Creating a wet woodland
I got up early for the regular riverfly session with Tony. The online gauge yesterday was showing a depth of 0.56m – normally touch and go, but this morning was 1.1m! There was a deluge of rain last night which rendered any monitoring impossible.
We went down to take a look at the river anyway, just to see the conditions. It had burst it’s banks in many places and the adjacent car park was under water.
I’ve never seen the river like this. It must be a combination of snow melt from the weekend and the rain last night.
I headed over to the Painswick valley to join Stroud Valleys Project for a tree planting day. The idea was to create a wet woodland on a beautiful peninsula next to the Painswick Stream and around a disused mill pond.
The challenge with this site is the extraordinary amount of Giant Hogweed across the whole area. At this time of year, the plants that had just seeded were now dead, and standing as 10 foot high dead husks, surrounded by a carpet of dropped seeds. By creating a woodland, this will eventually shade out the Giant Hogweed and reduce the amount.
I’ve never seen so much in one place – it would be impossible to eradicate using other methods. It was also very eerie being there in this post-apocalypse like hogweed world – this area would be completely inaccessible in the summer, just too dangerous to enter.
There were seven of us, and after a bit of planning, we set about planting in different areas around the pond. The species were alder, willow, aspen and birch, provided as small whips. We used chunky stakes and tall tree guards to protect them.
The overall aim is to plant 450 trees in this area and we completed around 250 today. We’ll be returning on Thursday to complete the job.
