Woods do not re-wild themselves
...not in a human lifespan, anyway.
In the south of England, people are buying small plots of neglected, tatty woodland and leaving them unmanaged. Their expectation, so they tell me, is that these woods will eventually revert to a "natural" state, whatever that is.
There is no truly primordial woodland in England: every square foot of woodland in the country has been managed, in some sense, at some time. The best we can claim is "semi-natural ancient woodland" -- by definition land that has been forested since at least the 17th century, and only lightly managed since then. In practice, most of our "ancient" woodland has, in fact, been forested since the Norman Conquest, but it's been managed over most of the ensuing time.
So what happens if you take a plot of woodland that's been managed for timber, then allowed to fall into ruin, and leave it untouched?
It turns out we have a pretty good idea, from studies done in Lady Park Wood in the Wye Valley. This wood has been closed to the general public, and completely unmanaged, since 1945 -- just over 80 years. Has this wood reverted to a "natural" state?
To answer that question, we have to consider what a "natural" wood would look like. When woods re-established themselves after the last Ice Age, we think they housed a rich diversity of tree species, with similar diversity of animals and plants. We would have found trees at different stage of growth, an abundance of ground flora, a mixture of densely and sparsely-covered land, and a relatively thin tree canopy. Like the "semi-natural ancient woodland" of today, in fact, but more so.
Let's look at what happened in Lady Park Wood.
The tree canopy remains dense in most places, except where tree cover has failed completely. There's no significant ground flora, and single tree species dominate most parts of the wood. Many trees fail to thrive because deer have proliferated unchecked.
The infestation of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s flattened those parts of the wood that contained a mono-culture of elm. Ash die-back is cutting a swathe through England's ash trees right now which, of course, is bad news for any region of woodland that comprises only ash.
To be fair, Lady Park Wood is now home to a diverse range of bird species, particularly owls, and bats are thriving. If there are birds and bats, there are probably bugs. So it's not all bad news.
Still, all in all, Lady Park Wood is a dark, gloomy place, making little to no contribution to ecological sustainability. It hasn't turned into a "natural" or even a semi-natural wood. If it's like that after eighty years, how long will it take to revert to a primordial state? Nobody knows, but I'm reading estimates of five hundred years, or perhaps more.
The reality is that woodlands that were once managed do _not_ re-wild in a human time-scale. Ironically, re-wilding requires active management: radical thinning of over-stocked trees, in a pattern that preserves diversity -- of species and of age. Where that isn't possible, areas need to be clear-felled and re-planted. The canopy needs to be reduced, to allow light to reach the forest floor, and encourage the growth of wild flowers and grasses.
I can tell you from experience that all this is a long, back-breaking job, if you're doing it in an environmentally-sensitive way (that is, without bulldozers). I've been working on my current wood for about eight years, and I think I've done about one third of what needs to be done.
Of course, however hard I work, there's always the risk that some climatic catastrophe will set everything back to square one. Or I could fall ill, or sustain an injury that makes further work impossible. Everything I've done could be for nothing. Even if I do everything right, and luck is on my side, the real ecological benefits aren't going to be seen in my lifetime. Trees take a long time to grow.
Organizations like the Forestry Commission come in for criticism, because they tend to work their woods for timber, rather than turning them into wildlife reserves. What people who aren't foresters don't always realize is that active management for timber is better than neglect.
Active re-wilding would be even better for the natural environment, of course, but there's no money in it. Still, the worst thing that can be done for a wood is to neglect it, and hope that it will somehow turn in to Tolkien's Woodland Realm. More likely it well end up like Mirkwood.
Published 2026-03-10, updated 2026-03-10