Cherry Orchard Local Nature Reserve
“Nature has the power to heal itself and to heal us, if we let it.” - Rewilding Britain
Cherry Orchard Local Nature Reserve was previously a landfill site which has been undisturbed since 1987. It serves as a flood plain for the River Severn and has mixed habitat including woodland, semi-natural grassland and scrub.
Walking through Cherry Orchard offers us the hopeful reminder that nature always finds a way. The land turned itself into a nature reserve through a process of ‘natural colonisation’, a key component of rewilding. Rewilding is an exciting, surprising and rewarding process that seeks to reconnect people to nature by restoring ecosystems until nature can take care of itself.
One of the greatest symbols of the rewilding philosophy of interconnectedness is the wood wide web: a network of fungi that grow around and inside the roots of trees that result in trees sharing resources with each other, sending nutrients, and even messages! Fungi are an incredibly underrated specimen of our ecosystem. In fact, without fungi, there would be no circle of life. Neither plant nor animal, fungi are incredible collaborators in the natural world and pose us the question: what kind of collaborators do we want to be?
