Mildmay Oaks, Hartley Wintney

[Adam M]

Hi,

One of my sites is the Hartley Wintney Commons in north Hampshire. They were planted in response to a request for landowners to plant oak for ship building, after the Battle of Trafalgar. Consequently they are not especially old, dating back to the early 1800's. They were planted in a regimented, plantation fashion in straight rows, across common land around the village. It appears they have the same genetic background and it seems as though this was quite poor as there is a high failure rate among them. There is little else on these commons, they are basically a monoculture. There has been some replacement planting although this is from acorns gathered on site, consequently I do not hold out much hope of this being successful.

 

I've purposely spent very little time here so far as I envisaged carrying out a comprehensive survey this summer. From my view so far, it is apparent that while there is a high failure rate, this is allowing the formation of a substantial veteran population. The commons are subject to high levels of foot traffic in places, with established desire lines criss-crossing between a church, a primary school amongst other features.

 

The purpose of my survey will be to make an attempt at risk-zoning the site then to do as little as possible safety works as possible. All trees will be mapped and numbered, including missing trees. Crown spread and DBH on every tree. I'm going to try and identify the trees with the highest veteran value and carry out more in depth surveys on these. There's plenty of hollow stems, big lumps of deadwood, decay, bats, woodpeckers, inverts, retrenching trees and more. By themselves they would barely register on anyones radar but the amount on this site make it quite interesting.

 

One of the striking features of this site is the regimented plantings but the problem is that in 100-200 years, this feature will be lost. Should the site be managed into the ground or should replanting occur? I look at it like an avenue planting, and having looked at other organisations approaches to avenue management, I think this will be beyond tricky.

 

Does anyone know of similar oak plantings? How are they managed? Any works beyond essential safety works would be highly controversial with the locals so would need to be well reasoned, researched and presented. For instance, some of the better trees would really benefit from being released from their competitors but this would make a big dent in landscape. This is going to be a long-term project resulting in a long term plan. I'm looking forward to carrying out the preliminary investigation this summer. I'll update this thread with pics and any notes of interest.

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

maybe as it appears to be going past timber values try promoting it as an early veteran future ancient Oak site, you could even put this to the ATF crew and see if they could offer better advice.

 

Recruitment into the landscape of new ancient/veteran trees is now critical.

[Adam M]

maybe as it appears to be going past timber values try promoting it as an early veteran future ancient Oak site, you could even put this to the ATF crew and see if they could offer better advice.

 

Recruitment into the landscape of new ancient/veteran trees is now critical.

 

Yeah I was going to approach them once I have a better appreciation of what is there