Print View

This Autumn we've all been getting excited to learn about trees for our new wet woodland project.

NRN and Long Mead Foundation have entered into two new partnerships that support this project:

• International Tree Foundation (ITF) are providing some funding, a knowledge base and materials to create a new tree nursery at Long Mead Local Wildlife Site, which we'll build over time into a nursery to supply the wet woodland and other partners with a variety of native trees grown from local veteran trees. 
• The Black Poplar Project is part of the Swindon to Oxford (Sw~Ox) Nature Recovery Programme that sees us partnering with Cotswolds Rivers Trust, The National Trust, BBOWT and others to survey and propagate native black poplar; a priority species for Oxfordshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy and one of Britain's rarest trees.

Tree Nursery

Much activity over the last few weeks has been focused on collecting and preparing tree seeds, with visitors to Eynsham Apple Day, 1st Eynsham Beavers and Scouts and regulars at our Wednesday Plant Propagation group all mucking in to extract blackthorn and hawthorn seeds from berries, planting hazel and crabapple pips and collecting as much local seed as we can. 

_{Collecting tree seeds including blackthorn, hawthorn, bullace, field maple, hazel & alder from an well established countryside hedge}

_{Learning to identify trees from leaf shape and seeds.}

_{Blackthorn seeds (sloes) collected ready to be processed} 

_{NRNers bag up tree seeds to stratify over the winter}

International Tree Foundation will be supporting us through this learning process. We are one of four community tree nurseries being established across Oxfordshire. There are no longer any commercial local tree nurseries in the county. Our aim is to collect local native and naturalised tree seeds from the local area and grow them to support our environment.

Native and naturalised species are better suited to supporting local wildlife, are more resilient to our local climate conditions, and, as the seeds are collected right here on our doorstep, help reduce both costs and travel emissions.

Black Poplar

We have been collecting and propagating rare native Black poplar from cuttings for some time with great success, and already have some established saplings in the nursery from a rare local female clone (that has sadly now been indavertantly cut down and cleared).

_{NRNers propagating native black poplar from softwood cuttings}

But with support from the Sw~Ox Nature Recovery Programme we are now surveying the local area for more native trees, with the aim of building up a living library of clones in our tree nursery and wet woodland.

Conservationist Catriona Bass, local ecologist Anna Rowlands and other members of the team have been out recording and sampling across the county.

_{Native Black poplar trunks have distinctive bosses, burrs and deeply fissured bark} 

_{Surveying Black poplar at Swinford Toll Bridge}

_{As part of the surveys we record the characteristics of each tree and measure the height and girth of each specimen}

_{Measuring the height of trees using a clinometer}

_{Another indicator that a poplar may be native is the presence of galls} 

So far we have surveyed 37 trees with many more potential specimens being spotted all the time.

The good news is that although there are only 50 recorded in the whole of Oxfordshire, we suspect more have been hiding in plain sight! So far we have found 10 true natives already and we think we have 15 more, we are just waiting for the DNA results…