Woodland Conservation Groups

May 2025 - Friday Session & Barclays - Special Volunteering

Castle Wood Meadow

Two beautiful, sunny days and two wonderful, hard-working teams totalling 36 volunteers participated in our first couple of sessions this year, tackling Castle Wood Meadow.

For over one hundred years, a meadow has stretched down from the Castle Wood Rose Gardens to Crookston Road.  Unfortunately, over the last 5/6 years mowing has been erratic and, in fact, for almost 2 years now, it has not been mowed at all!  

Rather than being covered in wildflowers and other ground cover plants which attract bees and other pollinators, the meadow was very quickly being taken over by a combination of gorse, brambles and saplings, many of which are Turkey Oak, a non-native species now impacting our native oak populations - growing at a much faster rate, up to 30m tall, and being less valuable to wildlife.  What a huge task this turned out to be!

The first session on 9th May involved a Special Volunteering Day with an enthusiastic and hard-working team of 16 from Barclays who clocked up over 70 hours in this area, 40 of which were on the meadow itself removing the overgrowth.  Despite their amazing effort, the following week our own team of 20 returned to the meadow and added a further 60 hours of their combined time. 

In addition to working on the meadow itself, smaller teams focused on the area at the top, beyond the pathway.  Here, what appears to have been a formal shrubbery in the past, had become overgrown with cherry laurel, holly and, more recently, snowberry.  This last shrub, although attractive at times of the year, is also now widely recognised as invasive due to its aggressive spreading habit via underground rhizomes.  Much of the visible snowberry has now been removed although return visits will be required regularly to remove regrowth caused by the tight network of roots remaining underground.

As usual, the waste product from all this hard work was put to good use re-building an existing dead hedge, where yet another ‘desire path’ has emerged recently.  The hedge, in combination with a fallen dead tree, an existing standing dead tree, and the cutting back of a huge laurel tree, has helped create a light-filled opening in the trees which, hopefully, will result in a greater variety of ground vegetation and shrubs and an associated increase in pollinators and other invertebrates. 

But…there’s still more to do to maintain this beautiful meadow area and we will be back!