Oak tree in Arley Wood

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 17 Oct 2023

Arley Wood, an ancient broadleaved wood, was turned into a conifer plantation in the 1960s by the Forestry Commission, with great loss of wildlife habitat for little commercial gain. The Commission now recognises this and is gradually planting broadleaved trees. A young oak is growing among the ranks of conifers, with a birch off to the right. "For its first twenty-five years, the Forestry Commission had little direct impact on woodland; but after 1945 foresters acquired woods and treated them as if they were moorland, trying to poison or otherwise destroy the existing vegetation and to replace it by plantations, usually of conifers. This was justified by a crude kind of cost-benefit analysis... a third of our ancient woods have been the victims of this habit of thought. Successful replanting destroys not only the trees of a wood but the herbaceous plants as well, which succumb to evergreen shade or are buried by heavy leaf-litter." (Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside, Phoenix Press, 2000, pp95-96). See also Image

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