Volunteers celebrating the tree-planting progress – credit, Graham Makepeace-Warne
3 years ago this month, GNN reported that a UK land trust had set the goal of reforesting a 70 acre “celtic rainforest” on the Isle of Man.
30,000 trees later, the effort exceeded expectations and finished ahead of schedule.
The budding rainforest instead stretches 100 acres across an area called Creg y Cowin, owned by the Manx Wildlife Trust, which owns three properties for the sake of conservation.
Temperate rainforests are one of the rarest kinds of ecosystems worldwide, and in the UK are found in Wales, on the Isle of Man, and a few other locations.
MWT chief executive Graham Makepeace-Warne spoke with the BBC about how best to categorize the ecosystem, describing something akin to the forests of the American Pacific Northwest.
“Temperate rainforests can be described as plants growing on plants, growing on plants,” he said.
It will take around 50 years for the trees to reach the level of maturity where that lush microclimate can be seen, a date too far off for some of the volunteers, many of whom brought their children with them to show them what they had hopefully secured for their posterity.
“To plant 30,000 trees in three years in incredible work, our volunteers should be really proud of that,” Makepeace-Warne said. “I love the idea of them coming back with their kids, when it is a proper woodland, that they can enjoy—that’s a lovely idea.”
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Makepeace-Warne said he believes it will take far less than 50 years for cattle and sheep to be welcomed back into the rainforest. Unlike our image of domesticated cattle out in a field, the native bovid species on the British Isles was a woodland animal, which enjoyed scratching itself on trees and sheltering from extreme temperatures.
Many of the UK’s plant species evolved to rely on the downstream effects of the cattle’s presence, such as hitching a ride for their seeds on the animal’s fur.
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Creg y Cowin was included in the UK’s Temperate Rainforest Restoration Program, which aims to reforest these ecosystems where they’re found across the British Isles. The project is led by the national Wildlife Trusts, and funded with a mixture of public and private money up to $52 million (£38.9 million).
Future sites, as GNN reported in 2023, could include the peak and slopes of Bwlch Mawr, in North Gwynedd, Wales.
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