Porth Y Parc and Pocket Forests
The first planting of the season
We have a pretty full year at Stump Up For Trees, with ecological surveys in the spring, managing the trees at our nursery, monitoring how woodlands and hedgerows we’ve planted are doing, and seed collecting in the Autumn.
December, however, is always an especially exciting time for us. On Saturday, the 12th, our volunteers went to Porth Y Parc for another successful tree plant, a new wood pasture on steep bracken banks — the first of many in this upcoming season.
When our team starts working on a new project on a farm, two things are put on focus:
The first is what the farmers, the owners of the land, need to keep their farms thriving. In this case, the objectives were:
- To control the bracken on the land.
Bracken can impose many issues on farmlands— it may outcompete other plants, reducing the lands’ biodiversity; by spreading across the land, it reduces the land available to livestock; and, the compound produced by it can be toxic for the livestock. - To enhance the existing linkage between the hedgerows and the woodland.
Secondly, as an environmental charity, we seek to connect the farmers’ objectives with ours, to create projects of ecological restoration in the land of the Bannau Brycheiniog by connecting with farmers, helping them enrich and enhance their lands’ sustainability and biodiversity in a way which benefits both them and the environment.
The planting project in Porth Y Parc is a perfect example of how we work with these two core ideas, (integrating other key drivers for increased tree cover such as improved water quality and flood mitigation) as part of our consensus approach to creating local action. This often involves developing innovative ideas, such as our Pocket Forests.
What are Pocket Forests?
Inspired by the ethos of the Miyawaki method (a fantastic approach for increasing biodiversity in urban areas, but not always suitable for rural settings) and our observations of our local woods and forests; the Pocket Forest imitates the natural distribution of saplings under a parent tree in forests and woodlands where seeds are dispersed by gravity (known as barochory), for example oaks, chestnuts, beech etc.
These seeds fall close to the tree in large numbers; it’s thought that this might give future saplings a ‘home site advantage’ as well as reduce the energy costs of more complex seed dispersal mechanisms.
A host of saplings at the foot of the Oak
This creates dense circles of saplings, able to outcompete the ground vegetation and grow under the shade of the original tree, until such a time as the tree falls or they grow up through the receding canopy. This technique has great potential for growing through Bracken, both minimising the bracken growth and with saplings able to grow under the shade where it surrounds them. Overstocking like this has been shown to create greater overall survival rates within the short (100yr, short for an Oak) term, as well as significant carbon sequestration and biodiversity potential (in both living and dead wood).
We are using Pocket Forests as part of our wood pasture/low-density Coedcae approach, as this creates an incredibly diverse site, with planting spacings ranging from 5-0.1m. This has huge benefits for the range of biodiversity, stand structure and increased diversity of root structures (benefiting water quality and providing flood mitigation).
What does it look like?
To plant a Pocket Forest, we take up a big field and plant small, dense circles of trees on it, dotted throughout the field. We want to create a big, open space with small clusters of different species of trees to create a mixed mosaic of habitat!
The move from one habitat to another on the land planted creates a highly biodiverse land. The edges of each Pocket Forest create a lot of different habitats, and that is where we get the most biodiversity.
When the trees are planted, we encourage the landowners to let their cattle return to graze the land around them, to allow growth in a controlled way.
Porth Y Parc
This is exactly the reason why projects like Porth Y Parc, integrating more trees on farmland through innovative and diverse methods like using pocket forests, are so important. To increase the biodiversity of our nature, whilst also considering the people who make a living from the same land.