A Deeper Look into the Gallery’s Woodland with the Parks Team

We have a really interesting woodland here at Orleans House Gallery which is very valuable for bats, even though the woodland itself isn’t particularly old. It has a lot of sycamore trees, which are very fast growing and develop these cavities at quite a young age, which are very useful for bats. We’ll see as we walk around, there are some trees that have some really deep, hollow cavities in the stem which provide good roosting opportunities for bats. And as this woodland is located so close to the River Thames, it provides a good corridor for bats using the landscape over the wider surroundings, such as Richmond Park and Ham Lands, which we have over the river. 

We have records of stag beetles here. Richmond is very famous for its stag beetles, which is quite a rare species these days. They suffered huge declines in the past 100 years, primarily because of changes in woodland management practices and the habit of removing deadwood. Stag beetles rely on buried deadwood to complete their life cycle. They actually spend seven years of their existence as grubs, feeding on buried deadwood in the ground, and then they only spend a couple of months as an adult beetle in the summer when they emerge to breed. Then the process starts all over again, so they’re very reliant on the deadwood that we have in woodlands.  

We leave standing and fallen deadwood wherever we can in the woodland. We’ll even sometimes create dead trees on purpose. We take a low value tree or sometimes do what’s called ring barking, which is where you use the chainsaw to cut off the outer bark a tree so that it will die back naturally and leave a standing dead pole which provides a habitat for any invertebrates and woodpeckers and birds that will be able to feed off of that. In the  Orleans House Gallery  grounds we have even made a purpose built loggery as an educational feature. We dug a pit about half a metre down into the ground and placed some cut logs into the pit. This will be used by the stag beetles for laying their eggs.  

Stag beetles obviously provide food for lots of other animals higher up the food chain, like birds and some of the larger bats, such as noctules, will sometimes eat big beetles like stag beetles and cockchafers. They also provide a very important process breaking down the old wood which releases nutrients back into the soil to be cycled into the trees that grow in the woodland. 

This tree is a really good example of a good bat habitat that we have in these woodlands. You can see this huge cavity going right through the stem of this tree here. The tree is still perfectly healthy; it’s the outer layer of wood that the tree needs to transfer nutrients between its roots and its leaves and its branches. When the hollow, internal part dies away, the tree starts to heal itself around the outside, but we have this great cavity going through the stem which is perfect for roosting bats. 

We’ve got about 8 or 9 species of bats locally. Most common around here are the pipistrelle species and the Daubenton’s, which use the river. They forage up and down the river and will use areas of woodland that are adjacent to the river.  

We’ve got two very nice specimens of trees here that are what we call veteran trees. These are very old trees that have survived through many different changes in the landscape, and we’re just walking up to them now. This is the Cedar of Lebanon that we see before us and then to the right there’s a very big London plane. These trees have survived a vast number of changes to the environment on this site. 

One of the most unique things about this woodland is its history. It was once quarried for gravel, and it’s been used in the past as a kitchen garden in the 18th century and ultimately it was filled in with bomb rubble after the war. So a lot of this woodland has grown up since then and it’s very young in relative terms, but these two trees [the Cedar of Lebanon and London plane] have been standing for much longer than that. 

We’ve taken the decision to try and divert some of the footpaths away from the root plates of these trees to prevent the soil compacting over the roots, to prolong the life of these trees. We’ve put some natural dead hedging across the old desire lines, and this winter we’ll be creating a new replacement path to allow people to keep moving through the woodland and enjoy these trees without having to walk directly beneath them. 

Towards the northern part of the woodland you can see some evidence of when this place was more of an ornamental landscape. You’ve got a lot of ornamental species of trees such as these laurels that we have at the at the top north of the site. These provide good places for children to play, they provide a lot of dense shade and cover and a bit of a maze for the children and dogs to run through. In the southeast corner, which we’ve just walked past, we have also an old boat tunnel that used to connect the river to the site. 

These kinds of sites, particularly in urban areas like this, play a really important role in connecting people with nature. That’s where the Arts team and the Parks team at Richmond Council work so well together, because we’re both working towards this joint goal of Cultural Reforesting. As much as managing the woodland for wildlife is important, the engagement with the public and the people’s views and the people’s enjoyment of this space is equally as important. And I think we’ve got the balance just about right here 

To me, Cultural Reforesting is basically about making people appreciate that ancestrally, we used to have such a close relationship with nature. We used to live predominantly off the land. We used to, as a society, have a much more symbiotic relationship with a natural world which is largely lost in today’s society.  Particularly in these in these kinds of urban areas with these really important green spaces, we’ve got a really good opportunity to reconnect people with that sort of traditional view of the natural world and traditional dependence on the natural world, and particularly for young people who are growing up in the city, I think it’s really important. 

As you walk around the woodland, you can find lots of micro ecosystems that exist within this space. An example here is this coppiced Sycamore tree that has basically formed this big bowl in the in the bottom of the stool there, which as you can see, fills with water. There are quite a few of these throughout the woodland, and although they don’t look like much, these features are important for invertebrates such as hoverflies. Even in the winter there will be full of hoverfly eggs that will hatch in the in the spring to begin their life cycle. These kind of standing pools of water with dead leaf litter and rotten wood inside them are important for many invertebrates. 

We’re very fortunate to have a good badger population in this in this woodland, and you can often see a lot of their field signs, their tracks if you look closely, particularly where they’ve been turning over the ground for earthworms and where they’ve been digging at the roots of the bluebells. We actually managed to capture some footage of some badgers last year when we put some cameras out, and we recorded three young cubs, newly born, who just started to venture outside of the set with their mother. 

A lot of this woodland is secondary woodland and there are a lot of trees that are self-seeded naturally as well as being planted. Because the underlying soil is quite varied, and in most cases quite poor, having been filled in with bomb rubble and capped with a very thin layer of soil, it’s not easy to establish many types of tree here. At the moment it is quite heavily dominated by sycamores, so we’ve looked at the kind of native trees that we have in low proportions already succeeding in the woodland such as field maple, hazel and beech. We plan to increase their prominence within the woodland. 

We also have quite a problem with non-native invasive species in this woodland, with a lot of Japanese knotweed springing up quite a lot of the time. Again, that’s down to what is in the underlying soil since the site was backfilled. At the moment we manage it by stem injecting the Japanese knotweed with herbicide, but we’re looking within the Council to start moving away from herbicide treatment and look at different, more biologically friendly ways of managing invasive species. With aquatic invasive species like Himalayan balsam and floating pennywort on our rivers, we’ve got funding now to start trialling sustainable, biological control methods, such as weevils that will feed on the plant. These are predators that would keep them in balance in their natural range, which have now been approved for release in this country. They will be using them to naturally control the plants without having to use any herbicide.  

The thing about this woodland is its history and the amount of change it has been through. It was part of a Georgian estate in the 18th century, a kitchen garden, and then it’s obviously been quarry for gravel and filled in with bomb rubble and now these trees. It’s really incredible how established this woodland is within such a short space of time. With the gallery being here as well, it a real destination for nature lovers and lovers of the arts and culture and cultural heritage. It’s a real destination within the Borough, and it’s something to be celebrated really.