From farm to forest: the volunteers planting 100,000 trees in Somerset

17 01 2025 | 08:56Jamie Grierson/The Guardian

A woodland charity has enlisted about 1,000 people to create Lower Chew Forest and help fight climate breakdown

On a chilly day in December under stubborn grey skies, a band of green-fingered volunteers can be found in Somerset’s Chew valley with spades in their hands and dirt under their fingernails.

There are about 30 helpers, split into pairs, carefully planting hawthorn, blackthorn and crab apple saplings, one tree at a time. Undaunted by the scale of the project, they are planting one of the biggest new woodlands in England.

The Lower Chew Forest, as it will be known, is a vast new woodland between Bristol and Bath with 100,000 native trees planted by about 1,000 volunteers mobilised by the woodland creation charity Avon Needs Trees.

The charity says the 170-hectare (420-acre) woodland will increase biodiversity, reduce flooding and lock up carbon to help the fight against climate breakdown. But what does it take to make it happen?

“We depend utterly on volunteers to be able to achieve our objectives and our aims. To develop the project as it is, we’re planting 100,000 trees here over the next two to three years,” says the volunteer leader, John Chew.

Chew, 66, a primary school teacher, has supervised volunteers, from children to those in their late 80s, mostly arriving from Bristol, Bath and the surrounding villages of the Mendips and Chew valley.

“One of the reasons that Avon Needs Trees has become so successful over the last four or five years is because so many people are concerned about climate change, biodiversity loss, things like that,” he says.

“There’s an awful lot of charities there that you can contribute to, possibly just give money to, but with Avon Needs Trees, of course, you can get actively involved. You can come and get your hands dirty. You can put some trees in the ground.”

The spades do not slip easily into the thick, clay soil; planting tree after tree takes some effort. But the volunteers are all thrilled to be here, each for their own unique reasons.

“I read in the media about the climate crisis, and I think for me to be able to compartmentalise it or cope with it in many ways, is to come and actually actively do something,” says Georgie Duckworth, 41, a writer who lives in the Chew valley. “So being here feels like a positive step to actually helping.”

Duckworth’s planting partner for the day, 68-year-old Liz Hine, tries to do one planting day a week. “I do it as a way of meeting a diverse group of people because every day I come on there are different people to chat to, and so it feels like it’s my window on the world.”

Behind the scenes, there is a team of about 25 who are the master planners behind the forest, from woodlands and habitat experts to project managers and nature finance leaders.

In the heart of the site, a makeshift HQ has been set up in a draughty barn – the only habitable building left in the old farmyard, which has an eerie, deserted feel.

Josh Hale, the Chew valley project manager, peers over a series of maps, charts and graphics, designed to help visitors understand what is happening at the site.

The charity bought the site – then known as Wick Farm – in May 2024, covering the existing woodland, fields and dilapidated buildings. First up, the team will restore historical hedgerows that have been absent for the last 100 years; these alone will comprise about 5,000 trees.

Hale speaks enthusiastically about the “mosaic” of habitats they are introducing; from wetlands to woodland pasture and grasslands.

“On our sites we leave about 20-40% open space to provide a variety of mosaic habitats, which creates the most diversity,” Hale says. “We have a range of biodiversity existing on our sites including hare, which needs open space, deer and different species of bird, which all need different habitats, not just woodland.”

The community has been vocal, most of it constructive and supportive. The Lower Chew Forest will be open for the public to enjoy, with a network of new permissive paths built throughout the site.

Dave Wood, the chief executive of Avon Needs Trees, said the project at first felt “unassailable”, adding that it took “quite a lot of blood, sweat and tears” to acquire, but is now well on its way.

“The people-power side of this has never been a barrier for us, we have so much community support and help from people, it’s been astonishing,” Wood says.

“It felt like a bit of an unassailable opportunity, because it was such a big area of land and it was such a high price tag on the area of land. But we also know that in the years that we’ve been tracking land coming on the market, nothing this size had really come on the open market in quite this way. So it felt like a really unique opportunity.

“So we talked to the Environment Agency, and they said natural flood management potential on this site and river quality enhancement through prevention of runoff were absolutely huge. And they said just to grab it with both hands if we possibly could.”