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6 hours ago
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A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand.
About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees.
They have used detailed maps compiled by NatureScot and Scottish Forestry that identify pockets of ancient woodland, often in exposed, challenging locations, scrambling up hillsides to find the right specimens.
They search for a select range of trees, known to have colonised Scotland after the last ice age: hazel, sessile oak, dwarf birch, willow, juniper, birch, wild cherry, wych elm, yew and elder.
The ecologists involved said these trees have inherited the genetic resilience to survive in specific microclimates and soil types along Scotland’s Atlantic coast – an advantage non-native trees would lack, particularly as the climate changes.
The latest surveys suggest only 30,000 hectares of original Atlantic rainforest, a rare temperate habitat adapted to the UK’s moist coastal environment, survives. Now the focus of multimillion-pound restoration projects, those pockets have been meticulously mapped within distinct seed zones devised by forestry experts.
The seeds have been collected, graded and checked by the rewilding organisation Trees for Life at its tree nursery at Dundreggan near Inverness, with the finished saplings sent back out to the correct zones.
The Woodland Trust has taken saplings for reforesting projects – including Glenn Shieldaig and Assynt in Wester Ross, Beò Airceig, a 30,000-hectare restoration around Loch Arkaig in Lochaber – and sold to scores of crofters planting small woods on former grazing land.
Sheena Macauley, a biology graduate who lives near Oban, is one of those volunteers. A former IT manager at Scottish Power’s Cruachan hydro station, she combines seed-hunting with butterfly conservation, crouching down to spot the larvae of marsh fritillaries and burnet moths as she walked on one seed collection outing near Oban.
“We need to regenerate for the generations coming behind us,” she said. “I mentioned it to my neighbours and one actually joined up as well. Another friend down in Glasgow, she joined a group down there. So, rather than moaning about climate change, actually do something.”
Her team was supervised by Roz Birch, the volunteer coordinator with Trees for Life, who uses these outings to deliver impromptu biology lessons, pulling down branches and splaying leaves, or digging through seeds and nuts proffered by volunteers on their open palms.
She has become expert in spotting the differences between Scottish native sessile oak and common, or English, oak; volunteers are shown how far sessile oak acorns and leaves sit from the twig. A moss-laden tree nearby offers a lesson on temperate rainforest ecology, with its bark home to a compact forest of moss and lichens that thrive in the moist climate.
“You do have really extreme high winds and storms that will pass through. Again, the trees are pretty well adapted to that environment,” Birch explains, pointing at liverwort that has colonised an old, partly severed oak branch.
“The uniqueness of the rainforest zone is there will be bryophytes, lichens, whole ecosystems on these trees and within these woodlands, that you can’t really find anywhere else apart from the west coast of Scotland and Wales and the south-west of England,” she said.
The project is underpinned by rigorous ecology, and close observation of seasonal weather patterns, drawing on the ancient woodland and Caledonian pine inventories.
Sites are often surveyed again and there are clear signs, Birch said, that climate heating means seed ripening happens earlier. A dry spring can stress rowan but turbocharge hawthorn, forcing seed collection dates to shift or be cancelled.
The project fills a significant gap left by commercial or state-sponsored forestry organisations: these locations are too remote or costly for commercial seed collectors to visit, adding to the significance of the specimens Birch’s teams are saving.
Its backers believe the project is the largest citizen-based reforestation programme of its kind.
Originally conceived as a one-year project, it has now received funding for a fourth, from a coalition of donors including the People’s Postcode Lottery via Woodland Trust Scotland, Trees for Life appeals, the BrITE Foundation and the Clean Planet Foundation.
Another of Birch’s volunteers is Laura Corby, 47, a marine biologist who prizes her time seed-hunting as it requires slowing down and focusing, undistracted, on tree branches and the ground.
“You’re literally growing the future. And that’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? I don’t think people really understand the significance of the rainforest, even people who’ve lived here their whole lives,” she said.
