Between the woods and the water: the unique habitat of Romania’s wood-pastures
These days there are fewer giant haystacks and horse-drawn carts, but Transylvania, in central Romania, still has its fortified churches, Saxon villages and traditional farming. It’s often cited as the last medieval landscape in Europe: for Romantics there’s much to be relished.
On my first visit since 1997, I also wanted to meet some of Romania’s ancient and veteran oaks (mostly Pedunculate), many happily recorded on the database arboriremarcabili.ro, modelled on the Ancient Tree Inventory. These oaks are mostly located within what has long been known as wood-pasture.
In the ‘Domesday Book’, William the Conqueror’s monumental survey of Anglo-Saxon England, completed in 1086, this land classification is termed silva pastilis — literally, ‘pasture woodland’. It’s a form of low-intensity agroforestry, practised since at least Neolithic times, in which the grazing of livestock takes place in a semi-woodland habitat of mature, scattered trees.