19th October 2021.

Autumn is steadily progressing and the leaves are starting to come off the trees. It will be interesting to see what happens to these leaves in the coming weeks as the earthworms start to get busy and drag them down into their tunnels. This is all part of the food chain and food web on the Park.

                                                                        Hornbeam.

                                                                        Sycamore.

                                                                                Beech.

                                                             Ornamental Plum.

.The cattle are supposed to be going off the Park in the next few days and they are making the most of clearing up the last of the conkers.

The grass has been mown because the cattle were not keeping pace with it and one of the terms of the Higher Level Stewardship is that the grass be reduced to a height of about 10 cm by the end of the grazing season.

The first of the fungi are starting to appear. I am not going to try and name many of these because identification is difficult. The role of fungi is that they break down organic matter either in the soil or in dead tree trunks. The nutrients are then returned to the soil as part of the food chain.

Moles are starting to get busy and it is interesting that there are not as many on the Park as you would expect. I think this is largely because most of the soils on the Park are very difficult to dig in which is why Moles are found in the north-west corner, by the Spring and all the way along the bottom of the sledging slope adjacent to the Osier Bed.

The Friends are currently planning a Bat Roost Box Project and here are five photographs of lightweight concrete boxes which are already on trees in the Park. We are hoping to be able to add some more ones in the not too distant future.

Just to demonstrate the biodiversity we have on the Park here is a shot of a section of Ash tree which has got two different types of Moss and four different types of lichen growing on it.

Birds are difficult to photograph but today there was a flock of Jackdaws taking advantage of the blustery wind. There were also some Jackdaws, Carrion Crows and Magpies feeding where the grass has been cut.

And finally, this is a rarity this year an actual Acorn in a year when the Acorn crop seems to have totally failed. This will have consequences for animals which rely on these nuts for food as part of the food chain.

Archive pictures from the 1970s.

 Here are some scanned 35mm colour slides taken of the Park in the 1970s.

The first one is a view looking north towards Nursery Wood. On the sledging slope there was a landscape Elm and a Horse Chestnut in full bloom. In the distance you can see the large Cedar of Lebanon and Nursery Wood.

Now the Horse Chestnut has fallen over. It died because the bark was eaten off by horses which used to graze on the Park. The Elm tree has gone because it caught Dutch Elm disease. Nursery Wood has disappeared because all the Elms have been cut down and in the next picture you can see a herd of black-and-white cattle in the distance which used to graze on the Park.

As ever, the Park was a popular place for sledging. You can see snow on the roofs of houses in East Park.

Here are some landscape Elms near to the bridge and ditch. The bridge was not there of course. The Park lost a lot of landscape trees at this time. The next picture shows a huge tree that has been felled in the South East corner of the Park and the sawn trunk. The timber was perfectly sound but the trees had all died because of the fungal infection spread by the bark beetles.

This is the spring area which at this time was completely open to the cattle and was surrounded by large Poplar trees.

And finally, here is the newly constructed car park when the Park was purchased by East Herts District Council in 1980.