Through the foliage it just looked like some weird plasticated white mess across the ground. Only when you went under the bushes to the exact spot could you see the real magic. It was an almost perfect circle of fungi, and each toadstool a creamy plate – glistening, succulent and as fleshy as a fillet of ox liver – and probably one of 30-plus species known as milkcaps.
It struck me as a metaphor for this place, Alpheton Hall Wood. In spring it is strewn with flowers and ringing with birdsong. Most special among the multi-coloured carpet is the soft lemon of oxslips, because Alpheton is one of a suite of Suffolk sites celebrated for being among Britain’s best ancient woodlands and of national wildlife importance.
I say it was an almost perfect circle, and there is need of the flaw to express its full symbolic resonance. Unfortunately, Alpheton itself is a circle broken. Or, rather, a site encircled. The whole place measures just 11 hectares and is fenced off to arrest the tree-destroying impacts of muntjac deer.
A breakthrough realisation of recent decades is that nature functions at the level of the whole system. You cannot parse it into fragments – badgers, swifts, curlews, oxslips – and work outwards from one organism to the whole landscape. You have to operate at the level of the system, which is exactly what Alpheton’s owners seek. They want to combine with regional neighbours to connect all the isolated woodland pockets, albeit of the highest quality habitat, so that each can function in an integrated ecosystem. It’s one of the government’s many new “landscape recovery” proposals, and it offers real hope for England’s beleaguered countryside, the seventh most denatured on Earth, according to the global Biodiversity Intactness Index.
The linking zones would comprise “scrub” – the most overlooked and ironically the richest habitat in which we are most deficient. Classic beneficiaries of these connecting corridors would be dormice, which could transit from one wooded island to another. Another tantalising possibility is that whole system would be reinforced – or, if you prefer, the natural circle completed – by introducing European lynx to curtail the destructive effects of the over-abundant deer.
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