2023 has been a year of ongoing development in High Wood, our ancient woodland close to Liskeard, Cornwall.
We have been planning its restoration since first taking over ownership and management of the land in 2021.
The 2022/2023 season was a big one for us, making progress on our plans to restore substantial biodiversity in this space.
Let’s take a look at this year’s progress.
Woodland restoration
Whether it’s a house, an up-cycled piece of furniture, or a woodland, to get things the way they should be - some things need to be removed, and some need to be improved.
When we inherited High Wood, the woodland was used principally to grow and produce timber for selling. And the best way to do that is to plant easy and fast-to-grow conifer trees.
While timber production is incredibly important, we feel that ancient woodlands deserve better, so we’ve been looking at gradually removing these non-native trees to allow for native restoration with the goal of returning High Wood to a temperate rainforest.
We removed some of the young conifers that were 6-7 years old last winter. In the 2023/24 winter season, we’ll remove more.
Several oaks were planted in the 1930s and are the building blocks of our woodland restoration plan. To ensure these oaks continue growing and transforming the woodland, we halo-thinned around them - meaning we release the oaks from the surrounding conifer, which increases their lifespan expectancy.
We also did a more selective and general thinning throughout the woodland. Thinning is essential for allowing light back to the ground to encourage growth. But of course, our approach to thinning is gradual, not clear-fell.
In total, 900 tonnes of conifer was removed last winter!
Not all of our energy was burned up last season removing from High Wood. We are confident that a naturally balanced woodland will come along. But we also wanted to help it out a bit. To kickstart the restoration process, we planted an additional 900 trees. All of these trees are indigenous to the UK, meaning soils, insects, animals, and other plants will all have adapted to these plants already and will be encouraged by the growth of these trees to also make High Wood their home. That is the definition of woodland restoration and greater biodiversity.
We also included scarce and very localised tree species: Devon Whitebeam and Cornish Elm.
To sum up
We are exceptionally proud of the progress in High Wood and excited by all the signs showing its redevelopment into a healthy woodland.
There is still so much for us to do in this space. By contributing to our biodiversity fund, you can help us build more biodiverse woodlands at High Wood and across all our planting sites.