Life From Old Wood

We are so pleased that Guy Sanderson offered to write this article for us and is doing such great environmental work at Gatewick in the centre of Steyning.  He has a great love and knowledge of trees. 

   Traditionally late autumn has always been bonfire month as gardeners seek to tidy away old wood and debris and enjoy the heat of a bonfire with a toffee apple or two. 

Over the past month at Gatewick House, behind the parish church, we’ve been gathering up piles of dead branches, leaves and hedge cuttings to start something that we hope will be much more exciting, more beneficial and enduring than a bonfire.

If you have walked along the edge of Abbey Wood nature reserve recently and looked across (as I hope you might), you’ll have seen the start of a long, snaking brown ‘dead hedge’. It’s not finished yet, but when it is, we hope that it will be a glorious, vertical pile of old branches, dead stumps and twigs which we will regenerate each year with hedge cuttings and any branches from ongoing tree maintenance. Believing that one large pile is better than several smaller piles, we are creating a continuous 125m pile of dead wood along the edge of the nature reserve. 

Over time, the wood at the bottom of the hedge will rot down, aided by tiny fungi, bacteria, slugs (yes we’ll even be encouraging those!), snails, springtails, millipedes, earwigs, woodlice and beetles. We’re hoping, in time, to find that we’ve attracted the musk beetle, the wonderfully named red-necked click beetle, and Britain’s biggest, the staghorn beetles, as the hedge settles down. Meanwhile the dry wood at the top of the pile will attract wood wasps and solitary bees which both drill into old dry wood to make homes, as well as overwintering butterflies, moths and ladybirds. All of these are then prey for spiders, hedgehogs (which sadly are less and less common in this country), shrews, frogs, toads, lizards, slow-worms and possibly grass snakes. Small birds like robins, wrens, dunnocks and even blackbirds all like the tangled maze and hideaways in such a hedge and, once it’s finished, we’ll enhance this by planting honeysuckle along the whole hedge.

To match this dead hedge, we will start next month planting a further 200m stretch of conventional native hedging with holly, hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple, hornbeam, dog-roses along the back of gardens from Shooting Field and Bowman’s Close