As a volunteer for the Woodland Trust, I have taken on several 1 km squares to survey. These include 4 km centred over the north, south, east, and west of Markstakes Common near South Chailey – and where I live: Lewes—the south of Lewes down from the Brighton Road and the High Street, bordering the Winterbourne stream to the Brighton to Eastbourne railway and A27 Lewes bypass.
My expectations were that I would find nothing more than a handful of ‘locally notable’ trees to add to the three long-recognised veteran trees: two wild black poplars and a mulberry tree, all, as it happens close to the Winterbourne stream, which runs through this part of town.
I’m meticulous. No longer walking our dog Evie, who died two months ago, I am nonetheless eager to get out and about and away from my computer screens, books and printing for a few hours every day. I spend this time poking around beneath trees. Several weeks into this task, I have finally started to let go of pretty tall trees (there are plenty of these) and focus instead on the geriatric – those trees with one foot in the grave, in an advanced state of decay, knotted and gnarled, dropping bits and by all traditional terms ‘ugly’ – even Arthur Rackham, in his wildest dreams, wouldn’t see an elf or goblin climbing around these trees. They are the forgotten ‘lost’ trees.
The trees I am expected to spot have ‘ancient characteristics’: they show signs of a hollowing trunk and hollowing branches, crevices and holes in their bark, water holes, fungi blooms, lichen and moss, burrs, broken branches and dead wood on the ground.
On my way to Houndeam Bottom, I stopped to consider and measure what Lewesians consider to be the sentinel tree as you enter Lewes by car from Brighton. It is a mature sycamore, two-stemmed, mature but not old. It is significant in the landscape but has few, if any, ancient characteristics. It might get recognised as ‘locally notable’.
Then, on the margins of the boundary line of the official Lost Woods project area for Sussex – a designated area covering both counties which resembles the shape of a slightly knackered sweet potato, I spotted something resembling a large Cirque du Soliel up-turned three-legged spider down a steep, nettle-covered embankment. This looked promising: a significantly hollowed trunk with plenty of decay, long, fat, thin, old, fresh tendrils of limbs stretching this way and that – some dead and decaying, some twisted, with burrs and repeated episodes of epicormic growth – all indicators of a struggle with disease, decay. There would have been a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the road over the grass and footpath here would have been heavy with traffic, and there’s been ash die-back, of course, something that kills younger trees that older trees like this survive.
This is my kind of tree.
It was late March or early April. I’m starting to get my head around tree identification, but with bark this damaged and no leaves yet, I had little to go on. I should have been able to spot the ash buds, but I think these were somewhat withered. The seed ‘keys’ were a clue. It had to be ash. I have a measuring tape, my phone is my camera, and to finish off, I usually do a 10-minute sketch to better pick out its form and character.
The details included in the survey for the verifier to establish which category the tree falls into (notable, veteran, or ancient) include photographic evidence of hollowing, dead wood, fungi, epiphytes, invertebrates, and bats.
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