The Afterlife of a Tree
The Afterlife of a Tree
The Afterlife of a Tree
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Death is full of life, with incredible ecosystem connections.
We see with features like raingardens how the soil, root systems, shape of the land, surface water, insects, even air temperature are all connected. Deadwood is also crucial to a successfully functioning ecosystem—more than 2000 invertebrate species require deadwood for their life cycles! When this aging chestnut tree began to reach the end of life, it cut off resources to larger branches and concentrated all remaining energy in a small section of living tissue in the main trunk. We removed the large dead branches in 2017 before they could become a safety risk and laid them around the still-living trunk. With a license from Scottish Natural Heritage and guidance from Echoes Ecology, we recreated roosts for pipistrelle bats in the standing stem. Freed of its dead weight, the trunk is now recovering into a healthy chestnut and the dead wood branches are bringing more ecological complexity. They provide for colonisation of deadwood organisms, fascinating fungi and lichens, specialist wildlife such as spiders and mites, plus a feast for bats and birds.
We are encouraging botanical diversity of the herbaceous plants in the disturbed ground surrounding the tree through a balance of management interventions. We allow native species to seed in naturally, but we also periodically remove disturbed-ground-loving species such as Cirsium arvense (creeping thistle) and Chamaenerion angustifolium (rosebay willowherb) to allow slower natives to establish a presence. Repairing the broken connections in the ecosystem by giving space for nature can provide benefits we haven’t yet realized.
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