WDVTA Events and External Events

Contents

WDVTA events

The WDVTA organises events for members and non-members throughout the year - an interesting mix of walks, talks, training and visits.

After some events we publish related documentation, presentation slide sets or videos. These can be found on our Publications page.

External events

Here we list some external events that may be of interest to members. Please note that WDVTA cannot take bookings for external events. For event details or reservations you should contact the organisers directly.

External event schedule
TVERC Autumn Recorders' Conference Saturday 10 October at Basildon Village Hall Save the date. Bookings will open in July.

Review of 2025

Spring

Our guest speakers, both from The Tree Council, gave two very interesting talks at our AGM. Jon Stokes, Director of Trees, Science and Research spoke on the UK’s Treescape and its Future, and Sam Village, National Tree Warden Coordinator, spoke about the Tree Warden Scheme detailing the work of groups across the country, their findings and the way forward.

We are very lucky to have made very supportive friends at The Tree Council and the fact that they took the time and trouble to travel to Wokingham for an evening at a busy time was another indication of their respect for the work done by everyone at WDVTA.

Summer

We had to twice postpone what would have been an excellent walk around The University of Reading’s Whiteknights campus to look at 25 of their most interesting and unusual trees. Head of Grounds, Rupert Taylor, has led a walk for us before and is an excellent and very knowledgeable guide. However, he agreed with us that as the evening temperature was forecast to be over 30° (it turned out to be 33°) the walk would be inadvisable. We had recurrences of the very hot weather throughout the summer and had to postpone for a second time. We had intended to reschedule the walk for autumn but this proved impossible but we are hoping to agree a new date with Rupert in spring 2026. The disruption affected our plan to visit Harcourt Arboretum, Oxford, so the Harcourt event is now likely go ahead in 2026.

Autumn

We had a very well-attended autumn hedgerow walk along St Patrick's Stream in Charvil. Twyford Fishing Club allowed us onto their private site during Loddon Rivers Week in September. Stephen Loyd, our Tree Warden Coordinator, led an interesting walk which had been arranged after we had enjoyed the 2024 talk given by Megan Gimber on hedgerows.

Walking alongside the stream on a lovely, sunny September afternoon we could see many examples of what Megan had told us to look out for. Stephen enriched the afternoon with his own knowledge of hedgerows from his local conservation work. He had taken part in laying some of these hedges on behalf of the fishing club years before - many of our best walks have been led by our own members who have extensive knowledge of their area. Members heard two poems that had been written about the Loddon and its tributaries.

More photos from the walk here.

Winter

The continuing very wet conditions through January and February of 2026 have prevented a winter walk and repeated what happened with our Barkham walk a couple of years ago. In most earlier years we have had many lovely walks in winter and very pleasant summer evening rambles but it may now be prudent to take account of the likelihood of difficult weather in our event planning.