Veteran Trees at Cow Close Farm

As you walk around Cow Close Farm, you will notice strange twisted outlines, drooping branches and thick multiple stems of veteran oak and ash trees standing at the field boundaries and stream edges.

A veteran tree can be defined as: ‘a tree that is of interest biologically, culturally or aesthetically because of its age, size or condition’.

Historical management of our veteran trees has resulted in these odd shapes where wood, the ultimate renewable resource, has been carefully harvested by generations of farmers through coppicing or pollarding. Trees managed in this way renew and regenerate, making them older than they look, although these trees are still in the early portion of their life – ash can live for 350 years and oaks for over a thousand years.

When coal replaced wood as the main fuel source in the 1800s, coppicing and pollarding largely stopped, allowing these veterans to mature while keeping their unique silhouettes. Already providing tremendous support for biodiversity (oaks can support over 2,300 species of birds, mammals, invertebrates, fungi, mosses and lichens), the veterans have started developing physical features crucial to wildlife – lifted bark, standing and fallen dead wood, hollows, snags and crevices where insects burrow, birds nest and bats roost.

Perhaps one day an acorn from one of our veteran oaks, collected and stashed by a squirrel or a jay, will grow into one of these new trees, becoming part of the cycle of renewal and regeneration – and in time, becoming a veteran itself.

Julie Riley, Ecologist