Tag Archives: Carr (wetland)

Conservation, Nature Reserves

Keeping Chiswick’s Wet Woodland Wet

Sedge removed (a tuft still visible bottom right), much mud still to scoop out …

Well, it’s late November, the animals aren’t breeding, and the flowers are mostly not flowering (Rowan and Cotoneaster are honourable exceptions). So, it’s the perfect time for clearing out the Wet Woodland (Carr) to keep it looking, well, Wet, rather than getting more and more overgrown and full of leaf litter until it turns into good old ordinary dry woodland, or Mixed Temperate Forest as an ecologist would say.

Mudscooping the Wet Woodland (aka the “Mangrove Swamp”)

There’s always a debate about why we do this sort of thing. Shouldn’t we just do George Monbiot’s Rewilding thing and leave nature alone? Well, we could. Then the reserve’s pond, wet woodland, meadows, grassy banks, and demonstration flowerbed would all go through the succession to mixed woodland, and we’d have an end-to-end canopy of trees: not a bad thing you might say.

But we would lose much of the diversity of habitats and of species – no pond life, no grassland flowers or grassland butterflies, for instance. In a large enough area, that would be fine: the rivers would flood and meander, create new oxbow lakes, mudflats, and shingle banks, which would be colonized and grow up into varied ponds, wet woodland, meadows, and forest, just as you’d hope.

Muddy but Happy!

Only one small problem: you need to include a river’s catchment area and flood plain in the reserve. That’d be the whole of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and London, roughly…

So, to be practical, in an urban nature reserve you only get a small area to conserve, to allow people to visit to see and feel and smell and touch nature, and to teach children (and adults) about nature. Those are worthy aims, and they’re the raison d’etre of London Wildlife Trust. To manage that, one needs to maintain a bit of diversity of habitats and of species for people to see and learn about. And that means holding back the natural succession so that not every inch is a tree canopy, splendid as canopies are. And that means having volunteers scoop mud, mow grass, and pull out tree seedlings, all the while trying to leave enough seeds, eggs and other life-forms in place for the reserve to burst back into life at all stages of the succession.

Yes, we know George Monbiot calls all that “gardening”: but really, it’s not. We’re just creating the conditions for nature to do its own thing, or rather, a lot of its different and wonderful things.

Chaotic patterns of wet mud running into erosion gullies down the flat face of a wheelbarrow. The pattern forms within a minute of tipping mud from the barrow: different every time, but always giving the same wonderfully beautiful natural result.

Actually, one can hardly help letting nature do its thing. It does it even in the mud in a wheelbarrow!

Conservation, Nature Reserves, Wetlands

Tree-Felling, and a Drunken Picnic

This week down at the Gunnersbury Triangle I found myself faced with a rather large challenge: a willow had fallen on to another willow, which … had fallen on to a third, which had fallen right across our little ‘Mangrove Swamp’ wetland at the end of the reserve, and was overhanging the boardwalk that we had all rebuilt last winter.

Fallen Willow across Gunnersbury Triangle's 'Mangrove Swamp'
Fallen Willow across Gunnersbury Triangle’s ‘Mangrove Swamp’

I cut off all the small branches for two other volunteers to drag away for dead-hedging. Then I sliced off all the larger wood I could reach. The rest was alarmingly high up, or far too large for a bandsaw: much of it will have to wait for a chainsaw team. We held a little conference, and I realized I could cut some more by scrambling up on a fallen trunk. I sliced through a largish branch, and the cut end gradually sprang back to the vertical, ending four metres up, and posing a nice puzzle for anybody wondering how it might have been cut! We cut up and dragged away the considerable pile of bits, and I ended the day with a pleasantly clear ‘Mangrove Swamp’ area, bordered by a neat line of large horizontal willow trunks, defended by a thicket of holly which had become trapped and had regrown all around the fallen trees.

Mangrove Swamp, cleared of fallen trees
Mangrove Swamp, some hours later, cleared of fallen trees (well, mostly)

The other odd thing that happened was that the picnic meadow was utterly befouled by a filthy assortment of broken raw eggs, cotton wool pads, mashed potato from powder, pieces of raw onion and raw ginger, and nearly empty bottles of vinegar and vodka. It smelt terrible. The team picked the stuff up with gloves and a litter-picker, and we speculated how it had arrived there.

Our story is that a group of new students at the start of term held a night-time initiation ritual there en plein nature, each initiate being required to take a bite of onion, mouthful of mashed potato, shot of vodka, swig of vinegar, etc etc, and to pay a forfeit of being pelted with eggs if they flinched. Or maybe they were pelted willy-nilly, who knows. And then perhaps they tried to clean the worst of it out of their eyes with the cotton wool.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that city-dwellers make contact with nature in a myriad ways. Some go birdwatching; some microscopically study pond life; some walk or run or cycle in green and pleasant places; some hold drunken picnics. Perhaps we should value nature (and nature reserves) for its ability to support all these activities.