Ancient English Oak 'Traditional' Pollards: How And Why скачать в хорошем качестве

Ancient English Oak 'Traditional' Pollards: How And Why

Here are some wonderful ancient oak pollards on two sites. One site has over 1000 survivors from what was pasture woodland. This doesn't mean woodland with livestock let loose in it. Although it may have started like that many centuries ago, woods do not survive long-term heavy grazing. 'Pasture woodland' actually means open grassland with pollards of different ages scattered across it and maybe scrub and some bramble. Pollarding (pasture woodland) is a way of having woody 'tree' products as well as grazing, which when these trees were started and in cycle, would have been as heavy as possible, much of the time. Grazing plus harvesting bracken, gorse and other woody material plus opportunistic hay cutting have now ceased and mean that this common is probably more 'treed' now than for centuries. The existence of pollards is an indication of a huge pressure for wood and all its uses from fuel to tanning and animal fodder to light construction - getting 10 feet up a tree to cut poles with an axe would have been physically demanding and dangerous. No NHS or insurance. No harnesses, few ropes and only knots to secure them. Axe? Saws were much rarer than now until the Industrial Revolution got well along. 10 feet up? If you cut a tree in the expectation that it will re-grow at anything less than 10 feet, your expectations will be confounded if you have cattle grazing. The branches will droop and cattle will grab them and eat along them, pulling them off, often along with neighbours on the same bolling. Cattle (whose ancestors were forest and forest edge creatures) love tree leaves and thin bark. On Epsom Common we started several sallow pollards because we were getting very rare willow regeneration in open areas and there were several rare insect species that need young willow. No regen was due to cattle eating all the natural tree regeneration except hawthorn and blackthorn (well-nibbled) unless we semi-permanently fenced off small areas which was expensive and obtrusive. The rest of the Common was closed-canopy scrub and secondary woodland, so no young willow there. We had very good plant species diversity, better than in the scrub we cleared back and which improved, even though the cattle were in during the summer - because if annuals don't set seed, they spread vegetatively and have another go next year. Insect diversity improved too. Anyway, our first willow pollards were cut as high as we could reach from the ground - about 6 feet. First year they all sprouted and the outer shoots got eaten. Second year the centre branches were growing fast and drooped and the pollards got ruined even though there was plenty of grass and all the cattle were youngsters with access to 'trees' for the first time. We also found that we would work in grazed areas in early summer while the cattle were there to clear some of the thorny bushes and gorse, plus thin out some of the oak and birch. The cattle would wander over while we were cutting and crowd 'round the cut material, eating the leaves and twigs whole. Come back next day after leaving all the downed branches and all the bark would be stripped. Much less to be put on the bonfire. No resources for a chipper or to remove the chips and chronically wet London clay + rotting wood chips = a quagmire because the chips retain even more moisture for longer. The Common we see and the neighbouring Epsom Common survived 'cos the London Clay was too wet to be worth ploughing. In fact Epsom Common was cleared and ploughed for 'dig for victory' in WW2 and basically abandoned as a bad job as soon as possible after 'victory'. The vid looks at the question of how to start new pollards (no records of how it was done) and why we should. Also why our ancestors went to the trouble to do it - they were forced into it by a pressing need for resources. The practice stopped on the Common we visit about 150 years ago, because this close to London who would cut pollards when less dangerous paying jobs in the towns and London were a walk away? Today the surviving oak pollards on the Common are all at least 300 years old and not cut for 150 years. They are a survival of an ancient agricultural practice and a wealth of now-rare wildlife (fungi, insects, bats) has come down to us with them. But if the Common was allowed to 're-wild' and go entirely to woodland, we would lose pollards through shading - maidens tend to be taller. Halo releasing is the removal of younger, taller trees from around a pollard to keep it going for longer. And saproxylic beetles, a little-understood group with hundreds of member species which depend on old trees would also go. Because though their larvae depend on dead wood (and often the fungi that live in it) but their adults require nectar. No or too few wildflowers close enough to their 'target' trees, no nectar, no adults, no eggs, no beetles. See this for modern high pollards:    • Modern High Pollards in an Old Dorset Village   Not the same at all.