A new charity founded by a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who found solace in this unique and biodiverse habitat says that he plans to triple Britain’s temperate rainforest with the launch of the Thousand Year Trust which hopes to transform his 120-hectare (300-acre) hill farm on Bodmin Moor into the largest rainforest restoration project in England and Wales.
Merlin Hanbury-Tenison’s charity is working with local farmers, landowners and charities to identify land suitable to triple Cornwall’s estimated 1,200-1,600 hectares of surviving temperate rainforest, with the ultimate aim of tripling Britain’s surviving rainforest to 1m acres over the next 30 years.
“We’ve all grown up thinking of rainforests as tropical rainforests and that’s how I grew up, not realising there was a rainforest on my doorstep – a temperate rainforest, the most stunning habitat we have in the UK,” said Hanbury-Tenison, who is transforming his family farm with agroforestry, natural regeneration, planting 100,000 trees and farming free-ranging Highland cattle, Cornish black pigs and the local ponies.
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According to reports, the profile of temperate rainforests has soared in recent months after the success of Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain. They are particularly effective at sequestering carbon because of the density of growth and the carbon held in the canopy by epiphytes.
Shrubsole, who is a trustee of the Thousand Year Trust, said: “For too long, we had forgotten we even possessed this habitat – but now there is growing recognition of its wonders, and it seems to have really caught the public imagination. As people become re-enchanted with the magic of our rainforests, I hope more farmers, landowners and politicians will step up to help protect and regenerate them.”
Recall that Hanbury-Tenison took over his family farm, Cabilla, in Cornwall five years ago and found the temperate rainforest still surviving there to be a balm after working in London and spending a decade in the military.
“After London and with some of the experiences I’d had in Afghanistan bubbling to the surface I started to suffer from quite bad PTSD and I very much attribute the forest at Cabilla being a large part of what stopped me from getting really unwell,” he said.
Although 100,000 trees are being planted at Cabilla to add to its 40 hectares of rainforest, 40% of the forest restoration will be via natural regeneration, with the process accelerated by the rootling and seed-spreading of free-roaming pigs and protection for jays who bury acorns and inadvertently plant oaks.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
