Guardians Worldwide

Grange Lane
Tree Rescue Hub

Established in August 2023, our London Hub is located within the historic Great North Wood in Southwark. The Great North Wood is the nearest ancestral woodland to any capital city centre in Europe, and a unique natural heritage, home to rare species like the Jersey Tiger Moth, wood anemone, whitebeam and several species of bats.

There are many historic trees in the area like William's Blake Angel Oak, the Vicar's Oak, the Oak of Honour (named after Elizabeth I), and the Guardian of Beulah Heights, thought to be the oldest living oak in London. The area is also home to some of the most extraordinary boundary trees in the capital, many of which are protected, for instance the Wood Vale oaks

Tree Nursery

Guardians Tree Rescue Hub at Dulwich Wood, October 2023

We grow our trees from the seeds of the oldest trees to preserve strong genes, or else we rescue them from nearby paths, allotments, roadsides. Sometimes we receive tree donations from neighbors and friends. Above you can see our nursery of common and sessile oaks (left) ash (middle) and sycamore (right)

We currently are growing almost 1,000 saplings at the Grange Lane Hub: 630 Sessile Oak, 105 Sycamore, 55 English Oak, 27 Ash, 12 White Willow, 10 Turkey Oak, 9 Horse Chestnut, 5 Elder, 5 Apple Trees, 3 Wild Cherry trees, 3 Pear trees, 2 Fig trees, 1 Walnut tree, 1 Cherry tree, 1 Olive tree, 1 Hawthorn, 1 Holly and 1 Hazel.

Woodland stewardship

We do not use the term land management. Nor do we speak of tree or woodland management. We are stewards of a small pocket of boundary woodland in Sydenham Hill named Woodhall, a small fragment of the historic Great North Wood.

Boundary woodlands are important heritage in the area. The land we protect used to be farmsteads up until the early 1800s. The owners of these farms allowed the original forest to grow in areas in between farms to demarcate boundaries. Thus, boundary trees and boundary woodlands in this part of South east London contain some of the oldest veteran and ancient trees in the area.

We are proud to be monitoring, studying, supporting and helping regrow some of the most amazing and certainly oldest trees in London.

Community volunteer days

The Grange Lane Tree Rescue Hub is open to members of the community. We do volunteer days once per month (weather allowing), where we spend time doing work on the land: clearing, trimming, pruning, planting, seeding.

We also do work on soil guardianship. We show our volunteers the importance of top soils and the soil structure conditions in this part of London, which is characterised by London Clays. Soil erosion is one of the biggest threats to our woodland, and so we do awareness raising work with community members on how to combat erosion, and how to help regenerate organic soils through wormeries, nitrogen fixing, composting, and organic top soil regeneration.

Children Activities

We facilitate children-focused and children-led activities to promote contact with nature among future generations. Some of the preferred activities the children in our community have carried out at the Hub are masqued processions (we recently staged a Kitsune no Komeiri, or traditional Japanese fox procession) and wild crafts, working with natural materials, especially making models with the clay we get directly from the ground.