Three quarters of the way through Macfarlane’s dazzling book he recounts a conversation with Robert Mulvaney – a palaeoclimatologist and ice-core expert at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. After handing Macfarlane a phial containing grains of sand, Mulvaney explains that they were extracted from a kilometre deep inside a glacier and they prove that  below the ice there was once a Sahara. “They’re beautiful” says Macfarlane. “ Desert diamonds from the bottom of the world” “I can tell you are not a scientist” replies Mulvaney.  It is an unfair jibe. Scientist or not, Macfarlane serves science brilliantly well in his latest work, Underland - A Deep Time Journey. With every chapter he demonstrates his talent for explaining science and communicating the sheer wonder of the world through scientific goggles. The ambitious scope of his storytelling steps lightly from geology to linguistics to geomorphology onto folklore via nuclear physics and meteorology – all brought into focus with elegant prose and sprinklings of poetry. Like a skilled mixologist he serves up cocktails of scientific knowledge that delight and deliver more than the sum of the factual parts. Read more...

Mushrooms come in many shapes, colours and sizes, that much we all know. It is these aspects that provide really the only way for the amateur mycologist, who doesn’t have access to sophisticated DNA sequencing techniques or microscopes to look at the tiny differentiating details of the spores, to go about the troublesome business of identifying their finds.    However, neophytes embarking on their first steps into the fascinating world of mycology quickly discover two things. The first is that the forms of the fungal fruiting bodies are never fixed. They begin initially when the hyphal cells first fuse to form a tiny primordium, described poetically by Eugenia Bone in Mycophilia as “a dense little nubbin of preformed mushroom that (in many cases) contains all its cells”. Read more...

Building a log cabin in Siberia is an art that has been developed over hundreds of years and takes account of material available and the extremes of weather.  For example, it may look as though the same logs are used for the whole cabin but in fact for the bottom three layers the Siberians use larch which is more resistant to rotting and carrying water upwards.  Above that they use Siberian pine which is in much greater abundance  - indeed its availability must be one of the reasons that so many of the buildings in Russia are built of wood, even today.  Between the logs moss is wedged into the gaps to prevent draughts and to seal the building from insects.  This moss, again, is freely and abundantly available in most of Russia. Read more...

A while ago I came across an article on the Woodlands.co.uk website about buying a woodland in a SIPP and I thought it too good an opportunity to miss. Having recently successfully completed the process I thought it might be useful to share my experience with others who may be thinking about it. It’s worth knowing up front that although it is a relatively simple process, it is a bit more long-winded than purchasing with cash and there are a few more considerations to take into account. Here are the steps I went through: Read more...

Introduction Much has been written elsewhere on the why's and wherefore's of planning issues concerning sheds in woods. For example, there is a very informative article elsewhere on this website and there are discussion threads in the forum section of the SWOG [Small Woodland Owners Group] website. This article concentrates on practical considerations when choosing, siting and constructing your shed together with ideas and tips based on my own experience of building all sorts of structures for woodland owners. Read more...

The Royal Forestry Society organises about 100 trips each year to visit woodlands - these are done through its local groups.  The London Division is particularly active with Paul Akers and Angus Morrison in charge - they recently arranged a trip to a small South London woodland of 2 acres, called Unigate Wood and invited the Director of the RFS as well as ordinary members such as me .   Unigate Wood was once part of the site of a Unigate Dairy which closed, leaving the dairy to be replaced by a large residential development .  As part of the planning permission the developer entered into a deal for planning permission called a "section 106 agreement " with Lambeth Council to preserve the woodland for local amenity and it is now jointly managed by Lambeth Council and the Friends of Unigate Wood.    The friends are led by Stephen Lacey who 10 years ago used the wood for walking his dog but couldn't resist building up a group of local volunteers to care for the site.  Read more...

Making woods resilient has become the latest fashion in forestry as illustrated by the RFS conference being organised with the Woodland Trust in Birmingham at the start of October.ˇ Resilience in this context means resilient both to diseases and to climate change effects.  Much of the thinking is based on the 2015 British Woodlands Resilience Survey which has been organised by the Sylva Foundation and sponsored by Oxford University, the RFS and the Woodland Trust.ˇ There have also been useful presentations on the subject such as the one given at the CONFOR Show (Confederation of Forest industries) show at Longleat, Wiltshire in early September 2015. Read more...

Social and Therapeutic Horticulture (STH) currently fits under the umbrella term ‘Green Care’. Research on the effect of our natural environment upon us has shown that there are many ‘passive’ benefits to our general well-being .  Social and Therapeutic Horticulture (STH) is described as the purposeful use of horticultural activities to promote health and well being, and to facilitate social inclusion. But what does this actually mean? An STH Practitioner is someone who has studied and practised how to use horticulture as a tool to help improve or maintain the health and wellbeing of an individual, and how to create the right environment for change to take place.  STH is now being used in hospital settings, and also within the charity sector as a means to help a wide range of people including those with mental health conditions, learning disabilities, within the prison service, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), spinal injury and dementia. Read more...