Wealden Times | WT192 | February 2018 | Wedding supplement inside

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Jane Howard’s Fables from the Farm Britain’s trees are suffering from underplanting, over felling - and too many deer The best telly I saw over Christmas, by a country mile, was Dame Judy Dench’s documentary My Passion for Trees. “My life now is just trees,” she said, “trees and champagne.” How perfect is that? She has a secret wood at her home in Surrey where she has been planting trees for the past 30 years, and every time a friend dies she adds another tree for them. “It’s something living that goes on.” What a wonderful sentiment and the whole programme inspired me to think more carefully about the woodland at Coopers Farm. 2017 was not a good year for trees in the UK. Less than 700 hectares were planted – fewer than at any time since the Second World War. And this, hand in hand with a desire to cut down more and more of our senior trees especially in towns where they don’t ‘fit’ with 21st century urban living. Part of the problem is that we no longer understand trees in a way we once did. Thomas Hardy could identify trees in the dark by the sound the wind made blowing through their branches, but in a recent survey of 2,000 people – readers of BBC Gardeners’ World magazine, no less – only one in 50 were able to identify five varieties of tree by looking at their foliage. How sad is that? Closer to home, the situation at Coopers Farm is far from happy. We have recently joined up with about 20 “Thomas Hardy could indentify trees by the sound the wind made through their branches ” other local landowners to form a collective ‘cluster’. The idea being that flora and fauna don’t respect farm boundaries so any conservation issues are likely to be far more successful if implemented across swathes of land, rather than farm by farm. One of the most pressing issues, of concern to everyone in the cluster, is the damage being done by deer and a recent talk by the Deer Initiative Partnership – set up to promote the sustainable management of wild deer – was a real wake-up call. Six species of deer exist in the UK: red, roe and fallow deer are native species, with sika, muntjac, and Chinese water deer all introduced within the past 150 years. It is widely accepted that deer are more abundant and widespread now than at any time in the past 1,000 years, indeed there may be as many as two million of them in the UK and, without natural predators, the population just keeps on growing. What is brutally apparent is that this number of deer is putting intolerable pressure on our woodland, leading to the loss of biodiversity and the decline of certain species of fauna and flora. I was quite shocked by the data, so I set about surveying our woods to see how bad the damage was. To do this you have to walk furtively about them with a clipboard, recording indicators such as deer seen (easy: none), pellet tallies (saw lots, but were they rabbit or deer?) and then a whole raft of clues such as couches, scrapes, wallows, wracks and slots! Once you’ve mastered this vocabulary, you can record bark damage, branches snapped, brambles nibbled and the numbers of young sapling trees. And here is the scary bit. In our 10 hectares of woodland I couldn’t find a single young oak sapling. Drastic action required. As a result Father Christmas delivered 25 oak saplings, with stakes and deer guards, and I now intend to spend the next couple of months planting them round the farm. And inspired by Dame Judy’s idea of using them to remember dearly departed, Mum and Dad are in a hedge together; Auntie Mary, always a tad tricky, is on a bank on her own; and some dear university friends, all taken far too prematurely are gathered together in a clearing having a fine old time. Time will tell if it works, but in the meantime I will be keeping a very close watch on them all and making it my mission in <strong>2018</strong> to eat far more venison. Follow Jane Howard – and the farm – on Instagram @coopersfarm wealdentimes.co.uk 144
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Wealden Times | WT192 | February 2018 | Wedding supplement inside

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