Gary Primrose
'One of the wildlife gems at Yewfield is our flower rich hay and wetland meadows. They are a colourful spectacle in June and July, and last year we recorded our best year yet for Northern marsh, heath spotted and common spotted orchids.'
Gary Primrose
Gary Primrose runs the Yewfield Guest House near Ambleside, which has extensive gardens that he and his partner manage for nature. They've previously opened up the land to support us and work with school pupils and WWOOF volunteers to pass on their knowledge and love of nature.
I've lived and worked in Cumbria for the last 29 years, and my partner and I have been members of Cumbria Wildlife Trust pretty much the whole time we've lived here. For a number of years, we opened the Yewfield gardens and land to the public in aid of the Trust.
Both of us have a deep interest and connection to nature. Our day job is gardening, forestry and more general land management, with a primary focus on enhancing habitat for wildlife. We believe it is possible and, in fact, necessary to combine human culture with nature in our gardening work. We're now winding down our design and build gardening business, we're putting our remaining energies into the management of the land and gardens at Yewfield, where we live.
Yewfield has about 80 acres of land, 50 of which are woods and the rest is wood pasture, flower rich hay meadows, wetland, a stream, a pond and
gardens. We keep bees and native ponies. In 2016, we won the gold award from the Royal Forestry Society for the Small and Farm Woodland category in the North of England. At that time, we were managing our woods with Continuous Cover Forestry methods using forest thinnings for the guest house wood chip boiler.
Our forest consisted then of about 50% larch which, sadly, has over the last three years contracted larch disease. We have had to remove all our larch by government mandate and have restocked with a variety of over 7000 mostly native tree and shrub species to make our forest more resilient in the future to pests and disease, better able to withstand climate change impacts and to make it better for wildlife, especially invertebrates, birds and bats.
One of the wildlife gems at Yewfield is our flower rich hay and wetland meadows. Our meadows are on the Trust's Tarn Hows and Yewfield Meadow Walk. They are a colourful spectacle in June and July, and last year we recorded our best year yet for Northern marsh, heath spotted and common spotted orchids.
Given the variety and richness of habitat at Yewfield, we were accepted in 2018 to join the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier Scheme where we are supported with government grants to benefit wildlife. One of the Higher Tier options we have chosen is to invite school groups to visit and learn how we manage the land for conservation.
A few weeks ago, Hawkshead Primary School planted 60 native trees and shrubs at Yewfield as part of the Queens Green Canopy for her Platinum Jubilee year. We also have visits from a secondary school and we accept WWOOF volunteers to help us on the land. We believe conservation education should be a central part of a child's education if we are to have a viable future on this planet.