A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
wood-pasture
A landscape of widely spaced trees with grazed grassland beneath — neither forest nor field but the ancient hybrid of both. Created by centuries of grazing and pollarding. Wood-pastures contain some of the oldest trees in Europe because the trees were never felled, only pollarded.
Etymology
“Wood” from Old English “wudu”; “pasture” from Old French “pasture,” from Late Latin “pastura” (grazing), from “pascere” (to feed, graze). Compound term in English land-management usage, describing a distinct medieval European system of combined grazing and timber management still recognized in ecology and conservation.