South Lodge

Each part of the site appears to be doing equally well here, with a survival rate of 82% thanks to our recent restock. The original survivors have grown wonderfully, and the majority of the restock are taking nicely too. Many of the older trees are growing out of the top of the guards, and when we looked inside the guards the others looked very healthy. Fortunately, the trees have not faced much competition from grass and weeds. Some guards had fallen over, so our surveyor did some quick maintenance to fix them.

We were pleased to see lots of self-seeded oaks appearing around the site, as these are likely to be hardy and should withstand weather conditions that planted saplings can find challenging.

Two corporate teams from AMO Consultancy and TML Partners joined us to help us plant 500 trees to replace trees we had lost. They worked incredibly hard and thanks to a little friendly rivallry they got the work done in short order, leaving us time in the afternoon to tidy up some of the long grass from inside existing guards.

In addition to the saplings we planted, we found another 100+ self-seeded oaks which we protected with stakes and guards. They were all heavily browsed by deer and looked more like short shrubs than oak trees. Now these struggling oak saplings are guarded and will be able to thrive as part of our woodland.

Of the original 1,500 planted, we recorded a 56.5% survival rate. With 500 replanted and 100 naturally occurring that brings us back to 1,250, which is a cracking result!

South Lodge had a rough start, with a survival rate of 56% by our first survey.

The landowner reported that of the 1,075 trees initially planted, we suffered 488 losses, giving a survival rate of 54.6%. Angus popped back to double check their numbers and recorded a similar result at 56.4%.

Early maintenance issues were identified, including cardboard guards that had completely fallen apart (and some even being eaten by deer). These guards were later replaced with the plastic recyclable guards, which we don’t like using but are forced to as the alternatives do not work at all.

Despite the establishment challenges, the site is already showing encouraging ecological activity. Observations included butterflies, bees, ladybirds, European hornets and a range of aquatic insects, indicating developing habitat value.

The planting area sits adjacent to ancient woodland, so open space has been retained along the boundary to support natural regeneration.

In March 2023 we visited South Lodge Hotel with a large group of volunteers, mainly clients of Ecologi who funded this project, as well as staff from the hotel itself. Some stayed overnight at the hotel and helped us on both days. In total we planted 1510 new trees. The hotel provided an excellent lunch, and we had the pleasure of Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, coming to see our work and give a speech.

In order to link up some pre-existing woodland in the area, we planted alder, aspen and willow in wetter areas, with oak and beech planted throughout. We also planted shrubs around the edges of the planting and around glade edges and clearings. We made sure to include blackthorn in the planting mix– the brown hairstreak caterpillar’s food-plant – in an attempt to attract this rare species.

Trees were planted as bare rooted 40-60cm whips in clusters of the same species, randomly spaced. and were protected with 1.2m stakes, and cardboard guards. Shrubs were protected with 75cm shrub guards and stakes. Random gaps were left to provide open areas in the woodland.

A big thank you to everyone who came out over the weekend. We had around 70 volunteers in all and some great work was carried out by all. Everyone had a lot of fun, and we even managed to finish early!