Failing to take root

Vast amounts of money are spent on tree planting schemes, yet nature can do the job for free

- James Fair

IN 1961, A FOUR-HECTARE FIELD ON THE southern edge of an ancient woodland called Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire produced its last crop of barley.

Having originally been cleared of trees during the Roman occupation, it was then abandoned to nature. In the intervening 60 years, that field has changed beyond recognition. Today, it's a mature, closed-canopy woodland with oak, maple and ash trees, as well as berry-bearing shrubs such as hawthorn and brambles.

Its "structural characteristics", according to a study published in the renowned science journal PLOS One in 2021, are "approaching those of neighbouring ancient woodlands". That's some recovery in a little over half-a-century - with no money spent and no human effort required.

Just a year before that study was published, the £1.5 billion upgrade of the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon was completed, with 850,000 trees planted as part of environmental enhancements that were meant to provide a biodiversity uplift of 11.5 per cent.

Over the course of the next year or so, somewhere between 50 and 70 per cent of those trees died and, despite two further replantings, the embankments of the new dual carriageway still appear today to be largely bare of anything living other than grass. Tens of thousands of plastic guards stand empty like corpses on a battlefield. National Highways, which was responsible for the scheme, said the high failure rate (which it would not confirm to BBC Wildlife) was down to drought. It said that 90 per cent of 160,000 trees and shrubs subsequently planted survived and that it had met its “performance target of achieving no net loss of biodiversity in the period 2020-25”. (It also declined to comment on whether it had achieved the 11.5 per cent biodiversity gain or not.) As of today, there is no reliable figure on how many trees, including those replanted, are still alive.