Elm

July 2025. A hot field with wildflower mix is sweltering in South Suffolk sunshine. The clay-rich topsoil has cracked over the past few weeks of drought. Foraging bees lend a desultory drone. Nearby, an ancient woodland is inviting us out of the heat, but we will need to struggle through fallen twigs, branches, grass tussocks and nettles and beneath its leafy skirts to enter there.

Inside, the vista expands into an ample space of hard trunks and lofty limbs; zones of light and shade; those myriad green flakes we call leaves clustering in aerial mosaic overhead.

The elm tree is very large and correspondingly old - evidently it is a remarkable survivor.  The lofty elms of my childhood have gone; only their clonal regrowth reminds us where they were before the bark beetle finds them and they die off after about 20 years. Their desiccated skeletons rattle in East Anglian hedgerows for a decade or so before rotting away. Meanwhile another generation of suckers is reaching for the sky. This elm is different:  it has inbuilt disease resistance which makes it a desirable variety - potentially a variety with a destiny. 

We are here for look for elm seeds. Emerging into a clearing packed with waist-high bracken and nettles, we can examine the branches of this venerable old tree to find clusters of petalloid seeds on twig tips. There aren't any to speak of - the tree has taken shock at the drought and dumped its children.  They lie like papery, brown farthings underfoot among the leaf litter. I have to pick up and bag handfuls of debris to get enough of them. 

The elm seeds contain an invisible message packed in their DNA.  Once they begin unpacking it, we hope they will grow into disease-resistant Ulmus laevis. With a bit of tree nursery help, we hope to spread them elsewhere in Britain. I will never see them grow great in my lifetime but perhaps a little fiddling labour now sorting through a bag of papery seeds is a gift to an uncertain future which others will enjoy, just as I enjoyed the towering elms of my Suffolk childhood. 

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Text and images © Tim Holt-Wilson, 2025

Rewilding Cringleford

Cringleford is a Norfolk village lying about two and a half miles distant from the city centre of Norwich. It is an affluent suburb close to the university and hospital, and lies sandwiched between the Yare valley and the city’s southern bypass. Its remaining arable fields are ripe for development. 

About a decade ago the slow process of converting farmland into premium housing estates began. Access roads were inserted and three-bed houses built in streets with names like Dragonfly Lane, Chervil Close and Nightingale Drive. Everyone wants a bigger house with a double garage, and everyone also wants green space.

Round House Way serves these estates and either side of it lies an area of green space. An aerial photograph on Google Maps shows a mosaic of bushes and grassland grown on land tumbled down from arable.

Round House Way, courtesy Google Earth Image @ 2025 Airbus

This ‘self-willed’ habitat has taken twenty years to develop its intricacy on what is essentially a housing company land bank. But time has been called on this natural growth. This year the western side was swiped and shredded to ground level, in preparation for redevelopment [photo 1]. 

1. Round House Way West, looking south (October 2025)

The eastern half remains. People might say “it’s derelict, it looks a mess - it’s a wasteland”. 

But what we find east of Round House Way is scrub land with a richly biodiverse fauna and flora – fruit of two decades of chance, natural elaboration. [photos 2 & 3]  An architecture of hawthorn, blackthorn, oak, rose, willow and bramble frames a herb-rich sward bumpy with anthills and the myriad craters of ground-nesting bees. A solitary cat ranges out from nearby houses, captivated by vole and shrew. Goldfinches flit among seed heads of teasel. Foxgloves and St John’s Wort star the grass. Toadstools shoulder up through the remnants of last-year’s matted vegetation. Processes of seed-time and decay are running their natural programmes at ground level; the loamy soil is bouncing back from the decades of agricultural treatment received from insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. Autumn is displaying a complex of yellows, browns, reds, russets and greens – falling leaf debris making the foundations for a future nutrient hoard. This land is owned by a housing company. 

2. Round House Way East, looking east (October 2025)

3. Round House Way East, looking south-west (October 2025)

The planet is in a Biodiversity Crisis. How can we turn local development into an engine for restoring biodiversity? It requires political will at national and local level, and buy-in from the building companies. If an environmental impact assessment has been carried out at Round House Way it will have assessed impact on a set of prescribed species, but ignored the cumulative value of allowing a self-willed ecological community to develop true biodiversity over a twenty-year span.  A real natural asset has grown up and could be incorporated into local Green Infrastructure if the political will – and awareness – were there.

But the flail mowers will move in soon and all this biological richness will be obliterated. A new ground-zero will be set – but a greatly impoverished one.

I am not asking for protection of the site – arguably any patch of land on this soil type in Cringleford could develop such biodiversity over a twenty-year time-span. I am asking for the biodiversity of such scrub lands routinely to be recorded and then evaluated in terms of their actual - and potential – assemblage value as ecological hotspots and corridors, and for this information to be translated into the planning process. I want all of this site’s biodiversity to receive greater consideration than the usual ecological consultants’ reports. This would require evaluation of the diversity of plants and invertebrates and not just vertebrates (Morris & Welch, 2023). The very early stages of abandonment of arable land can be highly productive for invertebrates (Fuller & Freeman, 2025). 

We know that scrub habitat is ecologically valuable. See, for example, a recent JNCC report which was written to inform government decision making (Mortimer et al, 2000). Scrub does pose challenges for practical management due to its successional nature, but its biodiversity value is absolutely clear. If there is a will to manage it properly it can revitalise the natural assets of urban and peri-urban areas such as Cringleford. It could be part of the invaluable reservoir of biodiversity which ensures the resilience of our nature networks in the face of climate change as well as the increasing pressure of human settlement. Scrub should be understood as contributing vital Green Infrastructure to development projects – provided it can be recognised and properly valued in terms other than financial ones. Round House Way East is a parish asset.

For example, a play area for children; a foraging terrain for birds; a place to go blackberrying and collecting sloes; a cherished suburban wilderness; airspace for bats to hunt moths; a resource for dog-walkers and bird-watchers; a secure place to dig a nest burrow. [photo 4] Round House Way East is a former arable field which is busy rewilding. Can we support that process for future generations of humans, plants and animals? 

4. An Ivy Bee (Colletes hederae) bringing back pollen to her nest hole at Round House Way East (October 2025)

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References

Fuller, RJ and Freeman, G (2025). Letting nature take back control: a paradigm shift in UK nature conservation? British Wildlife, 36.8, pp547-554.

Morris, RKA and Welch, MD (2023). Is invertebrate conservation in Great Britain best achieved by policies that increase species protection? Journal of Insect Conservation, 27(4).

Mortimer, SR et al. (2000). The nature conservation value of scrub in Britain. Report #308, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough.

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© Tim Holt-Wilson, 2025