sustainable – Stories from Nowhere Wood

June 27, 2025June 29, 2025

It’s Flying Ant Day!

Today is Flying Ant Day: the day that ants take to the air and fly at the same time. The ants are from different colonies that can be several hundred metres apart.

Let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

Swarm of flying yellow ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

To some, it’s a minor nuisance. They land in your lemonade, tangle in your hair, and make picnics suddenly less romantic. A swarm of tiny aviators with no regard for personal space.

Flying ants on the flowers of common ragwort. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Is there really anything much to celebrate? Would we not be better off without ants?

But pause a moment—really look. This is the wedding flight, the briefest of honeymoons, when new queens and males take to the skies to mate and search for new grounds and new beginnings. It’s a natural marvel unfolding on our doorsteps, so what is going on below the surface?

It starts underground, beneath a cracked paving stone, under a patch of sun-warmed earth: this is the colony, the kingdom of the ants. The colony pulses with organised purpose.

Yellow meadow worker ants. — Yellow meadow worker ants in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Tunnels and chambers run through the soil, branching and looping. Here, everything has a rhythm. The queen lays eggs, which are tended and nurtured. The queen is guarded with reverence because she is the provider of life to the colony.

Their larvae are fed and thousands of identical worker ants are formed. These do not have wings.

The power of ants lie in their numbers.

Some ants are the pirates of the wood: ferocious and aggressive, they will attack those who cannot defend themselves or have not learned to work with the ants. Like pirates, ants will protect anything that gives them what they want – usually food.

Some species roam in teams, tracking down caterpillars, beetle larvae, or even spiders. They subdue them not with brute force, but with strategy: surround, immobilise, overwhelm. A single ant may be no match for a wasp larva, but a dozen? A hundred? That’s a different story. Their venom can paralyse, their mandibles shear, and their numbers do the rest.

These ants are farming blackflies. [Photograph: Andrew Town]

Other ants are the gentle manipulators of blackfly insects, tending huge herds of them.

Blackflies suck the juices of a plant, excreting sweet sticky “honey dew”, which feeds the ants in the colony. In exchange, the ants give the blackflies protection and time to reproduce. Some ants actively”farm” the blackflies, by stroking them gently with their antennae to encourage them to produce honeydew. Like milking a cow.

Biologists call ants ‘keystone’ species. In architecture, the keystone is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the whole structure together. Remove it, and everything collapses.

Ants play this role in the architecture of the wood. Their tunnelling aerates the soil, letting water and oxygen reach the roots of plants. They break down waste, dead insects, and fallen leaves—recycling the detritus of life into the ingredients for growth.

Some species plant seeds by accident, dropping them underground where they germinate safely. Others protect plants from pests or farm aphids like cattle. A colony is not just a nest: it’s an engine of fertility, a subterranean society that quietly underpins the world above.

Take them away, and you begin to see the gaps. Soils become compacted. Nutrients stop cycling. Other animals—birds, lizards, even mammals—that feed on ants start to vanish too. The threads of connection begin to unravel.

The world is a better place with ants – and the flying ants are crucial, for this is where new queens mate with males and go to form new colonies, so the cycle of life continues for one more year. As long as the old colonies have healthy queens, they will continue, so that Flying Ant Day is a way of mixing together different colonies, to make and spread new ones.

The ants benefit, and so does Nowhere Wood, so, let’s celebrate Flying Ant Day!

Why is it an advantage for a new queen ant to fly away from the colony before laying her eggs?

Notes on the story

Being and becoming in Nowhere Wood

March 22, 2025April 21, 2025

The sustainable park (2)

An ash tree showing symptoms of ash dieback disease. [Photograph: M. J. Richardson, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5465604]

We did not want those trees in Nowhere Wood to be felled, but we accepted that the trees were infected with Ash die-back disease and had to go.

Growing and managing trees is something that people of done for tens of thousands of years. One secret is to use every part of the tree mindfully, to benefit the community.

And so it was that fifteen volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood group came together to drag the fallen branches (“brash”) to the edge of the pond.

Dragging Ash branches to the pond. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

We worked alongside the council parks team, who piled wooden stakes in the ground across the edge of the pond. We then weaved layers of branches between the stakes to create a “dead hedge”, separating the pond from the children’s playground.

Laying a dead hedge, using ash branches. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The pond is fed by streams and disappeared for many decades, only to return as a permanent feature in the last few years. Watercress plants grow in the water, as they would have done in the 1800’s, when people used to collect them to eat.

It took a morning to build the dead hedge, which will help to protect children and dogs from getting wet in the pond. It is a good use of waste wood that would otherwise be burned. Burning wood releases stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The completed dead hedge. [Photograph: Simon Stannard]

It is another example of how the park is managed in sustainable ways.

Sustainability is an important idea. The United Nations has a sustainable development goal for life on land, (number 15). Find out what it says and why it is important.

Notes on the story

What can eat a tree like this?

November 28, 2024April 21, 2025

The sustainable park (1)

The old willow tree in Trendlewood park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

This willow tree in the park is very old. Maybe a hundred years or so. Look how its bark is gnarled and twisted. It is a great friend of the park and is home to many different insects and birds. One year, a female mallard duck even made a nest on the flat top of the tree!

The willow keeps on growing because every few years, it’s friends cut off all of its branches!

This really does encourage the tree to grow strongly.

We call the removal of the branches ‘pollarding’.

This ancient willow tree has recently been pruned — Pollarding trees is a way of keeping them alive. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

This week, it was the old willow’s turn to be pollarded. You can see the cut stumps where the branches used to be.

Woods have always been important to people. In the 17th century, new forests were planted to provide enough timber for the boats for the Royal Navy.

People have pollarded woodland trees for thousands of years. It was their main source of wood for building, making furniture, for charcoal and for fuel to heat their homes.

Wood is a very useful sustainable resource, when managed in this way. It is sustainable because the tree carries on growing and making new wood.

Pollarded willow wood is special. It is used to make cricket bats and weave baskets. For generations, this provided income for poor families in Somerset.

It is also a good way of making new fences. This is because cut branches of willow will grow new roots when they are placed in water.

The cut stems will grow into new trees and can become a hedge when they are planted closely together.

Two volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood Park soaking the branches of willow. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

The photograph shows two volunteers from the Friends of Trendlewood Park preparing willow branches to build into a new hedge in the area near the playing fields.

They place the cut ends of the branches into water.

A newly planted willow hedge in Tendlewood Park. [Photograph: Neil Ingram]

In a few months’ time, when the weather is warmer, this hedge should be growing strongly and could grow for many years.

This species of willow is called the brittle willow, because branches break off easily. Suggest why it is an advantage to the willow for these branches to be able to grow into new trees.
This species of willow has two ways of reproducing. It flowers and makes seed and also can propagate through fallen branches. Find out why it is useful for the species to be able to reproduce in these two ways.

After the story:

Just after I finished writing this story, it was announced that young trees grown from seeds of the Sycamore Gap tree are to be given to charities, groups and individuals as “trees of hope“. This ancient sycamore tree, from Northumberland, was cut down in September 2023.

new growth from there Sycamore gap tree — Image from https://www.thesill.org.uk/sycamore-gap-tree-is-sprouting/

This is a lovely, kind idea. The tree lives on, not only through its seeds, but also in the new stems that are growing from its cut stem. This shows the power of nature to recover and re-grow. Life is resilient, it does not give up.

Notes on the story

Apples and the New Year