And although the word is not found in my good but fairly new dictionary, it means to me, the encouragement of all kinds of wildlife within the bounds of local climate and geography. I'm sure that my bosses at Sussex Wildlife Trust would define it better, but I'll stick with this until someone enlightens me.

So? Why all the fuss. Well, we recently cut down about 15 largish alders in the name of biodiversity... You may remember that we could not do the job last winter because of the wet weather in a steep ghyll, and we were calling upon the Trust's hit squad to help us out. Last the week the job was done in a day, with two small chainsaws, some expertise, and a lot of person-power.

I mention in parenthesis that a new boss, who has just taken up her job as our local reserves officer was one of those chain-sawing. She is Alice Parfitt and came to us from the well-known Minsmere RSPB reserve in Suffolk. Our green team and I, together with Alice, hope we will have a long and productive relationship for Selwyn's Wood.

I now return to the 15 trees, which are now carefully stacked logs, providing homes for bugs and birds for many years. The main necessity for taking the trees down was to allow the fine range of mosses, lichens and ferns to develop on the sides of the ghyll. And far from the general notion of them needing lots of shade, they actually prefer nearly as much sun as shade. Hopefully these plants will develop more of their particular biodiversity for which the wood has something of a name. It takes all sorts of work to improve a habitat - you'll see.

I want to add that finally we are virtually free of the worst mud and we are looking to abandoning the further reaches of the wood to the spring, the nesting birds and most of the breeding mammals. It has been a long winter...

John Hall © 2003