The Park Rangers

Make sure your volume is on: "Balancing the ecology and emptying the bins..."

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If we weren’t maintaining the plants that we have on site, the trees would take over. And that might sound like a great thing to somebody who is not necessarily in on how a forest would operate. But by allowing all the plants to just grow wherever they wanted however much they wanted to, it would create a monoculture like you would have too much of good thing. And the trees would just out-compete all of the smaller plants and a good healthy environment has a large variety of different species in it.

So we have a lot of rhododendron and laurel on site which, while nice exotic species, they are also highly invasive so they can take over an area. And nothing native to this country grazes them down so without our intervention it would just be a sea of rhododendron and laurel because they outcompete all the native species.

All of those very rare and wonderful butterflies and grasses that we have, they’d just go, they’d just be outcompeted by stronger and more virile, dominant species.

We’re very lucky to have a lot of exotic species in our park here, brought over by Staunton, and I like to think of it as a bit of a museum, really. So if we weren’t here to look after these trees and put them onto display for the public, the more dominant species of the forest would just take over, they’d all be lost. And I think that would be a bit sad. It’s a bit of history that we are trying to keep hold of and share with everybody.

We’re also a presence on the site, so with us being here we hope people feel safer and more welcome.

If we weren’t doing this job … we have to do the dirtier side of the job so we have to litter pick and empty bins, and we have to safety check play areas, benches and footpaths and dangerous trees… so if we weren’t doing our job it would very quickly become a bit of a fly tip area. And once that happens, people see it is not being looked after, that just rolls and it gets worse and worse.