September visit: Site survey
Acid sandy habitats in uk have few native species of plants. Dominant trees usually consist of birch, oak or Scots pine and open areas have heather, bracken or one or two species of grass. There are a range of other shrubs and herbs but not as many as you would find on more neutral or alkaline soils. My first impression of the site was of a formal garden drifting out into a rather unkempt woodland garden. It is tending to revert back to its natural state but it still has many more species of plants than you would find on a natural acid sandy habitat in this area.

An immediate question for me was what do people want from the site, there are several nature reserves in the area which have a mixture of scrubby woodland and exposures of the sandy soil or sandstone rock which are well known for their invertebrate populations especially solitary bees and wasps. On the other hand it may be better to recreate the garden as a garden rather than a natural habitat, restoring the landscape in some way. My initial inclination would be to open up the original vista from the house to the lake and clear some of the undergrowth but I would want to consider this more carefully while studying the ground plan and species distributions in detail.

One species that was in great abundance on this visit was Graphocephala fennahi a distinctive leaf hopper with a red stripe which lives on Rhododendron. There were clouds of them by the lake, its interesting that the leaf hopper has come to UK from USA and the Rhodo it was living on R. ponticum has come here from western Asia. When R. ponticum gets out of control in a garden situation or when it escapes into the countryside then it is considered an invasive weed as it smothers the ground over large areas preventing other species from growing. Its easy to see how it would escape from this garden as there is no barrier to preventing it getting into the surrounding woodland, it might be best to remove it altogether from the garden to protect the surrounding ‘natural’ woodlands. There are plenty of other rhododendrons that don’t (yet) behave badly that could replace R. ponticum in the garden.

I was please to find some mushrooms, the very wet summer should have brought them on but it had been dry for about 10 days prior to the visit so this has stopped them in their tracks. There were milk caps, Russulas (yellow, brick red, grey, and large white types), red cracking boletes, the deceiver, earth balls, and many zoned polypore. Many of these species of fungi are mychorrizal which means they can only grow in association with certain types of tree. I suspect there are more species of fungi here than if it just had the native range of plant species present so the garden plants especially the trees are probably increasing the diversity of fungi too.

There are also a good range of ferns on site, these range from wall rue and hearts tongue growing on the limestone retaining wall round the formal garden to various larger species such as male fern and buckler fern growing in the woodland and along streams. I would recommend a proper survey of the ferns as I did not get a chance to do this and its possible that some of the species along the wet flushes may be quite unusual.

One other area I was quite interested in was the old tennis court. There was one type of bright orange/yellow waxcap mushroom growing there but it looked like old grassland typical of where there might be quite a few of these waxcaps under more favourable weather conditions. I would like to see the grass cut at least once a year and the cuttings removed, preferably late in summer. Try this cutting regime for a couple of years to see if an interesting area of grassland develops for the solitary wasps in spring/summer and later the fungi, there look to be bare sandy areas caused by rabbits and/or moles.