WORCESTERSHIRE'S ANCIENT TREE REGISTER.

Harry Green & John Tilt

This scheme was launched with the April 2002 number of Worcestershire Record. A course was run in May 2002 to encourage more people to join in recording and another will be held Saturday 17th May 2003 at Lower Smite Farm. A booking form for this and other courses organised by Tessa Carrick for Worcestershire Wildlife Trust is enclosed and the programme of courses appears elsewhere in this issue.

Those who attended the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust's Volunteers Conference on 21st September also received great encouragement to record ancient trees through an outstanding lecture by Ted Green and a memorable visit with him to Elmley Castle Deer Park. Many of the points made by Ted were of course typically outrageous, but he did grab everyone's attention and as a result we hope to receive a great many more records of ancient trees!

Records are slowly accumulating in the data base - so far largely through our own efforts! But we do hope this is simply because the recording forms have not yet arrived in John Tilt's hands! We do encourage you to join in. If you were unwilling to use our two-form recording system (forms sent out in last issue) we hope you will at least use the enclosed simple form for listing many trees! In that way we shall at least get locations and can visit a tree again. Please note that we should like eight-figure grid references if at all possible, please. This can be done quite easily from the OS Explorer (orange) 1:25000 maps or with a GPS. Trying to find a tree again in a 100 m square of a six-figure grid reference is not always easy.

Three recent discoveries of note are, first, a group of ancient trees near Martley - triggered by an owner who has a fine ancient oak tree in his garden and had been told he should get in touch with us! He also has several others, including an ancient small-leaved lime in his boundary. Within a couple of kilometres of his house we found 15 ancient trees, mainly oaks but also the biggest pollarded ash either of us have ever seen! Second, woodland survey work in the Teme valley has revealed some remarkable pollarded small-leaved limes: there may be as many as fifty of these remarkable trees. Thirdly, Ray Bishop found some remarkable oaks near near Hollybush at the southern end of the Malvern Hills.

The table shows the sites visited so far. We suggest you record elsewhere!