How to Enjoy your Woodland

I think people get a huge amount of satisfaction about owning woodland. It's your work, it's your achievement. You know, and woodland will pat you on the back for that. My name's Anthony Mason. I'm a writer, the author of Tree Planting, How to Create a Woodland. We list in the book the top reasons for owning or planting a new woodland. And you know, there are many. It has a benefit that is really quite unlike other landscapes. One question that's often asked is, how long does it take to feel as though you've got a woodland? Patience is definitely a virtue. After about eight years or so, you will start to feel that the woodland is on its way. After about 15 years or so, by that time the canopy will have really started to knit together and join together. Once you reach 30 years, it really will feel like a wood. That's part of the challenge of it. And that's you and your relationship with nature. That's kind of therapeutic too. There are many ways you can involve the community. And you know, it often helps I think to think about that when you're planting a woodland. You know, who are the people around your woodland? What will they think of this project? Because you know, they're looking at a change in their landscape too. So it helps to involve them. And you know, there are many ways in which communities love the project. You can get schools involved to do nature projects and that kind of thing. There are groups of people like the Scouts. There's a lot of learning around woodland that people can get involved in. And that can be quite technical. You know, you can get maybe university projects that are counting species and looking at the way that species take over a new woodland and you know, what that process is. Coppicing, which is a fairly short-term way of producing useful timber. Usually planting shrubs or small trees like hazel, after about seven years you cut them right back and then they'll produce poles over the next five, seven years or so. And then you can harvest those poles. And those poles can be used for fencing or for broomsticks. Another one of course is firewood. When it comes to thinning, 20 years down the line or so, you know, you have your ready-made supply of firewood from your woodland. You might find an interest in people who are woodworkers or sculptors who like interesting, maybe even rare forms of wood with different shapes and knots and grain in them. There are studies of therapeutic benefits of woodland and just how good it is for people to be able to see trees from a hospital window, for instance. You know, COVID was a time in which people yearned to get out into woodland and woodland provided a lot of therapeutic benefit. So there's a medicinal side to woodland. You know, it's a great pleasure to be amongst trees. There's huge richness in woodland with all the biodiversity that entails. Hundreds of different sorts of moths and other kinds of insects, fungi, your smaller mammals, birdlife. And that can actually start to develop really quite early on when you're planting woodland. You can start creating wildlife corridors which allow a wildlife to move between other woodlands or between hedgerows and woodlands across your land. Trees, in particular, are very efficient at absorbing carbon. A five-acre woodland absorbs about 20 tonnes of carbon, enough carbon for basically two average people in the UK. It has an immense contribution towards combating climate change. There are actually not many other ways that you can quite so effectively do your bit for climate change than buying and planting woodland. I think woodland is actually very much a part of our natural psyche. People really love being in woodland and they understand what that means. They feel a natural bond with woodland. This book is out now for sale, available online.