Young Rewilded Trees Thriving in LettsSafari Parks
Young Rewilded Trees Thriving in LettsSafari Parks
LettsSafari has created thriving environments for natural new tree growth - and an exciting new biodiversity project in the process.
LettsSafari parks are hotbeds of biodiversity with growing wildlife populations, including numerous rare species. Our habitats are carefully designed to make it happen and, of course, important to this are trees. So, 6 years ago we started a project to develop our soil, trees and growing conditions such that we could naturally produce many of our new annual tree plantings. That way we could reduce the carbon produced by industrially growing, transplanting and delivering new trees. After all, with all the tree planting the world will need to do we will soon run out of them!
The project has been such a big success that we are expanding it and deepening it to try to understand the best methods and practices for natural, wild tree regeneration. A how, where and when of wild, natural new tree growth. The LettsSafari way!
We created controlled environments in LettsSafari’s Capability Brown gardens for natural tree growth to happen. The herbivores are strictly regulated and managed in these designated areas which have been built around specific tree types - including oak, birch, beach, ash, chestnut, English maple and more. In certain areas we help creeping bramble to grow over to better protect the baby seedlings. This is then cut back and removed when they are around 3 years old.
Six years into the project we are now nurturing hundreds of new trees in these 15 acre gardens - some a few months old and some 6 years old. In one corner we have a veritable sea of baby English maples growing at scale. Most of the wild new seedlings grow in tight, designated areas close to their parents. A few others get scattered in the wind and grow more sparsely up to 100 metres from the mothership.
When the saplings are 5 years old they are carefully dug up and potted. They are then replanted in specific areas across the LettsSafari parks using our tree-family copse arrangement whereby a family of the same kind of tree having grown up next to each other is re-planted together in a triangular planting scheme. A handful of such triangles, mosaic’d together, create a small new wood.
If things continue on the current trajectory, these extraordinary historic gardens could be naturally producing up to 100 trees a year ready for transplanting to other LettsSafari parks. We have also planted some very rare trees to see if this might become a place where almost extinct trees could be restored - the natural way. Capability Brown would indeed be proud.
Who needs branded jams and tea towels from well known gardens when you could grow and nurture a tree from these wild gardens. We are more excited than ever about the potential of the project to help us understand more widely how to regenerate woods, forests and rain forests in this country and beyond.
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