Anja Murray: I spent an entire day in one of Ireland's ancient oak woodlands

Worth so much more than dark, lifeless industrially-managed tree plantations, we need to look after these rich ecosystems which are bathed in light and have a rich soundtrack of birdsong and pockets of primroses throughout

Anja Murray: "We cannot continue to abandon Ireland’s remaining old oak woodlands — their value is so much more than any of us can even put to words or evaluate in monetary terms."

By early summer, tree leaves are filling out, casting lively shade across the interior of deciduous woods. Layer upon layer of green chlorophyll, filling up 3D space in an arrangement that maximises the efficiency of their age-old, light-eating, carbon-crunching, technology. Each tree species has developed its own characteristic arrangement of leaves, twigs, branches and boughs, each lineage of DNA coding the optimal positioning of leaves to harvest as much sunlight as possible. Oak, ash, and willow allow plenty of light through their emerging leaf canopy to sustain an understorey of smaller tree and shrub species — such as holly, hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel — and ample plant life on the woodland floor too.

I recently had the pleasure of spending an entire day in an ancient oak woodland. To get there, we had to follow a forestry track through Sitka spruce plantations for an hour or so. Beneath the evergreen spruce needles, packed tightly together in rows, almost no light penetrates to the forest floor. Scant mosses and occasional sprigs of bramble and fern manage to get a foothold, only getting established where canopy gaps have opened up from windthrown trees. Pine needles litter the ground in a thick layer that is acidic enough to prevent them from breaking down readily. The cohort of critters that normally chomp through leaf litter aren’t accustomed to these North American needles — a mismatch that is so often the case with alien species from afar. The dense shade also prevents much of a ground flora or an understorey... just one of the ways in which these spruce plantations offer little of value to biodiversity.