Soil compaction

I just tell you, the last time I came here and talked to one of the directors... was about, I think there had been a hurricane and one of your great ancient trees got knocked over and you didn't know quite what to do and so some brave person suggested replanting and you did something on the replant that made all the difference and it grew better than ever.

was the great storm in 1987 that tree was hit by the wind it fell over and then we re-propped it back up so from that environmental impact what we did find is the importance of soil and soil compaction and the devastating effects that soil compaction can have And it's something that we learned from there about how to manage soils and how to aerate and the importance of that.

So if we look at Kew today, Kew averages on about 2 million visitors a year.

Most visitors are walking over the grass and walking over the tree root plates, so we see that compaction.

And a lot of the stresses we see in the Arboretum is down to both climatic conditions but mainly soil compaction.

so you keep the people away and it doesn't happen

we do yeah so we do fence off so the trees that are extremely important to the collection through heritage and culture they're fenced so we can manage that or we use different implements so we use something called a geo-inject which allows us to bang a pneumatic pin into the soil and then we let shots of air out which then fracture that soil and loosens it up which then allows us to manage that soil compaction

just so happens that there's a former director of kew gardens here working well in Albany, Western Australia, actually with indigenous people.

I mean, that's the direction it's headed.

And you know about soil compaction.

You know for how long there has been a de facto soil crisis going on.

And even those of us in the industry can sort of just go from the day to day and not really be focused on that fact.

So that was one that was Bonnie Kaplan, who I hope to talk to sometime soon again.

But that was all about, you know, the connection between compost and brain health, which is an amazing connection that I certainly had never thought of.

And then specifically in this case, I recall Odette Menard who presented on Soil Compact.

And this blew my mind on so many levels, one of which being that she was a government representative, you know, who had obviously been at her job and her position for a long time and just had license to go and tell it like it was.