Creating new wildlife habitats

 16th October 2024: Lizzy from The Orchard Project led our team of volunteers on a habitat creation journey in and around Mayow Park orchard on a fine, warm October day.

Tools at the ready in wheelbarrows

Photo AS

We were joined by young people from Free We Grow, who came ready to work. Under Lizzy's guidance the young people planted bulbs in the soil around the trees so that, come spring, we will have a lovely floral show.

Photo Mariana FWG

The children worked well as a team and some good conversations were had about what they were doing.

photo Mariana FGW

photo Mariana FWG

photo Mariana FWG

Meanwhile Friends of Mayow volunteers searched for wooden logs the thickness of an arm or slightly thicker. These logs were sawn to manageable lengths ready to create our stag beetle loggery.

Photo AS

Lizzy found the perfect location:  

Photo AS

Stag beetles are among a number of UK endangered invertebrates. Even though there are not huge numbers,  they seem to have settled in South East London where there find old, rotting logs to lay their eggs. Stag beetle larvae can spend up to seven years munching through logs half-buried in the ground. Then they pupate and emerge from their cosy woody homes into daylight.  And we find these royal insects flying around on warm evenings from late May into July as they search for mates, lay eggs and the cycle starts again.

With the logs ready, the two Mikes prepared the ground:

Photo AS

Their artistic creation:   

Photo AS

All finished: 

Photo AS

TREE LOSES LIMB May 2017

Mayow Park has an impressive number of pollarded boundary oaks, planted between 250 and 300 years ago to mark field boundaries, before the existence of the public park we know today.

Boundary oaks indicate a once common farming practice to mark land and field boundaries in the same way as walls and fences.

Pollarding is a pruning method used for centuries to manage trees. The upper branches are removed when the tree is still young and in the case of these ancient boundary oaks they develop new upward-growing branches which over the centuries become as thick as mature trees and look like respectable tree trunks in their own right.

 Daniel Greenwood (from Sydenham Hill Wood, a stone’s throw from our park) has written about boundary and pollard oaks in nearby areas and you can read his fascinating article about some of the trees here:  https://danieljamesgreenwood.com/tag/boundary-oak-trees/

 So Mayow’s ancient oaks reflect past local land management, while providing habitats for a large number of flora and fauna today. Birds, small mammals and invertebrates make their homes in the hollows, fungi and mosses find somewhere to grow. The trees contribute to the character of the park and park users have often said that the Mayow trees are valued in making the park landscape so special.

When a lovely tree that has stood for centuries loses a major limb many of us express sadness, as happened to a pollarded oak in Mayow Park on 19^th May 2017. A local resident posted a photo to Friends of  Mayow Park Facebook group, thus alerting park users and the park maintenance team.

Tree alert. Photo by K Andreakou

The tree that lost a limb had the widest girth of any of the ancient trees in the park as measured on a tree walk in 2016.  Word quickly spread. Soon adults and children were seen clambering over the fallen limb and around its broad branches,  enjoying the opportunity to get close and personal.   A tree that probably few had noticed became a celebrity overnight. It was lovely to see how people engaged with the tree. But current concerns about health and safety, with the risk of someone falling and injuring themselves, was too great. Something had to be done.                                                                                                            

Clambering around a fallen tree

Heavy branches of the fallen limb hidden by dense foliage           
                                

Within a week a team of arboriculturalists from Sevenoaks arrived to make the broken limb ‘safe’. 

photo K Andreakou

Photo K Andreakou

Photo K Andreakou

These guys are clearly skilled at their job.  They explained their intention to leave most of the thicker branches on the ground to create wildlife habitats. Some of the thinner branches were taken to use as path edge markers along the woodchip path adjacent to the dawn redwood tree. Other branches were relocated by volunteers from Friends of  Mayow Park into a locked woodland nature area for wildlife, out of reach of human interference. And the thinner branches were shredded.

Broken limb still attached to parent tree by a small fragment of wood and bark

Concerns were raised by park users: maybe this tree is diseased because the heartwood of the broken limb was powdery brown sawdust? 

Powdery hollow heartwood

Without scientific knowledge about ancient oaks, I am inclined to the view that the collapsed limb may be due to old age, to the natural hollowing out of the inner trunk and to being a pollard with heavy limbs that lean out from the tree. I hope someone with greater knowledge can come forward to suggest some reasons for this fail. Meanwhile, the exposed inner core can provide a home to solitary bees, beetles and other invertebrates while the tree continues to live.

Looking around at other ancient oaks in Mayow Park, regular park users will recall that in July last year a mature oak split in two and needed urgent surgery. It now stands as a monolith tree where the whole crown was removed. Tree surgeons pruned it to remain standing as a monolith tree, allowing natural decay processes to continue for wildlife. Remarkably, it survives and has started producing new growth with side branches.

Not far from the monolith tree is the ‘lightning tree’. Hit by lightning a few decades ago, it lost most of its crown, thus exposing its hollow interior. It continues to survive, with growth only on one side of the trunk. 

These individual ancient trees contribute to the value of the park. Regular visitors recognise them, plants and animals colonise them and they recall land management history as pollarded and boundary oaks. 

(Photos by K Andreakou and A Sheridan)

CUCKOO FLOWER IN THE ORCHARD

Spring 2016 and an unusual flower was seen growing in the orchard. Where had it come from? What was it? Why had it not been spotted before?
Normally the orchard, along with other grass areas in Mayow Park, has its first mowing in March. But early 2016 was very damp and the ground was waterlogged. Any vehicle trying to mow would have got bogged down in the heavy clay. This was fortunate for Lady's Smock (cardamine pratensis), also called cuckoo flower, which likes damp grassland. A member of the cabbage family, it flowers from March to early June. It had not been spotted before because the mowing regime for amenity grassland in the park prevented it from growing in its natural habitat.

According to The Wildlife Trusts  http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/ladys-smock:
Only 1,600 hectares of floodplain meadows are left within the whole of the UK, in a landscape which was abundant with this habitat. Cuckoo flowers, once common, are therefore becoming a rarer sight. The Wildlife Trusts look after many meadow and wetland habitats for the benefit of local wildlife and are working closely with farmers, landowners and developers to promote wildlife-friendly practices in these areas.

This plant is unusual in the borough of Lewisham.  There followed negotiations followed with Lewisham Greenscene and with Glendale (the contractors who manage the park on behalf of Lewisham) and a map of the site containing the flowers was drawn up.

 

 As from early this year it was finally confirmed that mowing the grass in the orchard would be delayed until the end of May to allow the plants to flower and set seed. So don't despair if the grass in the orchard looks unkempt - it is intentional and not an oversight.
Thank you to park users who identified the plant and to Lewisham and Glendale for agreeing this change.

Gardening with Glendale 13 Oct 2016

As always when working out of doors, we hope for dry weather. The forecast though was a bit uncertain and there had been rain earlier in the morning. How lucky we were that by 10a.m the rain had passed  and we were soon working hard.
This session saw Glendale managers and Friends of Mayow Park working to tidy up the fruit bed  and the mini wildflower area in the Triangle.
The first task was to remove the stepping logs in the fruit bed. Many logs had been covered by couch grass and those that were still visible were rotting and slippery. In a very short time they had all been moved to create an invertebrate habitat in a corner by the hedgerow. A robin came to join us with the promise of a feast and a frog or two hopped away as we disturbed their hiding place.  Chris wheeled barrow-loads of woodchip to fill the small craters where the logs had been.

new log pile for invertebrates

camouflaged frog

holes to fill in 

The sitting logs near the holly tree and hedgerow needed some remedial work. Some logs had rotted. This was not a problem and in no time the Glendale team had it sorted.

Let's start with this log

warm work - time to remove jackets

The wild flower meadow was taken on by Sandra who cut down all plant matter from the site. Just as well she is not too squeamish as there were slugs and a frog hidden in  the vegetation.

Wild flower meadow cut

canes that were dug up

raspberry patch

Sue and Dave worked on the raspberry patch, pruning most of the canes and digging up some to allow more light in.

Here are some more photos showing the sitting logs, the team and the large pile of garden waste that was generated. All the garden waste will be taken to a depot for shredding and turning into compost.

Mike was skillfully pruning the wild rose bushes at the apex of the Triangle, at the herb bed closest to the cafe, and very visible to people entering the park. The roses are now full of delicious-looking rose hips for the wild animals  so care was needed not to lop them all off. Mike also pruned the hedgerow along one side of the fruit bed and it looks much better now. 

some of the team

the team again

story circle

job done

large pile of gardening waste

another pile of gardening waste

It was great to have the Glendale team  to help us as the fruit bed had become rather overgrown. While the team were in the park they also chopped some brambles in the bushes as these were beginning to spread onto the path and they also tidied up the tree pits around the row silver birch trees in front of the bowls cabins. The Friends of Mayow Park will organise another volunteer workday next month.

Old oak falls July 2016

A member of  Friends of Mayow Park Facebook group posted a message on Friday 22^nd July with sad photos about a mature oak tree . One of its major trunks had split and fallen from the main tree. From other comments on that thread, it seems likely that the tree had unexpectedly fallen the evening before around 7.30 pm. Being later in the evening, the park was not busy and luckily no-one was hurt as the tree is near the path that goes past the older children’s play area.

Our Facebook group is very effective at reporting positive or negative happenings in the park which helps to spread the word quickly. The damaged tree was reported to Glendale Lewisham via email the evening of the day it was posted on Facebook. The fallen section looked unsteady but it seemed unlikely that anything would happen on a Friday evening after office hours . 

These photos were taken on the Friday afternoon: 

How good to find out  that first thing the following morning Glendale staff came and draped striped tape around the tree so that people would keep their distance. No tree surgery could take place at that time. Any major works and tree surgery have to be approved by Lewisham’s arboricultural officer and skilled tree surgeons need to be called out so I did not expect much action for days.

TREE SURGERY ONE WEEK LATER

On Friday 28th July an arboricultural team from Glendale Arboricultural Services arrived to work on the fallen oak. The team, wearing harnesses and hard hats, skillfully cut up the trunk that had split from the main trunk. They had to cut most of the remaining standing trunk too, as it  was leaning to one side and could become dangerous. 

One of the guys explained that they were aiming to leave much of the main trunk as a 'monolith' i.e. a dead tree left to decay in a standing position to allow it to support a wide range of species that are dependent on decaying wood.

Woodland management can include a standing dead tree. The team made the tree safe by reducing its height . The hope is that the tree will continue to support a variety of animal and plant species that rely on dead wood including fungi, invertebrates, small mammals and birds. As we saw, the team also left some logs close to the tree to encourage invertebrates.

Signs of hope? A young branch still lives on this monolith tree.

The arboricultural contractors showed great care for the tree as well as safety for themselves and park users. As a Friends group we care about creating a range of habitats for the wildlife of the park so we wait to see if the tree will survive, like its near neighbour the 'lightning tree' oak about 20 metres away. Look carefully at the first of these two monolith photos and you should see a small living branch . . . a sign of hope that the tree may survive.

We don’t know the age of the tree but it is likely to have been over 200 years old. Whether is partially grows back or whether it will die, the tree will continue to serve a purpose in the park.