In 2025, the UK Government planted three million trees. Within a year, 800,000 had already died.The same year brought the hottest summer on record, with months of drought across much of England and Wales.
Trees and forests are essential; they have the potential to reduce UK wood imports and create employment. Yet large-scale planting schemes, carried out with minimal maintenance, are proving ineffective. Planting alone is not enough. Natural regeneration, allowing forests to re-grow, may offer a more resilient and cost-effective approach.
However, the problem is not simply about how trees are planted, but the combination of inadequate climate policies and anti-environment planning initiatives. This reveals a lack of coherence at the heart of UK policy on either environment or climate.
What, then, can we learn from four key books about trees?
Colin Tudge –The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter (2005)
Colin Tudge makes a compelling case for expanding the role of wood across modern economies. He suggests that aircraft, ships, and boats could all use more wood in construction, expanding beyond its traditional uses and replacing energy-intensive materials. Indeed, we can argue that wood could play a far greater role in the construction sector, too. Increasing the use of timber would mean a reduction in the use of both steel and energy in new construction and sustainable refurbishment. This goal requires long-term planning and investment from the government.
Tudge also highlights the value of nut and fruit trees, often overlooked by national policy. At a time of rising food prices and supply insecurity, producing more fruit and nut trees offers a practical way to reduce imports in the long-term. As well as becoming a potential new area of agriculture, gardens, allotments, and community spaces could all contribute to this.
The author further emphasises that specific tree species should be conserved far into the future, such as oak, ash, beech, sycamore, and hornbeam. Each has its own habitat and provides various types of advantages for a wide range of birds and insects. Carefully managed rewilding, including measures that protect from predators like deer where necessary, would enable species to regenerate. Over time, this approach may create a modest, sustainable supply of building materials, whether through natural tree lifecycles or selective pruning.
However, all tree species now face the growing challenge of climate change, including increasing periods of drought and the spread of pests and diseases. There remains a significant gap between the needs of trees and the support humans provide.
Peter Wohlleben –The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015)
Peter Wohlleben presents trees as organisms that both communicate and maintain relationships with one another. This sustains them, connected by vast networks of fungi. Through this, trees are able to share essential nutrients and resources. This allows forests to withstand the extremes of heat, cold, and rainfall. Poorly and artificially planted schemes, however, cannot benefit from this communication.
Wohlleben also describes how trees defend themselves from pests. They apparently can feel pain and release chemical compounds to deter the predators assailing them. Species such as beech, spruce, and oak have demonstrated this response.
Human activity that disrupts these networks, through deforestation or soil disturbance, risks weakening their entire ecosystems. The loss of trees also affects other species that depend on them, such as bees and other pollinating insects, as well as a variety of birds. Protecting forests, therefore, means protecting the intricate systems that sustain them.
Fred Pearce – A Trillion Trees: How We Can Reforest Our World (2021)
Fred Pearce challenges the assumption that forests are purely natural systems. He argues that most of the world’s woodlands, even those thought untouched by human hand, have been shaped by centuries of human activity and are often younger than they appear. This suggests that we must understand how landscapes evolve under different forms of management.
One of Pearce’s key insights is that rewilding may be better achieved by less intervention. Whilst animals can be beneficial to forests, rewilding may be better achieved simply by the removal of sheep. He highlights examples in north-west Scotland, where reducing sheep grazing allowed woodland to recover.
In England, however, many well-known forests are small compared to their counterparts on the continent. The urban sprawl permitted after 1945, coupled with the expansion of the road network, have certainly not helped forests while also undermining the regeneration of towns and cities as attractive, liveable environments.
Since 2019, political parties and major organisations have made big promises to increase tree cover in Britain. The National Trust, for example, has set a target of planting 20 million trees by 2030.
Pearce attributes a long period of great enthusiasm for tree planning to the Great Storm of 1987, which destroyed an estimated 15 million trees. As a Kent resident at the time, walking to work in Canterbury the day following the storm was certainly an opportunity to see an almost vehicle-free city with fallen trees. The University of Kent had a staccato start to the first term due to the fallen trees, damaged infrastructure, and delayed travel by rail and road. Sadly, the delivery of replacement trees was slower than many hoped, and survival rates were very ‘hit and miss’.
Pearce writes more positively about other rewilding efforts, such as at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. On this 3,500-acre site, an exemplar for rewilding on a large and small scale, allowing grazing animals to freely roam the landscape has produced an extraordinary resurgence of bird and insect species.
The benefits of increased tree cover are well established. Research shows that more trees lead to more absorption of pollutants, saving lives and reducing both heart and lung disease, noise reduction, and increased biodiversity. These benefits are particularly important in urban areas, becoming both an environmental and public health priority.
Guy Shrubsole –The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022)
Guy Shrubsole draws attention to the fact that Britain still contains fragments of temperate rainforest. Temperate rainforests, like those in British Columbia and Canada, used to be a major feature of western Britain. Widespread from Cornwall to the far north of Scotland, these may at one time have covered up to a fifth of the country. Today, however, as Shrubsole observes, only around 13% of Britain is tree cover, much of it commercial plantation rather than native woodland. There is, therefore, scope for more trees and more forests.
Temperate rainforests are already familiar to us, in that they typically include oak, holly, birch, rowan, hazel, and ash. These forests are also significant carbon stores with their canopy systems performing a vital function that captures and retains carbon, critical in the contact of the ongoing climate crisis.
Shrubsole notes how research in the peat of Dartmoor suggests that rainforest species were present as long ago as 5,000 years. Sites such as Wistman’s Wood may represent remnants of these ancient rainforest sites and are now showing signs of expansion where grazing has been reduced. This evidence raises a general question about how much of Britain was once forested.
On Bodmin Moor, fragments of temperate rainforests have been revealed. A pioneering project to increase 100 acres of such forest to 300 is in progress. A long-term plan involving both selective planting and permitted rewilding has also been developed. Similarly, Millook Valley Woods offers a promising example of restoration, supported by the efforts of the Woodland Trust.
But why should such restorations take place? First, in a country where nature has been depleted, specific, long-term goals are essential. Birds, insects, animals, fungi, and many plant species can play important parts in this process. Second, current land-use pressures must be addressed. We must recognise that the numbers of sheep and deer on the landscape pose significant threats to the expansion of our temperate rainforests. Without managing these pressures, efforts to expand rainforests are unlikely to succeed.
Conclusions
Taken together, these perspectives offer both grounds for optimism and concern. Our trees must be valued in order to be increased. It appears there is considerable public support for this. However, it is unlikely to occur unless the scale of sheep and deer in various parts of Britain are reduced. The former is threatened by a decline in consumption; the latter has no natural predators and may need larger public demand for venison to help reduce depredation by increasing numbers of deer.
However, much larger designated areas for forests to freely expand are needed, with large increases in enforcement powers and resources for the Environment Agency, and far more emphasis on urban regeneration instead of the urban sprawl and new towns favoured by the current and previous governments.
This article about trees and forests does not consider how concentrations of the same species in towns and cities could be achieved using both existing public green space such as fringes of school playing fields and expanded pedestrianised areas, and by judicious use of gardens.
Ultimately, more trees are needed in many more places than there are in a currently nature-depleted Britain. This has potential for improving incomes and creating useful employment in agriculture, forestry, and the wider environmental sector.
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