Waypoint 1 The Food Wood | Ranger Cadets guided walking trail
Our walk begins here at Waypoint 1 and continues along the path between the hedgerows.
But before we do that let's climb over the stile - with the permission of Farmer Andy, whose field this is - and take a look around.
Our Home Education colleagues have been busy this summer (2025). They have planted a whole new wood here with fruit and berry trees. And they've created homes for birds, bees and bats, as well as ponds for all the wildlife that will move into this new habitat.
Shortly after all the trees were planted, however, we had the hottest summer in ages and no rain fell for weeks on end. Daily trips with buckets of water bouncing around on the back of a Land Rover helped keep some of the young trees alive.
But unfortunately we did lose some saplings in this long, hot, dry spell. What you're looking at now are the survivors. Which in fact is what you're looking at, any time you're in the countryside. It's a constant struggle to survive. We've known this since Darwin.
People often talk about survival of the fittest. They assume that means that life is all about competing and beating everyone else. But we now know this is not true. And it's trees that tell us so.
Trees look out for each other. As these little trees in the Food Wood grow, stretching their branches to the sky and turning their leaves to the sun, their roots are also reaching out, under the ground.
Roots have several jobs to do. They anchor the tree firmly to the ground. They seek out water and nutrients in the soil and send them up to the leaves and branches. One of their most important jobs is to connect to the other trees around them.
How do they do that? With the help of long thin filaments of fungus.
What happens is that threads of the fungi that live in the soil wrap themselves around all the tree roots they can find. Once that connection has been made, the tree will give some of the food it makes in its leaves to the fungus. In exchange, the fungus will share some of the water and nutrients it's taken from the soil with the tree.
Both sides win. Nobody loses. But there's more. The fungus threads connect with each other. So once some have connected to a tree root, that tree is then connected to the other trees around, through the fungus.
So all the trees in a little wood like this are able to communicate with each other. And they do. Trees tell each other about insect attacks, so they can organise chemical defences. Some scientists believe that trees even share food and water with each other in hard times, through the roots and fungus threads.
So it's really not all about survival of the fittest.
Very often it's survival of the friendliest.
Once you've had a look around here, please return to the path over the stile and walk along it, keeping this field on your right, until you see the code for Waypoint 2, mounted on a post.
