Woodland Trust Plants Seeds to New Wood with £8.5m Project Land Purchase

The Woodland Trust has bought an 850-acre site to grow the largest continuous native forest in England. They are expected to plant more than 600 000 trees on the site near St Albans in Hertfordshire, within the London Greenbelt, and a Biodiversity Priority Area. This site will be the flagship in an unprecedented national tree planting campaign, including 250 acres at Elmstead Market and 183 acres near Durham. In total, these three sites cover an area four times the size of Hyde Park.

The trust says a new native forest of this size and type has never been created in England before, and could take shape within 12 years.

England has lost half its ancient woodland to development, agriculture or conifer woods since the 1930s. The site contains four small remnants (44 acres) of precious ancient woodland, the British equivalent to the rainforest, which now sadly makes up only two per cent of UK landcover.

Established in 1972, the Woodland Trust now has over 1,000 sites in its care covering around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of woodland. You can visit any of their woods for free and there's probably one on your doorstep, you might not know it's there.