Remaining patches of ancient woodland should be preserved for future generations

A WEEK of sunshine and Craven’s woodlands are in full bloom and I hope that you all find time to enjoy a walk this weekend. However, this time, as you admire the carpets of blue and white and the heady scents of garlic and bluebells take the time to stop and look a little closer and glimpse the fascinating world of plants and insects at your feet.

Let’s start with the carpet of bluebells - a quintessential English scene, or is it? Our native bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) are under threat from a foreign invader. Victorian gardeners introduced the more vigorous Spanish bluebell (Hyacinthoides hispanica) to their gardens but these have since escaped and now readily cross breed with English Bluebells to produce a hybrid that is a mix between the two.

A recent Plant Life Survey found that one in six broadleaved woodland contained hybridised bluebells.

So, how do you tell the difference? With English bluebells, the flowers are mostly on one side of a drooping stem and are narrow with the tips curved back. With Spanish bluebells and hybrids, the larger flowers are found right around an upright stem and more importantly they have little scent which means that one aspect of a spring woodland walk may gradually disappear.

To help reduce this problem there are simple steps a gardener can take. Firstly, if you want bluebells in your garden ensure that they are from a legal source (people still strip areas of woodland illegally and then sell the bulbs) and double check that they are native (Hyacinthoides non-scripta). If you already have non-natives that you want to remove, a near impossible task, leave the bulbs in the sun to thoroughly dry out or place them in a black bin liner for a year before composting otherwise you will just shift the problem to your compost heap.

Another distinctive species that has a fascinating life cycle is Lords and Ladies. In spring the sheathed purple spike (spadix) is very distinctive and to many in the past it had bawdy connotations hence a whole range of names from Cuckoo Pint (“pintle” being old English slang for penis) to “Willy Lilly”. The spadix raises its temperature through chemical reactions and releases a urine-like scent that is irresistible to flies such as the owl midge. The visiting midges then slip down into the base of the sheath.

If you look carefully (take care it is toxic) you will be see a ring of hairs that trap the midges in the base of the sheath. The female flowers are located at the base and these are then pollinated by the flies. Following pollination, the hairs wither allowing the midges to escape but in doing so they have to pass a ring of newly-developed male flowers, thus picking up pollen ready for their next visit to another flower.

The familiar Primrose is also adapted for insect pollination. To the casual observer all the flowers look the same, however, on closer examination it can be seen that there are two types of flower, each being produced on different plants.

Some primroses have a small green “pin” head at the top of the flower tube, this is the stigma, and the male pollen bearing anthers are lower down, these are known as “pin-eyed” flowers. In “thrum-eyed” flowers, the stamens are at the top and look like an orange ring and the stigma is lower down inside the tube.

So how does this avoid self-pollination? When an insect such as a butterfly visits it extends it tongue to reach the nectar at the base of the flower, in doing so it will pick up pollen from the anthers. If this is a “pin-eyed” flower, the pollen will be half way down. If the insect then visits another flower on the same plant, the stigma is at the top and so will not be fertilised, however if it visits a plant with “thrum-eyed” flowers the stigma is half way down and the pollen rubs off and fertilises the flower.

These examples are just a few of the amazingly complex interactions that form a woodland ecosystem. Ancient woodlands (defined as being continually wooded since 1600) are amongst our most beautiful and complex habitats and can take hundreds of years to fully develop; unfortunately it only takes a matter of days to destroy them.

Developers and even Owen Paterson when he was Secretary of State for the Environment have argued that destroying ancient woodland sites is fine and can be beneficial for the overall environment providing that the damage is offset by planting more trees (100 trees for every one destroyed). Whilst I agree that planting new woodlands can be of benefit, we are fooling ourselves if we think a fully functioning woodland can be created from scratch.

Even putting a road through a woodland can break up a habitat and ruin the remaining sections. I have even seen it suggested that woodland and soil can be “translocated” to a new site, I have yet to see an example where this has been a success. Thus I think it is the duty of all of us who enjoy woodlands to truly value them and fight to see that our remaining patches are preserved so that future generations can continue to enjoy this truly remarkable habitat.