The Nest is a small ash-elm wood running along a steep south-facing slope overlooking the River Tweed. A scattering of veteran ash trees skirts the top of the wood, below which a stand of ash has regenerated over an ageing understorey of hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, elder and holly. At one end, on a gentler slope, there are the remains of some big open-grown elms which have finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease. The wood has always been grazed, and calcareous grassland forms a wide glade in the centre peppered with primrose, rock rose and scattered hawthorn bushes.
There are a few woods like this on the south-facing slopes of the Tweed Valley with open grown veteran trees, a grassland flora and pockets of tree regeneration in patches of thorn and on rockier sites. The Scottish Borders have long been sheep and cattle country. It is quite possible that, in the past, wood pasture like this was much more evident as a belt of sheltered grazing between the floodplain meadows and the higher exposed moorland.