Friends

Bracken has its place in the world, the problem arises when it insists on engulfing a newly planted hedge.  Controlling it and its bramble accomplice is fraught with setbacks

Having completed 12 months of weekly blogs on wildlife and conservation activities at Wilderness Wood, I decided to take a break over the summer. You can look back at “A Year in the Wilderness” by scrolling back through the posts on this blog. Alternatively you can buy a copy of “A Year in the Wilderness by David Horne” £8 from Amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Year-Wilderness-Wildlife-Conservation-2023-2024/dp/B0D12RK4WF.

Now I am back to see what is happening in the wood both from a wildlife perspective and the conservation activities we are addressing.

Last week I decided to joined the regular conservation volunteers who meet at 10am every Wednesday. We toddled down into the lower wood and set about cutting back the understory near Hazel Grove. As the name suggests, hazel is a prominent part of this area of the wood. Our intention is to eventually remove the plantation scots pine trees over the winter months and let more light in. This will favour the growth of hazel coppice and the regeneration of native trees, especially as we will be controlling sycamore regrowth at the same time.

It is quite amazing what half a dozen well armed conservation volunteers can achieve in just 2 hours. Come and join the group if you fancy yourself as an ecowarrior intent upon saving the planet’s biodiversity.

I then spent the afternoon trench digging and pulling/pruning invasive bracken and bramble growth at Bat Park.

This week I returned to finish the job, whilst the conservation volunteers erected some deer exclusion pens back down at Hazel Grove (deer are a major problem browsing young trees - keeping them out of a 4 metre by 4 metre area enables us to compare it's vegetation with areas deer can browse).

My Bat Park thrashings could be filed under ‘self-flagellation’ since the most obvious byproduct of my exertions has to be the collection of myriad scratches and spelks (Northern English - a splinter or sliver of wood ).

I also inflicted this same experience upon a few volunteers attending our October Stewardship Saturday.

Five years ago we planted several hundred hedge saplings in Bat Park only for them to be browsed by deer, desiccated by drought and engulfed by bracken and bramble. Somehow at least 50% of them have survived.

I had thought the bracken might be our ally in all this, hiding the hedge plants from the deer and offering shade from the sun. Belatedly I have read that bracken produces a growth inhibitor, so it is no wonder most saplings are no bigger than they were five years ago. It is amazing these chemically bonsaid trees have survived at all. Choose your allies carefully!

It did come as a surprise to me that guelder rose and dog wood both seem unaffected by the experience and are now over a metre tall.

Dogwood appears to have fared well despite bracken, bramble, rabbits, drought and deer

What I have learned from my bracken research is that it does not grow in wet ground, hence my new trench. This cunning plan envisages diverting storm water, by way of my new trench, onto the roots of the nascent hedge plants, thereby addressing the issue of summer drought and hopefully discouraging the growth of wet intolerant bracken. Watch this space for progress.

As a side show we did discover several stinkhorns and their ‘eggs’ which seemed to find bracken litter perfect for development.

A stinkhorn.  The early fly gets a full English breakfast and the stinkhorn gets its spores dispersed