Our churchyard in JUNE

A small oak sapling has appeared in the middle of our meadow area. We probably don’t want a large oak tree to grow there, so this raises questions as to how far we should go in deciding what plants are welcome in the area and which should be removed. And hence the difference between ‘rewilding’ and ‘conservation’.

Rewilding, in its fullest sense, means leaving nature to its own devices and allowing it to take its own course, in the expectation that the flora and fauna will develop to a state more representative of how it was some hundreds of years ago. But this really isn’t practical on the scale we have available here: we would require several hundred, if not thousand, hectares to be able to let nature take its course fully. It would involve not only letting plants of all sorts grow, but also the presence of large herbivores such as cattle, deer and wild boar to keep the vegetation in check. In our churchyard, the large herbivores come in the form of volunteers with strimmers and shears at the end of each summer to replicate the work that wild animals would have done.

Conservation, by contrast, aims to help natural wildlife to develop as it will in an area, with a view to developing the full range of biodiversity that the area is capable of supporting. All the different plants we have in the churchyard have grown there by their own volition. The oak sapling probably grew from an acorn dropped by a jay. Other species will have grown from seeds blown in by the wind. Our attempts to influence nature over the years have been singularly unsuccessful. Occasionally, kind people have given us plants to put in, and one parishioner kindly planted a range of different species in memory of a friend who had passed on. Sadly, in spite of watering and cutting the grass around these introductions, none has survived. Why? That I can’t answer. Why do we not have forests of Oxeye Daisies there, when they grow in such profusion elsewhere in the churchyard? The answer probably lies – where else – in the soil.

In a truly re-wilded area, our oak would not survive. It would be grazed by the abovementioned herbivores. Oak trees generally only develop successfully from acorns that grow up in patches of brambles or other scrub, that protect them from being grazed. So our oak sapling can continue to grow until it is grazed by our human herbivores at the end of the summer. But if anyone would like to remove it and grow it on, please feel free to do so.

Nigel Symington