Battles for rescuing cowslips and a 200 year plan for Wandlebury wood

On his first walk through Wandlebury with daughter Caroline, they discover a solitary cowslip which brings back childhood memories of golden fields for Bill. He vows to create this natural wonder again. The aging woodlands also present their challenge, but not as big as the battle to establish a 200 year plan for the nature reserve.

Cowslips, photo Chris Thomas

Extracts from Bill Clark, conservationist and former warden of Wandlebury, his autobiography Route and Branch. Full reading available here as a podcast:
https://archive.org/download/lost-cowslips-tpo-battle/Ch7b-Lost-cowslips-TPO-battle.mp3

On the following day – Sunday – I started my new life as Head Warden of Wandlebury Ring. I patrolled, notebook in hand, jotting down, ‘things needing urgent attention’. Caroline joined me for a time, ‘Look dad, some primroses.’ She stepped nearer to peer at the dozen or so broken stalks, and one tall brown stem with seed heads, ‘No they aren’t, what are they?’

I was in the middle of, ‘Caroline, don’t tell me you don’t recognise .....,’ when the truth hit me – hard! Just prior to her ninth birthday, she was looking at her first cowslip plant. I was stunned, and tried to remember when I had last walked among them; During my time in Essex? No. Buckinghamshire? No. Oxfordshire? No. It had to be during my own childhood in Bedfordshire – the ones that I had spread ‘Gramoxsone’ on.

I knelt down to carefully pick off the remaining seed heads, and knotted them inside my handkerchief. As we walked on, I explained to Caroline, how at her age, I played in meadows that were yellow with cowslips. Pointing to the just harvested wheat field beside us, I remarked, ‘If the Society allows it, one day cowslips will cover that field.’...

...Now at Wandlebury, I had 54 acres of very mature beech woodland to care for, with goodness knows how many miles of official and unofficial footpaths threading below the spreading branches. The numbers of folk treading them was unknown, but from day one, I knew that the paths needed regulating, and the people required guidance – and the trees certainly needed some TLC.

Many branches were downright dangerous to those walking below – my first contact from a Wandlebury resident, was a complaint about a branch that his wife passed under every day. Half a dozen beech had been blown down in a 1950s gale – the branches long gone for firewood, but the trunks still lying, root plates upturned and not a single sapling planted in their place!

At my first CPS Management meeting, I predicted that 50% of the beech could be lost during the next fifty years, and that unless we started a felling and planting programme immediately, there would be too long an interval for carrying over the wildlife that needed the holes, nooks and crannies of ancient trees. A quarter of an acre worked each year, would result in a 200 year cycle. It was then pointed out by member J K Taylor that the whole area was under a Tree Preservation Order, (TPO), put in place by the County Council in 1953. ‘Not even a branch can be touched, because of the importance of retaining the woodlands just as they are,’ he said. Truly shocked, ...