Queen’s Wood is an area of ancient woodland which has been continuously wooded since at least AD 1600. Certain plants have a particular affinity for ancient woodland and are more rarely encountered elsewhere.

Many such indicator plants can be found (or have been recently recorded) in Queen’s Wood. These include the wood anemone, for which the wood is well known in spring, when a carpet of blooms appear in places before the trees get their leaves, and the orchid, the broad-leaved helleborine.

A full list of plants and trees is included in David Bevan’s Flora of Queen’s Wood (2007) . Meg Game, who carried out a survey of plants in the wood in 2000, commented that this is ‘an astonishingly long list for woodland so close to London’s heart’.

For surveys of the breeding birds, invertebrates, fungi, mosses and liverworts and other species to be found in the wood, go to:Surveys and Records