Managing the Trees and Woodland
in the Royal Parks

The trees in The Royal Parks are professionally cared for by a wide range of specialists.

All these people combine their skills and knowledge to ensure the trees have a long and healthy future.

Our Landscape Architect looks at height, colour and form, restoring the lines of ancient avenues and conserving important vistas. She visualizes how the Parks will look when new phalanxes of trees achieve maturity in centuries to come.

Our Arboriculturist advises on new planting schemes as well as caring for the Parks’ existing trees, surveying them annually for signs of stress, root compaction and disease.

He works on detailed tree-care programmes and initiates research into new ways of looking after the trees, like the hundred-year comparative study of oak pollarding in Richmond Park.

The Park Managers are all tree experts, directing everything from watering for the initial years of a young tree’s life - to sensitive pruning in the years to come. They and their teams recycle millions of leaves into compost each year and manage a broad spectrum of traditional tree-related crafts, such as charcoal-burning in Richmond Park, bee-keeping in Bushy and cam sheeting along the Longford River. The Park Manager in Regent’s Park even supplies coppiced willow poles to London Zoo’s hungry okapis!

The Shire Horse Team has three heavy horses that roll the woodland bracken and haul fallen logs from difficult spaces where machines can’t manoeuvre.

The Carpenters use harvested wood to make the tree cradles which protect the young saplings from deer.

Last but not least, The Royal Parks Ecologist monitors and conserves the microenvironments that flourish in and around the trees – from birds and insects, to rare species of lichen, fungi and other flora.

Modern Technology

The exact location of each tree will soon be tracked via GPS using a state-of-the-art, handheld system, that accompanies the staff out in the Parks. This is linked to a database, that stores the individual profile of each tree.