Elders story 2018-2025.
From our beginnings to today
Elders Spring 2025
Spring 2025
This year we were scientists, surveying, recording, measuring, witnessing the land evolve as a newly planted woodland, agroforestry, community and forest garden. Along with other projects and play.
The Elders became Professors, Doctors of science today and embarked on our project to survey the land for a year. To observe the changes this year of plantation, when 6,000 trees were planted this January on a land which was once a field of wheat.
So how do frogs spawn? Is it just one frog? How long does it take to hatch? What are the predators and eaters of frogs-spawn? Prof Beanland and Storey gathered many questions.
Dr Andrew and Esther Paige, observed that there were 3 clumps of frogspawn in a 1 year old pond, clay base, settled in the shallow base. Threats? herons? Ducks, other wildlife? Evidence of Muntjac deer hoof prints.
Dancer of concentric circles that crossed/changed mind
Cloud burst of sprogthorn
Inert inhabbited jellatinous colony
An intimate group of admiring scientists
Animal hoof marks in the clay mud – muntjac?
5000 tree protectors
Relieved to find Oliver was a dog and not a child locked up in a car
Pack of dogged dogs
A circle of friend
Lines in a landscape, now symetrically planted but will become as random as this 100 year old wood in which we sit.
Primular
Sap rising, and I’m awaiting my own sap to rise!
A time of anticipation, and preparation
Week 2 Balance
On this day of equinox, we opened the conversation describing the balance in our lives. (Kally was in London looking at soil, and Gina came in her stead).
Rachel began with the feeling of balance seeing her friend from the 1980’s at the start of her working life, in her 20’s, and seeing her again now, in the autumn of their lives, felt like a balance, a counter, and reminder of friendship.
– Coming here gives me balance
– I wish I had better physical balance
– I’ve felt unbalanced for a while and feel out of balance with all the ecological devastation caused by Sizewell and proposed energy projects. But joining this group has helped me find a different balance.
– I am not at my most balanced today, but coming here helps me find a balance
– Always been tricky for me, balance, I’ve struggled with it, with wrong decisions, but it was right to decide to come here!
– I decided to retire 2 years ago, but I didn’t like it, so i’ve gone back to work and am happier and more balanced.
– I have spent most of my life out of balance
– My physical balance is not good, and loosing my wife knocked me off balance, but I’ve found a kind of balance by giving out, and helping other people
– When I came out this morning I found beneath the nest of the long tailed tit, that i’d been monitoring, its feathers and an empty nest. I know I have sparrow hawks in my garden and naturally I felt sad, the brutality of nature. Then I saw a bird fly above me carrying a feather of a long tailed tit, to feather it’s nest. Ah I though, so nature goes round. In nature there is balance.
To bare witness to the change in the land, over its first year, this is what we will undertake each Thursday for this year, along with our crafting and other diverse explorations.
Pond Science
1 Newt
I toad – NOT frog – about 2.5 inches
1 silver fish – may be a stickle back, Hazel to research
Frogspawn had developed into comma’s and were wriggling, one week later. Gina had researched and told us spawn stage lasted about a month. This was week 2 or 3
Spider, black
Butterfly, mabe peackock, and yellow brimstone
Skylark
Whirlygig bettles on bornbeam – ESTHER CONFIRMS: Sap Beetles
Tree
Black poplar 32 F 16″ and 18 “
Black Poplar 23 M 21″ and 24″
Ginko 26″
Pride of India 36″
Walnut 1-6: 51/10/40/28/32/18
Black alder 52″
Lime 51″
Lets roll some logs around the pond so we can sit and look. And Rachel make safe the bridge to the land!
Frogs-spawn and sky larks – who could wish for better
Seeing the sap rise on the hornbeam
Why are black poplars so special?
How is Meg and has she had her baby?
Week 3 - Bridge
With Nicky, back we stretched out and tapped under the budding oaks.
We walked out of the wood, admiring Peters dead hedge on the way, and the view from Titanic point across to where A once fell in the pond. We crossed the Bridge of Armoral, which was tested and deemed safe and purposeful.
By the pond we found more blops of tadpole clusters, the original ones or content not seen. Had they been eaten? What eats frogspawn? How long are they tadpoles? Professor Gina advised around a month in egg form, and her assistant, Dr Peter concurred. However the internet challenges. Or may be its the type of frog.
From Egg to Frog in 7 weeks – The development of Wood Frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) eggs to froglets in 49 days, just 7 weeks! He took them out of the pond to an acquarium to monitor this extraordinary development. Boiled lettuce he fed them!
We took off across the land, down the rides of tree protectors, occasionally looking down their tubes to see how the trees were growing: some were budding and greening up, some slow. Down the alley of willow, we saw some were budding up, some trapped below the black plastic which we rescued up.
Observation
Armoral’s bridge
Frogspawn
Jet ski-ers
Hawthorn blossom
Mini miracles
Buzzard
Peace and tranquility
3 teenagers in a bat bunker
Dogs Mercury
Anderson shelter
Green alkanet
Peace-of-mind
Mole Hill
A natures corridor