Park Life

Years ago, when grazing stopped early in this field, we found 147 self-seeded oak trees coming up through the grass. We assume the jays had been busy planting them.

We protected almost all of the seedlings from deer and sheep with tree shelters, but later grazing proved too powerful for the tree stakes and we lost many to their use as scratching posts for hefty ewes. Thanks to grant funding from The Annandale Way, which passes by our smallholding, and the Tubney Trust, we were able to construct tree shelters for thirty of the oaks.

They are no longer seedlings. They have grown into substantial young trees and the field is beginning to look like the oak parkland we could only imagine when we first counted them.

Parkland was a particular kind of farmed landscape, with grazing animals beneath widely spaced trees. The trees provided forage and shelter from bad weather and good weather, while the land beneath remained pasture. That is what we hope this field might become—not closed woodland, but oaks and grazing animals sharing the land.

Thirty oaks hardly make an ancient woodland. But maybe one day they will be.