Manor Farm tree plantation

Output

628 native trees (aspen, beech, oak, silver birch and sycamore) planted across two fields. ~80 survival rate to date.

I provided consultation for Manor Farm, to improve its marginal farmland for biodiversity. Specifically, I was hired to convert poor quality pasture adjacent to railway hedgerows to semi-natural woodland using native tree species. The entire process from planning to implementation is visualised in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Tree planting workflow used at Manor Farm.

Project stages

1. First planning stage
   • From the available land, optimal locations were selected using GIS. This involved topological, soil and vegetation data.
2. Second planning stage
   • Appropriate species chosen for the selected environmental conditions. Grant funding sought from the Woodland Trust.
3. Third planning stage
   • Plausible planting regimes considered based upon landowner and employee polling. Copse like regime preferred with fast and slow growing species interspersed.
4. Planting stage
   • Initial November 2020 plant of ~300 individual trees across two sites. Farm employees and families were invited to take part (see Figure 2).
5. Management and expansion
   • Since 2020, three additional plantings have been made with periodic management to prevent grass overcrowding. The local community now donate unwanted saplings to the farm (e.g oaks in lawns).

Figure 2: Farm community taking part in tree planting.

Figure 1: Tree planting workflow used at Manor Farm. Figure 2: Farm community taking part in tree planting.