The Importance of Woods
Native woods are important because, as a result of geological events thousands of years ago, the mix of trees and the wildlife they support is unique to the British Isles. Tree species that have been with us for thousands of years result in a greater variety of wildlife than woods of introduced or exotic species. Ancient woods, once lost, cannot be replaced.
When Kenneth Watkins was preparing his appeal for public support the history of trees was less well researched than it is now. Nature writer Peter Marren suggests that, in the early 1970s, there was still a view that the Wildwood was “a place of great oaks, growing so close together that a squirrel could leap from coast to coast without once touching the ground”. A notion, he says, not conjured out of thin air: most of the big trees preserved in peat bogs are oaks and oak pollen is abundant in peat core samples. Ecologists at the time thought more in terms of the present than the past, and, since oak is undeniably the dominant native tree today, so, they argued, it was in yesteryear. Authorities are still more in agreement about when the Wildwood was formed than what it looked like.
For those who, like me, had not paid enough attention in their geography lessons the message in the Trust’s early brochures were an eye opener. Around 7,000 years ago, the melting ice eventually filled the straights of Dover and separated Britain from the Continent it isolated the native plants and trees that had been re-establishing themselves since the end of the last Ice Age 5,000 years before. The natural return of prehistoric species from warmer southern climates was halted. The fact that a climate change event 10,000 years ago created the unique nature of woodlands and the wonderful diversity of wildlife was news to me and as well as explaining much it would fascinate our supporters.