Return of the natives

There is nothing as satisfying as creating a magical miniature woodland or conservation hedgerow using our native trees - and now is the best time to start.

- Ursula Buchan

RUSSELL PAGE, the celebrated garden designer, wrote in his seminal work The Education of a Gardener, published in 1962: 'To plant trees is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world" I read the book when I was an idealistic student and I needed no second bidding. When, in 1993, my husband and I moved to a scruffy cottage in a Northamptonshire village, it was in large part because of the precious three acres of ground - one acre garden, two acres paddock - that came with the house. We had scarcely finished unpacking before I was ordering trees to plant in the paddock. Thirty years on, the cottage is marginally less scruffy and those three acres infinitely more precious.

Much of the paddock had been a depressing, neglected Christmas-tree plantation, so we set about removing every single Norway spruce and replanting with 400 bare-rooted, two-year-old tree whips, some 18 inches (45 centimetres) tall, comprising a range of common deciduous and evergreen trees: common ash, English oak, silver birch, hornbeam, English and common lime, wild cherry and yew. (We went easy on beech and holly because they grow only very slowly and grudgingly on a heavy clay soil.) We chose native species because they would be tough, naturally suited to the environment, congruous in a rural situation and home to a wide range of invertebrates: beetles, moth and butterfly larvae, gall wasps and the like, many of which would draw in small bird species.