The daffodils are emerging. Here at Bodnant Garden in North Wales they put on a spectacular display in the Old Park Meadow…
Later in the summer the meadow looks like this…
The National Trust own this fabulous garden and are managing a lot of it for wild flowers, pollinating insects, birds and mammals, which is great because 98% of these old hay meadows have been lost from the Welsh countryside in the last 50 years because of agricultural intensification…
Understanding the relationship between nature and how land is used is at the heart of what I do in conservation management planning. Today I was back at historic Dinefwr learning how an ancient deer park…
with ancient trees planted 500 years ago…
that is grazed by the descendants of those first fallow deer…
with a good helping of clean, warm, wet, Welsh air, can provide perfect conditions for lichen communities that can take hundreds of years to become established, and only if conditions are just right…
Once the relationships are understood, making the appropriate management decisions is relatively easy. These rare lichens need light, open conditions on old parkland trees that grow without competition from neighbours or smothering from ivy and scrub. Grazing livestock create these conditions, and a deer park created in the 1700’s is the perfect place to find them.
And lots of other wildlife also benefits, from beautiful woodpeckers, red kites, treecreepers, to tiny beetles living in the dead wood and even tinier yellow meadow ants who make their anthills in the ancient grassland…
I’m just finishing off a job I had last summer writing conservation management plans for several National Trust castle and mansion gardens, and this photo has briefly transported me back from the cold and the rain to more serene days of glorious summer…
It’s difficult to do justice to the place where I’ve been working today. Dinefwr Park in West Wales is a beautiful, historic designed landscape, laid out by the people who lived here in the 17th century.
A mixture of parkland and farmland, with hundreds of oak trees that are over 500 years old. Today we were working out how to maintain these ancient trees for another two hundred years, and how to create the right conditions for their successors. So we’ve been thinking very long range thoughts today indeed.
And if that wasn’t enough Dinefwr is home to a very rare breed of the White Park Cattle. This beautiful breed can be traced back in history over a thousand years.
And if the trees and cattle are not ancient enough, then just under the soil here there are rocks containing thousands of trilobite fossils, aged a mere 400 million years.
It was a wonderful day immersed in such ancient beauty.
This week I have been back in the mountains of the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales working, although it didn’t feel like work, on an upland farm. I was there to help advise on management and to survey the magnificent heathland that has developed on the mountain in the last 30 years.
There are some rare and unique plant communities growing up there now because the traditional farming practice of burning and grazing by sheep has been absent for all that time.
On the valley floor is the beautiful lake (Llyn Dinas)….
I only have a very small, cheap digital camera, but it’s a times like these that I wish I’d made that upgrade! Here’s one from someone who has…
This week we are management planning for the National Trust at the wonderful landscape and gardens of Erddig in North Wales….here are some nice photos courtesy of the other Mike.
So this week I’ve been in North Wales doing some more work on my grasslands project for the National Trust, and I visited Bodnant Gardens which apparently are world famous, although I hadn’t heard of them and you probably haven’t either, which is a shame because they are absolutely magnificent! Because I wasn’t being a tourist (I was working!), I didn’t take lots of photos of all the lovely herbaceous borders and lawns and the mansion house, so I can’t show you those. I did, however, have to take photos of the amazing laburnum tunnel and the magnificent old trees that dominate and seem to exist in a different dimension and time to you and I. Anyway have a look first at the delightful laburnum tunnel, hand crafted by the very gifted National Trust gardeners who were all really nice to me and showed me around…..
And now feast your eyes on these humungous trees…..
Here’s an idea of the house and lawns (which I secretly love and would like to play tennis on given half a chance!)…
I can also report that the cream teas served were absolutely divine. It was a tough job but someone had to do it 🙂
I’ve been away this week helping the National Trust out with some of their management issues at Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. My first impression of this place, because of its incredibly grand appearance on a truly large scale, was that this mock castle must have been built either by somebody with a great sense of humour, or someone with a whopping ego. I’m reliably informed it was the latter.
The castle is another reminder of the ubiquity of Britain’s links with slavery. It belonged to the Pennant family, famous for their slate quarries in North Wales, but whose major fortunes came from the exploitation of the slave trade in the Caribbean in the 17th century.
The family acquired plantations in Jamaica and held high office on that island, before a new generation returned to Britain and started trading from Liverpool. With the money the family made from these varied slavery-based enterprises, the Pennants acquired substantial holdings in Wales and also developed slate quarries.
Penrhyn Castle was developed on the site of an ancient property, but it is a 19th-century version of a Norman castle. Alongside Harewood House, it provides an example of the levels of material wealth that was accumulated by those engaged in the slave trade, which was then invested into British property and land.
The family apparently were not liked by the indigenous Welsh population. Apparently they didn’t treat the quarry workers at all well.
These days the castle is owned and managed by the National Trust, and the gardens are lovely.
It was a real pleasure to have a look round and to help out with management issues.
The castle itself was closed on the day I was there, but the rather lovely railway museum was open, so I had a little wander around some beautiful machines from yesteryear…..
I’ll be visiting many more interesting castles and mansions as part of this particular job, so I’ll keep you posted….
Mike Howe 