If you are thinking of buying a woodland, or just want a useful resource...

if you are thinking of buying a woodland, or just want a useful reference site, this site is pretty good.

As is the Small Woods Association, link to it here

You know, i would love to buy a small woodland. I like the idea of owning - and protecting a wood. And I could coppice it for my fire.

A lot of peolpe are, JG, as the traditional 100acre woods are being carved up and sold in 5 acre or less strips...silly prices some of them.

Is it the green thing to do though?

Well it depends..if 5 acre lot splitting means the people who buy the lots gently manage the woodland, providing different areas for biodiversity and also learn to love woodlands and become "greener" in outlook...and also use wood instead of at least some fossil fuel...then to me that is A Jolly Good Thing....

If the alternative was a 100 acre wood just gets left to fall into a tangled mess..yes it has a lot of biodiversity BUT it tends to be based around decaying ground flora and fauna, with a lot of very tall trunks competing for light and not much in the way of understorey or shrub/ground layer as the light is excluded...

Whereas, for example, our wood ( 3 and 1/2 acres) is managed so we coppice mainly Hazel ( letting in light to the ground layer) in selected areas, we leave older trees as standards, and leave fallen trees to decay naturally in some parts, we fell mature trees which will open up glades for other flora and fauna and we get the wood as a side benefit, thus reducing by half our use of oil to heat our house....

So an sympathetic management plan is IMO a better bet for biodiversity than just leaving a larger plot to rot.

Also small amenity plots owned by different people are less likely to be clear felled for timber and then planted up as a monculture of pine..( trees on parade...with very little to recommend them...)

Sorry...on my high ( saw) horse a bit there! but this is why we do, what we do, in our little woodland...

And it is so wonderful to have care of a small woodland...I cannot enthuse enough about how great it really is....

CW, you seem to be inline with the small wood land owners in the UK that we know. They really are proud of their wood and rightly so. It seems to work well if the owners of the whole wood talk to each other too.

JG look at the Small wood land owners site and the coppice woodland sites..I think they are all run by Tracy! But you will get a feel for the passions and the problems.

The woodland in the UK seems very much to be in a sad and unmanaged state. Its just that some woods around London have been purchased at a reasonable price and then shredded up to make a lot of very unjustifiable wealth for that individual.

About £10,000 an acre round here.

Wow Billy! Thats why I'm over here!

I must add that our woodland is only 25 years old and was fields before it was planted up...so we have no other woodland around apart from an ancient unmanaged tangled mess of a coppice wood, across the field...

we are an oasis of woodland surrounded by cut down hedges, conventionally farmed fields and orchards....

probably why we get such a lot of wildife!

I think that's the best thing to do if you can, as we have, buy agricultural land that is low grade and plant it up as a wood. This way you really are adding to the biodiversity and the biomass of your patch.

"The Woodland Way" by Ben Law is a good read and inspirational.

Agricultural land around here in plots of under 10 acres commands prices of £8-12k an acre too. Smaller plots command a premium because people want them as pony paddocks.

In France we are constantly and have always met ExPats that have bought a "nice place in the sun" and then find they also own a hectare or 2. So of course they buy a sit on mower and spend a whole day mowing it (or pay some other Brit to sit on a mower....which of course are called tractors!) and moaning about it. And then they have to strim the edges and "deal" with the moles and wildlife that make it difficult to mow.

The worst was one couple that when I pointed out the orchids in their field they moved them into the flower beds (so they died) because the couldn't mow round them with their "tractor".

Ok thats my rant! We need a "get my coat" smily

They MOVED their ORCHIDS

They MOVED their orchids?

Un - be - effing- lievable....

I am speechless