Wild Voices | Trees for Tomorrow

0:01ZOE HILL If I collect just say a hundred grams of something,

0:04 that can be 2,000 future trees. In 20 years time I can collect from those and those 2,000 trees can become 200,000 trees.

0:17ROSIE HOLDSWORTH Welcome to Wild Voices, a special series

0:20 from Wild Tales of inspiring conversations about people, nature and the stories that connect us. It's often said that trees are the lungs of the planet. And as the impacts of climate change become increasingly visible, their importance has never been greater. In this episode of Wild Voices, Ajay Tegala is joined by Zoe Hill, the National Trust's Tree Nursery Officer, to discover what it takes to care for 50,000 tree saplings, how she's helping to create a more climate-resilient landscape, and what we can all do to help trees thrive.

0:55AJAY TEGALA Hello and welcome to another Wild Voices episode

0:58 of Wild Tales. I'm Ajay Tegala, Nature Communicator and National Trust Ranger on Britain's very first nature reserve, Wicken Fen, and today I'm experiencing another first. I'm in the studio chatting with Zoe Hill, the National Trust's first and only Tree Nursery Officer. Hi Zoe, how are you doing?

1:19ZOE HILL Yeah, not bad thank you. Yourself?

1:21AJAY TEGALA Very well, thank you very much. Very excited to

1:23 talk to you. And I thought I'd start with asking you really, what is being a Tree Nursery Officer really like?

1:30ZOE HILL You know what, it's very unique, you know, my job

1:34 revolves so much around kind of what's going on in the environment. You know, I spend a lot of my time kind of, I go out, I propagate, I kind of grow on and I supply. And so being able to kind of do that is just, it's one of the most incredible jobs.

1:52AJAY TEGALA I gather you were a gardener before this so is that

1:54 where your propagation love began?

1:57ZOE HILL Yeah so I worked on a kind of semi-private estate

2:01 managing kind of 10 acres of grounds with the team and we did a lot of annual bedding displays and when I was training we did a lot of propagation on those and I kind of I just fell in love with being able to just kind of create something from like one specimen and so you know I kind of took that love of being able to grow a couple thousand geraniums.

2:23 And then I saw a job for a Tree Nursery Officer and I was like, wow, I can do that for trees too. And it kind of just like got the cogs turning in my brain of being able to go like, okay, I can propagate more and more things. And then I was able to then place all these little different bits together.

2:42AJAY TEGALA And for people that may not be familiar with the

2:43 term propagation, how would you describe that?

2:46ZOE HILL I kind of describe it as a way of being able to

2:50 reproduce a plant. You can do it so many different ways. You can do it by seed, you can do it by cuttings, you can do it with a leaf. There's so many different ways to be able to propagate a plant. It's almost, you know, it's like having plant babies in a way. You're able to then create kind of that genetic matchup of material. You know, a lot of times you see the 50% of the parent plant if it's a seed or, you know, you're taking 100% of the genetic material if it's a cutting. And so you're able to kind of directly pass on a lineage of a plant in a way.

3:19AJAY TEGALA That's amazing. Tell me about your office

3:21 because it's a tree nursery what does that look like?

3:25ZOE HILL My office so to speak is all outside I have a really

3:31 nice shade tunnel which enables me to grow a range of species with a kind of certain level of protection. I have outdoor growing beds which I can grow kind of in the region of 30,000 trees just out in the open in soil that we kind of work, we manicure, we tailor to the trees we want to grow. And then I also have like outdoor growing areas where I have kind of specialised air pruning pots that we sow our seed into and we can grow those out in those pots.

4:00 And that gives the rangers like a perfect way of planting those saplings because they're so easy. They're kind of a one inch cell that's maybe 20 centimetres long. They can take out a bundle of 100 and plant really easily.

4:14AJAY TEGALA And how many trees are we talking about? What sort

4:17 of numbers are involved?

4:19ZOE HILL So in the nursery we went through this other day, we

4:22 currently have 41 different species of tree on site. And currently we have 50,000 trees in the nursery. And with that, we're talking maybe 20,000 of those going out this year and then a further 20 going out next year. And kind of that revolving cycle.

4:39AJAY TEGALA And are there any particular species that you

4:41 particularly love and that you're excited about?

4:44ZOE HILL See, it's... There's a bit of like, because I was

4:46 speaking to my volunteers about this the other day, and we were all talking about like, oh, you know, trees you remember from your childhood. And one none of us mentioned was spindle. And yet in an environment now, we love spindle. It's a tree, large shrub kind of thing. And this time of year, it's got lovely pink fruits, which on the inside have the orange kind of seeds. And it's just none of us can remember seeing it as a child. And yet as an adult, they're just so amazing.

5:14AJAY TEGALA I was the same. I think I first learnt it when I

5:16 was probably a teenager. Someone pointed it out. And it's great for birds, isn't it? Great food source for them.

5:21ZOE HILL Yeah, it's just like... You know, you can see it

5:24 now. Every time you look in a hedgerow, you spot it, you know. It's amongst the blackthorn, it's amongst the hawthorn, you know. And it just, it stands out. It just catches your eye.

5:33AJAY TEGALA That's the lovely thing when you get to know more

5:35 species. You start to spot them, don't you, in the wild. Yeah. But of course, with you propagating them and sort of caring for them, that must be quite a big responsibility, actually.

5:47ZOE HILL It kind of really is in a way, you know. You almost

5:50 really take ownership of them. Sometimes you think, okay, I'm growing 3,000 of this. Even if you get kind of 10 that don't happen to kind of succeed as well, there is this kind of level of like, oh, really frustrating. But also it's amazing because, you know, if I collect just say 100 grams of something, that can be 2,000 future trees. And then I'll say, okay, we'll plant out those 2,000 trees. In 20 years time, I can collect... From those and those 2,000 trees can become 200,000 trees.

6:24AJAY TEGALA Yeah so you're playing a small but huge part

6:26 actually in history really with things that could live for well hundreds of years to come potentially. Yeah. And so what is perhaps one of the most precious seeds that you've collected in your time?

6:38ZOE HILL I think it's probably going to have to go with some of

6:40 the white beams. I'm in an area where we don't particularly have many and you know They're a little bit more on the kind of pickier side to propagate. I personally haven't managed to do it very well, but I know there's people that specialise in it. Whitebeams have so many cultivars as well. You know, we've got local ones to us like odometer, which is named because it's a sorbus near a car park meter, hence why it's called odometer.

7:07 And then you've got things like chedorensis, which is on the Cheddar Gorge, which is just up the road from us. And so I'm kind of trying to work with those and try and start propagating those and it's almost like a challenge

7:17AJAY TEGALA Yeah yeah and this is obviously Somerset so that's

7:20 where you're based the Holnicote Estate?

7:22ZOE HILL Yes yes on Holnicote so Holnicote very unique you

7:25 know with 12 and a half thousand acres with almost like a mosaic of habitat you know we've got salt marshes we've got temperate rainforest we've got our riparian habitats, you know we've got kind of coastland, heathland, you know I have the most unlimited choice to go select our seed from.

7:44AJAY TEGALA Amazing. And so supplying them obviously for the

7:46 estate and for other people is how it works. Is there kind of quite a wide audience of people these trees are going to?

7:53ZOE HILL So at the moment, we're just supplying our estate.

7:57 But as the nursery progresses through its kind of development phases, the ambition is we'll start supplying some of our wider Somerset properties, whether that's our Quantocks and our Mendips or local kind of other National Trust sites. But we're also working with our tenant farmers. The hope is to start supplying hedging packs, fruit trees for them to plant. And so we'll graft our fruit trees in the nursery as well. And those will be from local varieties that we can then kind of put out for our tenants to create orchards.

8:29AJAY TEGALA So it's fantastic there's these opportunities to

8:31 expand. But it's kind of mind blowing that actually for one estate, there's this such a huge number of trees that you're working with.

8:38ZOE HILL Absolutely. It's, you know, when we think about a tree

8:40 plant in this winter, we're talking one field. And we're going to put in the region of 8,000 trees in there, it seems like such a big number. Actually, when you look at it as a scale, it's actually so small. And, you know, over time, as we kind of produce more trees, it's going to be amazing to see how those go out and not into just our kind of our local environment, but into the wider environment as well.

9:04AJAY TEGALA And so before your role came along, presumably the

9:07 Trust were sourcing trees from elsewhere, but then they realised, actually, this is something that we can be doing ourselves.

9:13ZOE HILL I'm going to speak from our property personally,

9:15 but you know, we were sourcing our trees from some of the other local nurseries. And what we started to kind of think about here was actually, where are they getting their trees from? Sometimes these nurseries, whilst they do grow a lot themselves, they unfortunately have to buy in their surplus. And so there's kind of this like ongoing traceability for trees that we thought was very important for us in kind of knowing what we're planting is the best of what we could be planting.

9:47 And so that kind of forwarded the movement for us to start producing our own trees. There was also that carbon thinking element. With growing trees you don't just think about the carbon tax to grow them, but it's also kind of the getting them to us as well.

10:01AJAY TEGALA And it's quite an incredible job that you're

10:05 doing. But it's not something you do on your own, is it? I'm guessing that volunteers probably play an important part in supporting you?

10:11ZOE HILL Absolutely.

10:13 I couldn't do half the work I do without volunteers. We'll go out, we'll collect seed together. And just that, you know, we'll spend all day out between one or two woodlands where we can collect five or six different species. Which we can then bring back into the nursery. We'll then process all together and then we stratify them together.

10:32 We sew them together. We do everything and they're involved in the whole process, which I think they really enjoy because it gives them also a sense of ownership in the kind of environment that we're creating, not only inside the nursery, but outside of the nursery as well.

10:47AJAY TEGALA And I suppose you've got to think about

10:49 disease and biosecurity. I suppose that's part of the consideration as well.

10:54ZOE HILL Yeah, so that's kind of a big thing in the nursery.

10:57 So we're actually the first property in the Trust where our nursery is plant healthy certified. And that means we've almost gone above and beyond to become biosecure. It's really important for us that coming into the nursery, we're not bringing in any pest diseases or pathogens. And so we have a very strict kind of cleaning our boots procedure, making sure that our clothing is clean before we come in. But we also take that out with us as well. If we go to collect seed from one woodland, We want to ensure that our boots are clean before we go in, our tools are clean before we go in.

11:28 So we're not spreading anything, not only between woodlands, but then to and from the nursery either.

11:33AJAY TEGALA So when your day starts, your first job basically

11:36 is to clean your boots then?

11:38ZOE HILL Pretty much. So I actually have a dedicated pair

11:40 of nursery boots that do not leave the nursery. Just because, you know, it's cleaning your boots every day. It's one of those things that could slip your mind. And so I take that error process out of the equation.

11:51AJAY TEGALA And I suppose biosecurity and not... The

11:54 spread of disease is even more of a consideration with climate change. And so this year, having faced such a serious drought in the grass, it's been obvious seeing that die and trees losing their leaves so much earlier. Trees are so important to combating climate change for so many reasons, aren't they?

12:12ZOE HILL Yes, yes, absolutely. They enable almost like a cooler

12:15 microclimate beneath them. And that not only helps the tree, but also it helps all the ground floor and things as well.

12:23AJAY TEGALA And in terms of providing shade, that's really

12:26 useful for animals and also for people out walking as well, isn't it?

12:29ZOE HILL Absolutely. You know, I saw a study this year where

12:33 they took the temperature of tarmac from an area that was shaded by a tree versus not. And there was almost a 20 degree difference. And that's kind of, it's a very simple way for us to see the effect that just a simple tree cover can have, you know, for us and wildlife.

12:50AJAY TEGALA That's absolutely incredible. And then also things

12:52 that are perhaps harder to see, just how much carbon they're storing as well and how important it is for us to have so many more trees.

13:00ZOE HILL You know, absolutely. You know, it's not just the

13:02 carbon they're able to store. You know, we're also talking about kind of the reduced soil erosion, the flood mitigation with the increased rainfalls we're seeing in winter. The trees are able to help mitigate the floods we see with the ability to take on water, slow the flow of water. Kind of those kind of things.

13:20AJAY TEGALA So really trees are just nature's perfect way of

13:23 combating climate change and providing what the environment needs.

13:27ZOE HILL They're so unique in what they're able to achieve,

13:30 but also so broad in what they can do.

13:33AJAY TEGALA And does climate change have any other big

13:37 bearings on your job?

13:39ZOE HILL Yeah, so there's lots of things that we see now,

13:42 especially like I've been in the role for three years. In the three years, every single season has looked different. When I look back to last year, trees weren't going dormant in the nursery until almost December. That really affects how we manage the nursery. I'm unable to lift those trees until they've entered dormancy, which means our rangers here on the ground have a much shorter planting window.

14:04 And so that's kind of affected what I've grown this year. I'm growing more cell-grown trees, which we can then go plant out end of November, early November even, rather than our bare rootstock. And I'm expecting to do that again this year. And then kind of outside of the nest, we see those effects too, you know.

14:21 Like last year, a lot of people would have worked out, you know, you looked at an oak last year. It was an incredible mast year. You know, there was no getting away from it for a lot of tree species. And then what you're seeing this year is essentially it's almost like a blank slate. There's nothing, you know.

14:36 A lot of these oaks put so much energy into trying to produce seed last year, they've almost exhausted themselves. And what we're going to see is more of that. We're going to see trees. Not really doing a marsh year how they're supposed to. You know, certain trees will do marsh years biannually. Some trees do it every five, ten years. And what we're going to see is they're going to become much more sporadic. You know, we're not going to be able to predict when that's going to come. Kind of going to happen.

15:01AJAY TEGALA So that makes it harder for the trees and harder

15:05 for you, I suppose, in managing your work.

15:08ZOE HILL Now that we're seeing trees seed earlier, what we're

15:11 seeing is by winter, a lot of our mammals and birds have a depreciated food source. We're also going to see is our natural regeneration of trees becoming much less, you know, a tree seed needs certain conditions in order to germinate. And with them seeding earlier. We're not going to see those kind of conditions in the environment they're being put into and so what we're going to see is certain species struggling to get away afterwards it's hard on the trees what we're seeing here you know especially like this year if people looked out into their garden they'll see a beech it's almost got no leaves on now because they've just suffered so harshly in the drought and what that also means for me is like this year a lot of our seed

15:55 ripened maybe four to six weeks earlier. I plan my year out in kind of March, I look in my calendar, I'm like, okay, I'll typically collect seed here, here, here. And this year, I had to adjust completely, you know, I'd usually start seed collecting now. I've been seed collecting for the past six weeks, you know, I'm over halfway through now. And so the climate change is having a massive effect on even just the quality of fruit as well. You know, what we're seeing is things like this year our hazelnuts, a lot of the viable embryo inside it's not really there it's kind of just the the drought has just made them suffer essentially.

16:36AJAY TEGALA When you're propagating you're putting a lot

16:38 of care into keeping them alive and helping them to establish and water is essential for that obviously in the wild drought is making it really hard how are you combating water shortage in your role?

16:49ZOE HILL Water is a is a such a hard one in my role I can't

16:54 really put aside that water conservation, you know, these trees I'm growing need water. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to water in the most conservative way possible. Their rootstock is being watered by kind of they're like seep hoses. They trickle out a little bit of water twice a day, which allows the ground to stay moist.

17:15 But I'm not oversaturating. I'm not using more than I have to. And then our kind of our pots are being watered twice a day, but they're being watered at 6am and 7pm, which allows the least amount of kind of surface evaporation. And so whilst I'm still using the same amount of water, I'm conserving it in a way because it's going to kind of last longer on our trees.

17:38AJAY TEGALA Are there any species that are better at

17:40 growing in drier conditions that you're perhaps looking to produce more of now?

17:45ZOE HILL Yeah, so there's a fair few, you know, we've got

17:47 things like our red oaks, they actually do well in kind of the both extremes, they do okay when they're really wet and waterlogged, but they also do okay when they're kind of more droughted, you know, and we're seeing that in our environment as well, you know, out there this year, while some of our oaks have looked a little bit worse for wear, the red oaks have looked very well, you know, they've seeded really well this year, you know, in the nursery I'm seeing that too.

18:13 When you look towards our growing beds this year, the greenest crops were those red oaks, so those aren't native to the UK, but they can develop a really climate resilient woodland in combination with our native trees. Some people wouldn't have heard of provenance zones, but essentially that's kind of regions of the UK that are kind of specified by growers where Somerset is in a 305, we're quite a southern provenance, we're kind of looking more south. Sometimes that is just simply towards Cornwall.

18:46 Species down there that have been in the wild for a long time things like our shrubs like our spindle and our older buckthorn using those to foster our populations. When we're looking at things like oaks we're looking to more places like France where for they've been ahead of us in the climate we've had for 20 30 years you know those trees have been able to genetically adapt themselves to that and so we're looking more towards Eastern Europe southern France regions to get our seed from, to kind of it develop those more drought characteristics in our seed and what we can do is we can plant those in a mix in our woodlands and that can help develop a more resilient long-term mix as they will kind of reproduce with our

19:29 local provenance seed and start kind of genetically hardening almost.

19:34AJAY TEGALA Ah so you're gradually yeah you're gradually

19:36 sort of phasing them in alongside the native species yeah.

19:39ZOE HILL Yes yeah.

19:41AJAY TEGALA And I suppose that that's important for the

19:42 wildlife that depends on them as well, being able to have shelter when needed and also seeds for them to feed on too.

19:49ZOE HILL Absolutely. You know, that's, it's one of the really

19:51 important things with trees, you know, people often think of a tree as just kind of as itself is just one of these amazing habitats, but it's also, you know, the food it gives, it's the shade it's giving, it's kind of the ground stability as well, you know, on the edge of rivers and stuff. Trees almost lock in the ground.

20:09AJAY TEGALA And so, yeah, you mentioned that obviously some of

20:11 the hazelnuts aren't so good at the moment. These red oaks are doing well. Are there any other sort of particular native tree species that you're worried about for the future in particular?

20:21ZOE HILL When you look at trees now in the environment, it's

20:24 very obvious which ones are doing well, which ones aren't. I'd be concerned for things like hornbeams, things like beeches. You know, we're seeing increasingly these drier conditions. They're just not thriving. In our new woodland plantings they're the first things we're seeing struggling and and I think you know I think they'll be in our what in our kind of environment for a long time to come but I do worry about the success we're going to have with them in the future.

20:51AJAY TEGALA Because beech trees in particular they do a thing is

20:55 if I got this right called Marcescence is it well they're supposed to hold on to those dead leaves until later on and obviously that's not happening and So that's having an impact on their life cycle?

21:05ZOE HILL Absolutely yeah and you know we're seeing in their

21:08 seed often as well like a lot of times now when I'm collecting beach seed every year there's kind of been a reduction in viable seed and obviously that'll then affect the onward production of beach if we're not able to get viable seed the tree also isn't self-seeding and so out in the wild we're probably going to end up seeing less and less kind of natural regeneration of things like beech and hornbeam.

21:32AJAY TEGALA They're two of my favourites actually. I remember

21:34 learning the Latin for beech is Fagus Sylvatica isn't it? Yeah. I guess you're a bit of a whiz on all the Latin names as well.

21:42ZOE HILL Yeah. And so it's my volunteers. It's a love-hate

21:45 thing. I only do Latin. It's universal. The Latin name is the Latin name. Let's go to a garden plant, something like a geranium. That is a common name. It's very different to the plant. It's a botanical name. And that's kind of the same sometimes go for trees. You know, if I said a goat willow. Someone might think of that as a slightly different tree.

22:06 And so I tend to always try and use the Latin name. It enables that we're all talking about the same thing, but sometimes a Latin name can give the kind of details about the tree and where you might find it. Like Acer Campestre is field maple. And so it's of the woods, kind of that kind of thing. So you know you're going to find it in a field.

22:27AJAY TEGALA I'm putting you on the spot a bit, but one of my

22:28 favourites is, I love to say, Fraxinus excelsior, which is ash. Yes, yes. Do you know what that means? I've often wondered.

22:35ZOE HILL Do you know what? I don't.

22:38AJAY TEGALA No worries.

22:38ZOE HILL Because I just don't have much dealings with ash. And

22:41 so it's never been one that I've spent lots of time learning about. But as a name, it just rolls off the tongue very well, doesn't it?

22:48AJAY TEGALA Yeah. And it's interesting that you don't have

22:50 much that you're dealing with with ash. Because I was going to ask about that, because obviously... They've suffered a lot with the ash dieback disease and I've heard that there might be some resilient strains coming through but is that anything you're aware of or work with in any way?

23:03ZOE HILL So I believe there is you know Kew have been out to

23:06 Holnicote in the past and they've collected seed from trees that they believe to have some level resistance and. Kind of within the nursery setting now we are allowed to produce ash but from a disease point of view it's a very hard line to draw if we if we grew ash in the nursery and it did develop ash dieback there's not only a big kind of biosecurity point there but it's also kind of a financial point you know those trees grow in the nursery for two years if at the end of that two-year cycle they get ash dieback that whole kind of selection of trees has to unfortunately be destroyed and so at the moment there's not the the desire for a lot of other nurseries to grow ash yet but i think in the next 20 years we're

23:53 going to start seeing nurseries to producing those certain strains of ash that are resistant you know we're seeing in elms there's now disease resistant strains of elms that a lot of bigger commercial nurseries are starting to produce and so i slowly think over time we're going to see these start to work their way back into our environment that would be lovely because i i couldn't really even tell you what an elm looks like because i see them so infrequently yeah it's it's one of those that like As a kid, I remember seeing them in hedgerows and things, but you never really correlated them with anything because you didn't see them often enough.

24:26 And now, in the environment, they're so few and far between. The ones you do see, you really hold a liking towards because you know they're surviving and they're trying their hardest to stop the beetle getting to them.

24:40AJAY TEGALA I work on a peatland reserve and obviously I

24:42 know that you'll be using peat-free soils. But I'm intrigued to know a little bit about the kind of the growing material, the soils and the mulches that you use.

24:50ZOE HILL Yes. So we are fully peat free.

24:53 I'm of the generation that's never been able to touch peat. And so I've always had to kind of work with our peat free compost. And a lot of the time, you know, when they come in, I try and buy a compost that's kind of based on bark. That tends to give the best base for growing media. And what we'll do in the nursery is we'll kind of we'll tailor that to our stock. A lot of the times now we're adding kind of moisture retention media into those in order to them to essentially stay moist the whole summer.

25:22 You know we're seeing a lot with our peat free media they will dry out, they'll desiccate and almost become hydrophobic and so those moisture retention medias allow this kind of compost to stay. Moist for longer. You know, we'll add drainage to it, we'll add some horticultural grit, you know, perlite, those kind of things to allow the free movement of water in the compost.

25:42 It doesn't stay water logged in wet conditions. You know, we'll use in our bare root beds, it's a bit more kind of slightly different to our kind of compost mix. We'll work with the soil, we'll often mix in things like leaf mold, composted bark, we'll occasionally use a green manure. And so that will kind of grow on the growing bed when it's not in use, work in. And not only does that kind of enrich the soil, it also acts as almost like a bio-fumigant.

26:10 And so that's not a phrase a lot of people might have come across. But it's essentially the green manure will kind of almost suck out some of the nasties in the soil. It kind of allows the soil to rest well and kind of over a couple of years. The soil then becomes back to almost like a stable state and it's kind of in its optimum for tree planting and so we use green manures for that and so when we plant in it then we're getting the best trees and what we're doing now more and more is we'll mulch our trees saying that 20 years ago a lot of gardeners wouldn't have done as they wouldn't have mulched their beds as there wasn't a need whereas a lot of the time now we'll mulch our beds because the moisture retention underneath

26:54 that mulch is 20 times what it would be without it.

26:58AJAY TEGALA And when you say mulching the beds, is that kind

27:00 of like leaf litter?

27:01ZOE HILL Yeah, so that can be leaf litter. It can be kind of

27:04 our garden compost. Sometimes we use small aggregate. And that's for kind of some of the more kind of not delicate seedlings, but some of the ones that kind of if there was a living media, so things like your leaf mould or compost, if they're on it, sometimes that can have a negative effect on the soil.

27:27 And so we'll sometimes use like a small aggregate as a mulch instead of those.

27:31AJAY TEGALA Gosh, there's so much to think about. Such a

27:33 complex, so many, so many factors. So is there one species that grows particularly well, that you're particularly fond of, perhaps a favourite, that is just a dream to work with?

27:42ZOE HILL Oh, see, I...

27:43AJAY TEGALA Or are they all hard?

27:44ZOE HILL I love...

27:47 As a gardener, I think a lot of people relate to this, is that our favourite thing changes every time we see something different. At the moment in the nursery, I'm loving Rowans. They're... Our bare root rows are growing so well in a season we're seeing a metre and a half of growth you know they're still luscious they're green. In one year I can get them from seed to plant was ready to be planted out and in an earthly setting that's just that's amazing that we're able to kind of captivate that much growth in a tree to then plant out essentially.

28:17AJAY TEGALA We've talked about the process we've talked about

28:19 climate change I want to sort of look to the future because obviously there's there's a lot of challenges, a lot of changes. And I wondered what your thoughts are on what the UK landscape from a tree perspective might look like in 50 years time.

28:32ZOE HILL Do you know what? I think we're going to see some

28:33 big changes in our landscape. You know, something I'd like to see more of is kind of that kind of softer woodland edges. You know, I want a bit more of that mosaic of habitats. I want our kind of our woodlands and our heathlands to mix up a bit more. You know, that's how we're going to develop a more resilient woodland. It would be amazing if. We stopped having a bit more of that kind of monoculture. Often in plantings, we used to see people like, we want an oak woodland, we want a beech woodland.

29:01 It'd be great to see those being mixed with kind of those native broadleaf shrubs as well. You know, the underlay of food for dormice, the birds, kind of a bit more maybe restored temperate rainforest around here. You know, there's a lot of those in the south end of the country. And we're very lucky that we're able to have that habitat.

29:20 I'd love to see some more of that.

29:22AJAY TEGALA And for your role specifically, I mean, the

29:25 practical realities of growing tens of thousands of trees into the future. How do you see that changing?

29:31ZOE HILL I think it's a hard one. I think nurseries always

29:34 over time have been very dynamic. We're very kind of we become very aware of the changes because in that space every year things change. And I think what we're going to see is we'll grow. I think it's how we're growing things. I think we're going to revert back to growing things bare root. 40 years ago, bare root was the way we grew trees. That was the best way. And then over time, we started growing sail-grown trees just because they're more efficient. Whereas I think for a quality of tree, we're going to go back towards bare root. And I see that in the nursery as well.

30:04 We'll start growing back more towards bare root. I think how we kind of manage water in the nursery will change. I think there's going to be a lot more mulching, a lot more wider plant spacings to allow that water to be absorbed by the tree better.

30:20AJAY TEGALA And just to pick up on bare root, I mean, I'm

30:22 visualising kind of like no soil and just roots. Is that what it is?

30:26ZOE HILL That's pretty much it. Yeah. You know, we'll plant our

30:28 tree in the ground. It'll grow on for a season. We'll then lift it. And it might have some soil attached to the roots, but typically it'll be kind of. A non-root bound structure essentially so we'll lift it and it'll be they're typically larger which is why we kind of went away from them you know the smaller cell growing trees were just a lot easier for rangers and people to plant so yeah.

30:52AJAY TEGALA And in terms of water and water availability one

30:54 thing I'd really like to see is more use of the kind of the the bath water and the dish water and this summer I was spreading that in the garden and there's so much water that's wasted that could be used to help things grow.

31:06ZOE HILL Absolutely. At home, every time I do the washing up,

31:09 I'll save that grey water to then use in the garden. You know, personally, I'll use kind of natural soaps, whether it's in kind of my bath showers, whether it's in my washing up. And so I'm sure the water I'm putting out isn't full of chemicals. I'm also thinking like the things that I'm washing up in, we don't want to be putting oils and things really into our gardens.

31:32 And so I think it is also just knowing what your what you're putting out into your garden and there's a lot more so just rainwater conservation a lot of people now just at home they're going to start putting water butts on their sheds. You know I'm in Somerset and for the first time in 50 years we've got a hose pipe ban that's something we've never dealt with here and so I think even just locally people are going to start thinking more about water conservation whether that's rainwater grey water and I think we will start seeing that in the nursery sector but We're talking commercial quantities and so it's going to be how we're managing our water I think.

32:07AJAY TEGALA And so for ordinary gardeners obviously they can use

32:12 grey water that's one tip for them but do you have any other tips for people at home and how they can help their trees have the best chance for the future?

32:20ZOE HILL I'm going to say mulching is really important. I

32:23 think regular little and often waters are better than once a week going out and giving a large water. There's quite interesting things now. They're like water bags that go around a tree or near a tree, and you can fill those up. And instead of kind of you water the ground, and in the state that it's in, it runs off, those little water bags will allow the water to slowly trickle into the soil. And so I'd recommend those. And I think just those few little things will help trees establish better.

32:53AJAY TEGALA And once they've established, they can go on to

32:55 live for so many years. And do you ever think...

32:58ZOE HILL They can outlive us.

32:59AJAY TEGALA Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. Do you ever think

33:01 about some of your trees and the legacy they're going to have beyond your lifetime?

33:06ZOE HILL Absolutely.

33:07 Some of the rangers here took me to a planting that was done the year I was born. And when you look at it, you can't even fathom that it's only that old when you look at it. The trees that we've already grown in the nursery that have been planted out, I think of those in 20 years time. I think that's going to be an established woodland just in 20 years. I can't imagine to even think of it in 100, 200, 300 years. We're talking future generations down the line. And so it's almost unfathomable to think about.

33:36AJAY TEGALA And to conclude, do you think you'd have a message

33:39 for those future generations in years to come in relation to your experience and to trees?

33:44ZOE HILL I think it's all just about appreciating what we've

33:47 got. I think it's just appreciate what's around you, you know, look after the small bits we have, as well as nurturing those we're going to create and just kind of adapt. The world we have is changing. We're going to have to change what we're doing. And so just be welcoming of kind of change.

34:06AJAY TEGALA I think that's a really great message. And I've

34:09 thoroughly enjoyed listening to sort of a taste of your life and the amazing things you're doing. So many things to think about. And yeah, I'm kind of envious, really. I'd love to come and see you and join you one day.

34:19ZOE HILL Oh, that'd be fabulous.

34:20AJAY TEGALA Thanks so much, Zoe. And thanks to everybody for

34:22 listening to this episode of Wild Voices from Wild Tales. You can follow us on Instagram At NT Wild Tales, and you can listen to more episodes of Wild Tales on your podcast app of choice.