Town & Country
THE Forestry Commission (FC) is marking the 100th anniversary of its foundation, via the Forestry Act of September 1919, with the planting of a centenary glade at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire, a new set of Royal Mail stamps, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy and various other tributes and events. Commemorative avenues will be created in Eggesford Forest, Devon, the site of the FC’S first plantings—of beech and larch, in December 1919—as well as in Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire, and Wendover Woods in the Chilterns.
At the end of the First World War, the nation’s woodland cover was at an all-time low of 5%; it was to address this that the FC was created. Due to shipping blockades, the need for timber for the trenches led to the felling of an estimated one-third of Britain’s trees.
Since then, however, ‘woodland cover has doubled, a modern timber industry has grown up and the British people have built a new relationship with the forests and the life within them,’ writes chief executive Ian Gambles in a new history of the organisation, British Forests: The
Forestry Commission 1919–2019 (Profile Editions, £25).
With woodland cover now at 10%, Britain is, according to the FC, ‘back to where it was in the 1300s’, although we still trail far behind our European mainland neighbours.
Those with long memories will recall the part once played by the FC in the destruction of ancient woodland and open spaces to make way for monotonous plantations of Douglas fir, Corsican pine and Sitka spruce. However, in line with wider public sentiment, recent decades have seen efforts to remove plantations created on former heath- and downland and to restore broad-leaved trees to ancient woodland.
The new book says that, by the late 1980s, ‘striking a better balance between timber production, conservation and recreation’ had become ‘absolutely imperative to the Commission’s reputation and its very survival’. With more than 1,500 forests in its care, it is now the largest single provider of outdoor recreation in England, offering more than 3,000km (1,864 miles) of waymarked walks and mountainbiking trails. In 2017, the nurseries of the FC’S agency Forestry England grew nearly 1.6 million trees to replant and create new areas of woodland.
In his foreword to British Forests, tree-loving journalist and news presenter Jon Snow, chairman of the Heart of England Forest in the West Midlands, says the FC ‘ranks with the NHS and the Houses of Parliament as key to our British way of life’.
Given the swell of public fury that beat down the Government’s plan to sell off the public forest estate in 2011, it seems that most of us would now agree. Visit www.forestryengland. uk/100 for more details of centenary events. Jack Watkins