Abingdon Green Gym Blog

Blog by Sally. Photos by Michele and Sally On Saturday, 22nd November, nine Green Gymmers braved a wet November morning to join consultant ecologist, Rod d'Ayala, at the lovely Elizabeth Daryush Memorial Garden at Boars Hill, which is one of Oxford Preservation Trust's sites boasting some rather rare (for Oxfordshire, particularly) acid grassland.  We needed a variety of tools for all the tasks we'd been asked to do - saws and loppers for removing encroaching scrub, rubber gloves and black bin liners for removing Crassula helmsii  from the pond, scythes for cutting vegetation and bramble that the tractor could not reach when the grassland was cut, rakes and pitchforks for removing the cut material and the tree popper for removing young trees to prevent the grassland from becoming a wood.  The tools were carried to our usual "base camp" next to the bench under a sweet chestnut tree by the pond, where Rod gave instructions to the group. After Rod's briefing it...

  Sunningwell Village Green and Pond   -   Saturday 15th November 2025 Blog by Eleanor, photos by Sally, Helen, Michele and Eleanor We always enjoy going back to Sunningwell, and today fifteen of us assembled in the Village Hall car park for our briefing by Bob Evans, resident in charge of the project. The day was cloudy and slightly damp feeling, but fortunately the torrential downpours of the previous day had passed. There were three main tasks: to clear the stream at the bottom of the field and create an area of open water, to clear weed from the village pond and barrow it across the road to the ditch alongside the Village Green, and to continue hedge laying at the top of the Green. Briefing from Bob Sally and Simon set off to do the hedge laying, as they know how to do it. Andy from the village was there in chest waders to clear the pond, and Philip gallantly volunteered to don Green Gym's thigh waders and help him. James, Dieuwke and I went with pitchforks ...

Blog by Sally.  Photos by Julio and Sally On Saturday, 8 November, we visited a new site for Abingdon Green Gym, which is a bit further afield than we would normally go.  Situated off Junction 6 of the M40 is the National Nature Reserve, Aston Rowant, which is famed for its beech woods and chalk grassland and, amongst other cherished plants, is home to Juniper.  This is becoming increasingly rare - so much so that Plantlife has a campaign to save Juniper and more information about this can be found at:  https://www.plantlife.org.uk/our-work/saving-englands-lowland-juniper/. We car shared where possible given the extra miles we needed to do, but it didn't take us long to get there and we arrived at Natural England's office to meet Steph Wilson, who manages the Reserve.  We collected the tools together and made our way up a short slope to the Juniper nursery area, which has been taken over mainly by dogwood in recent years, but also by hawthorn, blackthorn, b...

 Blog by Eleanor, photos by Julio and Sally We met, as usual in the Greenkeepers' compound of Frilford Golf Course. It was a fairly mild day of sunny intervals with no rain forecast. Adrian, our leader for the day had driven the tools along the road next to the gap in the hedge opening on to the fen, so we didn't have anything to carry as we made our way there. Rod d'Ayala was there to direct operations, and briefed us on the tasks needed to advance his cunning plan for rewetting and maintaining the fen Pre task briefing There were two main tasks. The scythers, consisting of Sally, Roger, Jim, David and Adrian were to go to the higher edge of the fen by the neighbouring house and scythe bramble and bracken. View of the far side The rest of us went to the far lower corner of the fen to rake up the cut vegetation and deposit it in the leat in order to make the water spread out across the fen. Area to be raked Eleanor raking This area bordered on the golf course. An invasive s...