Join world-renowned botanist, Aljos Farjon on a walk around Barnes Common and find out how trees appear on open land, turning it into a forest within a human lifetime, and how the forest regenerates. It was previously thought that without grazing and canopy maintenance, oaks would eventually disappear from our forests and Aljos has been exploring English commons in his research to find out whether this is the case. Could British oak forests be able to regenerate on their own, without humans planting trees?

About half of our large trees on the Common are self-seeded oak trees. Most of them were acorns in the 1950s, growing slowly into a forest while the village and the city changed and grew around them. Some of our big oaks have been around for longer: our oldest trees are over 100 years old. And some of our future oaks have just started to grow from seed, or are just tiny saplings now.

Historically, Barnes Common has been grazing land, so most of our woodland is secondary woodland, naturally grown over the last 70 years. How did a muddy village common turn into an oak forest over less than a hundred years? Why are oaks so important for biodiversity and how have they shaped the English countryside? What makes an oak tree grown from a naturally seeded sapling healthier than a planted tree? Come along to our woodland walk and find out. We will also look out for fungi associated with oak trees and oak wood.

This walk will last approximately 2 hours, starting and ending at Vine Road Recreation Ground. Please dress appropriately for the weather and bring a bottle of water (you can re/fill it from the drinking fountain at the Pavilion).

Your ticket includes a 50% discount on a drink (hot or cold) at the Vine Road Community Cafe at the Pavilion.

Aljos Farjon is a botanist associated with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His world-renowned research was on conifers (630 species world-wide) at Kew and earlier at the universities of Oxford and Utrecht.

In recent years he has shifted his tree focus to the two native oaks in Britain, Quercus robur (pedunculate oak) and Q. petraea (sessile oak), especially the ancient oaks in England, about which he published the book Ancient Oaks in the English Landscape (Kew Publishing, 2 editions).

Following on from this he became interested in the natural regeneration of oaks. Barnes and other London commons turn out to be ideal locations for this study subject, so far resulting in two articles in the magazine British Wildlife.

Not a member of Barnes Common yet? Why not join us and support all our activities?

Find more information and join at http://barnescommon.org.uk/membership

Tickets:

All proceeds from ticket sales support future learning and conservation activities and we would encourage you, if you can, to pay full price. We do not want cost to be a barrier to our activities, so if for any reason you are unable to pay for the full price tickets, we have a limited number of discounted concession tickets.

Please contact [email protected] for more details.

Refund policy:

Unfortunately, we are unable to issue refunds on cancellations made within 2 weeks of the event. In some circumstances we may be able to offer a rebooking for a similar event.

Please contact [email protected] with any questions.