Trees for life

The Woodland Trust was set up as a Nature-conservation charity specifically concerned with trees. Clive Aslet visits its south Devon birthplace of 50 years ago and remembers its far-sighted and altruistic founder

- Clive Aslet

 

THE leaf litter and pine needles form a deep, springy mattress on the forest floor. Fallen boughs and the remains of tree stumps, rotting back into the ground, are as soft as sponges. Few people find their way to this mossy pocket of immemorial woodland on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. Trees are multistemmed, hollow, tortuous in form, their branches green and woolly from lichens.

Hall Plantation on the Hall Farm estate, I am told by David Rickwood, site manager for the Woodland Trust, has all the characteristics of a temperate or Atlantic rainforest, a habitat formed by the constant presence of moisture in this case, rolling in from the sea and mild temperatures: 'It supports an ecosystem that is rarer than the Amazonian rainforest, if less obviously threatened.'

A beech, shaped like an octopus, has crashed to the ground, felled by the platelike bracket fungus that weakened its trunk. One limb still puts forth leaves, as it obstinately clings to life. This is a weird landscape, festooned with the hairy grey strands of Usnea articulata, similar to the Spanish moss that hangs from the live oaks of America's southern states (it was thought to resemble the Conquistadores' beards), but which in Devon is known, less romantically, as stringof-sausages. At least a dozen of Britain's 17 species of bat live here, diving into the crevices of senescent trees. The rotting timber is a Holiday Inn for invertebrates.

In the Middle Ages, this area supported four farms, the field patterns of which can still be seen. The name 'Plantation' suggests a more recent origin and probably dates from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, to judge from the dry-stone wall that surrounds the wood, although the early-19th-century plantings may have overlaid pre-existing woodland.