Primroses, bluebells and wood anemones

I went to Standish Woods to recce the status of the bluebells which can be abundant in these ancient woodlands. Unfortunately I know that these woods have been rather ravaged by an insidious disease afflicting larches, which had been planted there in relatively recent times. The wood is owned and managed by The National Trust who rather insensitively started to cut down the larches without explaining what they were doing to the local population for whom it is a prime leisure resource. 'Ash die back' has also been a serious problem in the local area, so I was expecting the resultant damage caused by all the machinery and disposal of the wood to have had a big impact on the woodland.

The woodlands are divided into varied sections, as it has been for centuries. All ancient woodlands were managed and the divisions of the wood were mostly made using woodbanks, ditches and hedges, as well as manmade barriers, in order to organise sections that could be allowed to regrow without the uncontrolled influx of damaging animals such as deer or pigs.

When I walked into the wood today, there was as yet virtually no leaf growth on any of the trees, so that the light shone brightly on the undergrowth. The weather has been very dry recently, as well as relatively cool, but also bright under the warming spring sunshine. I immediately saw that the area where I expected carpets of bluebells to grow, as seen in my Blip from April 2014, now had many of the trees cut down, with bundles of their branches and sections of trunks lying about the ground. 

I also saw a profusion of wood anemones (Anemone nemorosa) in flower amongst the rather short and thin scattering of bluebells. So although I didn’t get to see the bluebells in all their glory, I am not worried. It is what happens with changeable seasons and the management of woodland. Trees regrow. The good thing is that the wood anemones are still there and thriving as well as bluebells. What I was most surprised about however was this patch of primulas a the top of this woodbank which demarcates the differing areas of the wood.

Regular readers of my blips, and I know they are few, will recognise my admiration for Oliver Rackham, who books I read avidly such as the much admired ‘The History of the Countryside’, and ‘Woodlands’. It was he who first introduced me to the botanical fact that wood anemones are indicators of ancient woodland, as much as bluebells once were.

The text  I have copied below is an excerpt from a short publication by Oliver Rackham, called 'Ancient woodlands: modern threats', and written in 2008. He sadly died in 2015 just a month before I was going to go on a course he was running in Suffolk.

But do have a quick look below at Numbers 4 and 5, which are particularly relevant to this photo. All three of these indicator plants which he mentions are alive and well in this picture. I was pleased to see them as I haven’t seen the primulas here before, and nowhere have I seen such a large clump of them, which shows they are well established. It seems all is not lost with our woodlands.


From 'Ancient woodlands: modern threats':
Ancient woodland tends to be characterized by the following.

1 A regime of frequent felling and regrowth, often termed ‘coppicing’. This exploits the natural property of many trees to regenerate by stump sprouts or root suckers – a property inherited from their evolutionary past, long before people invented axes.

2 Isolation is not the result of recent fragmentation (as it often is in countries other than England) but has been a feature of woodland for long enough to become an integral feature of the woodland ecosystem.

3 In England there are often many tree communities, each of a few species (limewood (Tilia), hornbeam‐wood (Carpinus), etc.), forming a mosaic within each wood‐lot (Peterken, 1993; Rackham, 1992, 2003). Eastern North America tends to have fewer tree communities each of many species. 

4 The flora contains characteristic ancient‐woodland plants, which do not easily migrate from wood to wood (e.g. Peterken & Game, 1984; Bossuyt et al., 1999; Rackham, 2006, Chapter 12) which tend to be either clonal plants (e.g. in England Anemone nemorosa) which do not often reproduce by seed, or ant‐dispersed (e.g. Melica uniflora). 

5 Besides shade‐bearing plants, there is also a large component of coppicing plants, not adapted to continuous shade, which flower in abundance every time the wood is cut down (e.g. Primula elatior) or germinate from buried seed at each felling (e.g. Euphorbia amygdaloides). (Some coppicing plants, including these two, are also ancient‐woodland plants (Rackham, 2006).) 

6 There are permanent open areas with woodland‐grassland plants.