We’re so excited to have you join us in West Dorset to celebrate Paul’s 60th Birthday, thanks so much for making the time, and for traveling all that way!
To mark your visit, and our time together, we are hoping you will join us in planting trees. For so many reasons we need more trees at Slape: to create wildlife corridors that link isolated pieces of woodland around us, or to ensure the future climate resilience of our valley as we move into a warmer and wetter future – trees create cooling microclimates, as well as taking up all of that water and keeping it out of the rivers – or simply because many of our trees are old and we need succession planting to ensure the future of the garden.
Below is outlined a couple of different projects we are developing going forward, as well as some other ideas for the garden.
What we really look forward to is being able to have you back to stay with us at Slape, and showing you your tree or hedge or Rambling Rose in place: healthy and thriving and part of our future.
Field Trees for Woodland pasture.
Our future plan at Slape is to turn a series of the fields that run down to the river into woodland pasture. This will do several things: create overhead and linked tree canopy that joins up existing woodland stands with the river thereby creating safe movement corridors for birds and other animals - we really notice an increase in bird life where there is habitat for them to move safely around in; large trees particularly increase water retention and improve river riparian zones, reducing flooding downstream; trees create shaded pasture, future proofing our landscape for hotter summers, and finally, distributed woodland grazing allows us to have canopy while still enabling us to graze below and around the trees - keeping Slape in the food chain, while increasing space for our non-domestic, non-human friends and family.
Notes on sizing
Standard trees are measured by their girth in centimetres 1 metre above ground level: their trunk's waist measurement. Unlike sapling trees and hedge plants, standards aren't measured by their height, which will vary quite a bit both between and within species. So, a 6/8cm standard tree has a trunk with a circumference of 6-8cm and an 8/10 standard has a trunk 8-10cm around. This measurement makes no difference to the tree's final height. On average, standard trees are 2-3.5 metres tall when they arrive, but we cannot tell you precisely how tall your trees will be before we deliver them. (see here for sizing guide )
New and expanded hedge creation
One of the lessons we learnt from The Knepp Estate and their rewilding (see here if you don’t know the story) is that if hedges are allowed to billow out to 8-14m in width, rather than being tightly and neatly cut, all sorts of wonderful creatures return – including the Nightingale. All over Slape we are allowing our hedges to expanded.
In addition to letting existing hedges grow free, we need to create new hedge lines. We do our best to plant only native British bareroot saplings, along with food and nut producing hedge trees that provide foraging opportunities for everyone.
Hedge plants are usually bought by the Meter. We use a traditional Dorset ditch and mound hedge laying system, always planted in Autumn, winter - dig a ditch, pile up the soil, plant into the pile – 5 bare root saplings per meter in a W pattern. The ditch then also becomes important wet habitat for invertebrates and amphibians throughout our wet winters.
Ornamental Plants and trees
