Woodland is not wildwood.

What wildwood was like in the pre-Neolithic (Peterkens past-natural state) is open to interpretation. What it would be like by now had human activity remained at a Mesolithic level (the present-natural state) is open to conjecture. What present woodland would develop into in future if human activity were to be withdrawn (the future-natural state) is open to hypothesis. Turning wildwood into woodland involved at least the following processes: Fragmenting continuous forest (on the Tansley model) or stopping the dynamics of groves (on the Vera model). Instituting coppicing and the production of small timber trees. Giving woods boundaries, ownerships and names. Withdrawing browsing. Selecting guilds of plants that take advantage of cyclical changes in shade.

These are not recent events; woods have had an appreciable fraction of the Holocene in which to come to terms with them. Some aspects, such as the removal of upstanding old trees and large deadwood (apart from boundary pollards) have presumably reduced the fauna and flora of the wildwood, though wood-pasture gives an alternative means of survival. However, woodmanship is an ecological factor in its own right, just as mowing is the defining factor in meadows. Coppicing has produced several guilds of plants that respond to it. Where did these come from? What they were doing before people invented axes? Neither Veras nor Tansleys theory of wildwood seems to provide for large temporary openings every seven to 30 years. Fire, where it is possible, stimulates the germination of buried-seed plants, but woods with coppicing floras tend not to be combustible, least of all in England. Alternative natural processes are avalanches, windblow, beaver activity and ice-storms; although some of these can stimulate buried-seed plants like coppicing, they are too sporadic in time or too limited in space to be a prototype of coppicing. Are trees and woodland plants still conditioned to some factor from previous interglacials that no longer operates?

Rackham, Oliver (2010-08-19).