For villagers in Tharabari, a remote village located close to Balipara Reserve Forest (BRP) in Sonitpur district of Assam, India, the forest that surrounded them has always been full of treasures. Other than firewood, they forage the jungle for medicinal herbs like seni bon, a cure for acidity, durun ful, a headache remedy and dupor tenga used to treat kidney stones. Over the years, however, the forest became severely denuded. So did these treasures and their livelihoods. This also led to soil erosion, loss of biodiversity and rise in human-elephant conflict. 

Could afforestation offer a solution? In 2017, Balipara Foundation, a non-profit working for community based environment conservation had transformed barren land in Udalguri in Assam into a full-fledged forest with local help. The transformed forest was soon restored as an active elephant corridor.  It also had experience running similar afforestation projects in other parts of the state. In Tharabari, however, when the Foundation initially explained the plan to afforest the area with indigenous trees, local attitudes initially proved to be an obstacle. Villagers feared that once this happened, their land would have to be handed over to the forest department. 

Lucky for them that a local student, 21-year-old Junali Basumatary, understood that perhaps by restoring traditional biodiversity to the area, local livelihoods could get a much-needed fillip. She persuaded Jermia, 43, a local farmer, to participate. Together, they convinced 150 villagers to join the drive and paved the way for the Foundation to start their work at Tharabari. 

The plantation drive had a three-fold strategy. “We started by offering them wages for the plantation that gave them livelihood. Then we asked them to build a community nursery from where we could purchase saplings,” explains Gautam Baruah, chief operations architect, Balipara Foundation. The project took off and today, planters and site supervisors earn between Rs 250-350 a day, considered a good livelihood here. Additionally, they also undergo training in multi-cropping and looking after the newly planted saplings.  

From 0.25 million in 2020, Jermia and friends have already reached the grand figure of 0.47 million saplings planted this year at Tharabari. The project however, is fully dependent on Balipara Foundation as of now. It needs time and perhaps more community support to become self-sustaining. 

Linking forest regeneration with livelihoods has ensured that villagers are not solely financially dependent on cultivating rain-fed paddy. It has also reawakened the community’s natural affinity for the forest. “It is unbelievable that we are managing to earn our livelihood without destroying the environment,” says Jernia. “The earth can certainly become a nicer place to stay if such efforts are replicated in other places!”

Author: Gurvinder Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Balipara Foundation

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We think of Delhi as a concrete jungle, which, indubitably, it is. However, the city is on the tail end of the Aravallis and their forests, many of which are, happily, in different stages of rewilding. Recent surveys of these forests show that they harbour an astonishingly rich diversity of wildlife with relatively high densities of mammals in non-protected areas. As someone who has been documenting life in these forests over the last few decades, I have, in recent times, chronicled many species that used to be rare to find and can now be spotted.

The growing awareness about the conservation and protection of Delhi’s urban forests is a welcome breath of fresh air for conservationists and wildlife lovers like me. Much more needs to be done but I am happy that in my years as a chronicler of the city’s animals, I have got to see some of these amazing species return to their lost habitats.

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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A Welsh folk poem dating back to the 14th century Derwen Ceubren yr Ellyll, or ‘The Hollow Oak, Haunt of Demons’ tells of an ancient oak that bears witness to the betrayal of Welsh revolutionary Owain Glyndŵr by his cousin and English royalist Hywel Sele, supporter of King Henry IV. The cousins embark on a deer-hunting trip, when Hywel turns his sword on Owain, who has suspected his motives and worn chainmail. In a fight to the death, Hywel is vanquished by Owain and:

“Pale lights on Cader’s rocks were seen,
And midnight voices heard to moan;
‘Twas even said the Blasted Oak,
Convulsive, heaved a hollow groan…”

Owain conceals Hywel’s body in the old oak’s great trunk and never tells of the murder, only bespoken by the oak, which grows gnarled and twisted in its dark knowledge until, many years later, Hywel Sele’s widow leads a band of men to split the oak’s great bole to find her husband’s body within, a rusting sword clutched in its skeletal hand.

Hallowed by the Celts, great oaks traditionally served as meeting spots and boundary-markers to Welsh wayfarers in an era when upland oak woodland – dominated by sessile oak (Quercus petraea) and local pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and typically supporting 500-plus plant and animal species as well as other trees such as alder, ash, birch, hazel, holly, and rowan – covered much of Wales’ landmass.

These days woodland only covers 14 percent of the current land surface in Wales (in comparison to a European average of 37 percent), and as of 1998, only 38 percent of Welsh woodland was composed of native species such as oak (Welsh Assembly Government, 2013). This process of gradual deforestation is thought to be down to many factors, including destruction of woodlands during English King Edward I’s seizing of Welsh territories and the hunting-to-extinction of apex predators such as the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), European brown bear (Ursus arctos) and the grey wolf (Canis lupis) from the early to late middle ages (700s to 1500s) resulting in an irruption of herbivores that devoured emergent tree saplings.

The final crisis point for many of Wales’ upland oak woodlands were the World Wars, when a rapacious appetite for timber led to upland oak woodlands being force purchased by the British government’s Forestry Commission, felled and in many cases replanted with non-native fast-growing conifers.

One woodland’s tale: Gigrin Prysg

I’m standing in a stretch of upland oak woodlands in a region of mid-Wales whose fate charts the turbulent fate of Wales’ upland oak woodlands. From its slanting escarpments are visible the brooding blues of the Cambrian Mountains and the sheening dams and reservoirs of the Elan and Claerwen Valleys; brushing my ankles as I walk along the woodland’s steep-inclined pathways are mauve heather, fronded ferns and bushes of bilberries, a tiny dark berry that makes a fine late summer pie.

“Those are good indicator species that this is ancient woodland,” says Marc Liebrecht, a Sustainable Forest Management specialist who maintains Gigrin Prysg for Sacred Groves. “As are the lichens that you see on the oaks over there, such as wood bristle-moss and old man’s beard lichen.”

An 11.8 acre stretch of mature oak woodland, Gigrin Prysg translates as ‘Gigrin’s grove’, for an 18th century local farm owner. Its ancient trees were felled, Liebrecht believes, for World War Two timber and have since grown back and reseeded naturally from dropped acorns, in higgledy piggledy patches and clusters of oaks.

The oaks also support the growth of rowan and birch trees in the gaps in the canopy left by this natural dispersal of saplings. Deadwood left to rot on the site provides a home for species including blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus) and crane fly (Lipsothrix errans).

The lack of ruminant grazing on the site will allow further trees to grow from the tender saplings at our feet, Liebrecht says, as Sacred Groves plan to leave the woodland to rewild and reseed naturally, with the help of supporters.

Regenerating Wales’ lost woodlands is, Liebrecht admits, a long game. Easily felled, oaks grow slowly (at around 50cm a year), and it’s hard to predict if pests or erratic weather conditions borne of climate change will threaten the viability of this native species, as has been seen with Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus), a fungus that arrived on British soil in 2012 and which is predicted to kill 80 percent of native ash trees (including a patch on the western edge of the Gigrin Prysg site).

“For dynamic resilience you need mixed wooded ecosystems with different species and ages of tree, and you need time,” says Liebrecht, gesturing at Gigrin Prysg’s boughs. Gigrin Prysg’s venerable Welsh oaks will live, he predicts, to witness other tall tales.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Sally Howard and Hollow Oak illustrations out of copyright

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Think of the Cotswolds countryside and what springs to mind? Green, sheep-dotted fields? Honey-stone cottages? Neatly tended gardens with flower beds in full summer bloom? What about lawns and verges that sprawl unmown as they sprout daisies, clover and that most reviled of gardeners’ weeds, the shock-haired common dandelion?

One Cotswolds village has challenged British gardeners to cast aside their famous prediction for neatly trimmed lawns and rigorous weeding of unwanted plants. Tysoe’s journey began in spring 2019, when a handful of its residents refrained from mowing their lawns during May, the month when emerging bumblebees and hoverflies are feeding on the rich nectar of wild plant species such as dandelion, bluebells and cowslips. The campaign, dubbed #NoMowMay, was first proposed by British wild plant conservation charity Plantlife in 2019, as a way to protect endangered species as well as the fast-disappearing natives that feed on wildflower nectar and whose populations are threatened by factors including global warming.

In Tysoe, locals took to it with gusto: sowing wild flower seeds, refraining from mowing and installing Brian May, a scarecrow who inadvertently resembled the legendary guitarist with British rock group Queen, to deter birds from pecking at wildflower seeds and shoots.

“The effort has been growing every year since,” Rosemary Collier, one of the project’s local coordinators and an entomologist at Warwick University. “The idea to make space for nature came from members of the church and we first rewilded parts of the churchyard. Then the parish council came on board and we re-wilded some of the parish’s verges. We also harvested seeds from local native wildflowers and sowed these alongside yellow rattle, which is semi-parasitic and suppresses grass, allowing other wildflowers to grow.”

Tysoe villagers are part of a broader citizen-led British green volunteering trend that’s been dubbed ‘ungardening’, which urges Britons to let 30 percent of their gardens and public spaces grow wild for the benefit of native wildlife. The trend can present a challenge to British tastes, admits Shirley Cherry, who coordinates a conservation campaign to turn Tysoe into a year-round wildlife-friendly village that’s sprung from the village’s rewilding efforts, Tysoe Wildlife.

“You won’t win everybody over because some people like primness in their gardens,” Cherry says. “Nature likes things messier: curving lines rather than straight lines, plants left to grow.”

On a mild day this May, Tysoe’s verges bloom with daisies, buttercups and wild violets as bees fly in busy arabesques and passersby quizzically stop to read the signs erected to explain the thinking behind the villages’ unkempt verges. Collier, who studies insect counts in her work at Warwick University, says that quantitative analysis of the impact on Tysoe’s insect life is tricky but that she had noticed more bees in the village this year, as well as a greater range of insect species.

Any good news is much needed. A 2019 study found that a third of British wild bees and their pollinating relatives, the hoverflies, are in decline, with habitat loss and climate change thought to be the principal causes of the insects’ demise.

Collier has enjoyed the flowers that have sprung up on her village’s unmown verges, including nectar-rich wildflowers such as oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed. She’s also pleased that dandelions, unsung kings of the pollinating world, are being rehabilitated, in Tysoe and beyond.

“People get annoyed with dandelions because they’re so good at dispersing their seeds but they’re amazing pollinators because they’re composite flowers with lots of little flowers in their head,” she says. Collier hopes such efforts will lead to a renewed appreciation of the environmental benefits of wildflower such as dandelions and nettles and the important role they play in supporting insects and animals higher up the food chain.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Unsplash, Rosemary Collier and Sylvia Davies

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Think about it. Though 25 per cent of India’s landmass is under forest cover, only five per cent is protected for wildlife conservation! I realised this while I was in Banaras Hindu University’s South Campus in 2009, pursuing a Master’s degree in Environmental Science. Our campus was surrounded by the rich wilderness areas of Mirzapur that fell, as most of India’s lesser known wildlife areas do, under the category of ‘Reserve Forest’ – owned and managed by the state government. As students, we spent all our free time exploring these forests which seemed to us no less than a paradise for wildlife such as leopards, sloth bears, antelopes and a diversity of birds and reptiles. The picturesque landscape was marked by hills, forests, waterfalls, grasslands and a criss-crossing of rivers and streams. However, we could also see how this was under pressure from human-induced land use changes, mainly due to mining of sandstone and real estate expansion.

The wildlife population in Mirzapur forest division was declining in front of our eyes.

In 2011 when a mega coal-based thermal power plant was proposed in this area by a private company, I decided I had to act. I appealed to the Ministry of Environment and Forests that this move would adversely, and further, impact the rich flora and fauna of this area. When my pleas went unheard and the project was approved in 2014, I challenged the environmental clearance in the National Green Tribunal (NGT), an environmental court established in 2010. Many thought it was futile for a mere student and his motley band of tree-huggers to take on the government and a rich private corporation. But eventually, NGT cancelled the environmental clearance while terming the process ‘tainted’ for deliberately concealing the presence of forest and wildlife in its Environmental Impact Assessment report. The motley band had won!

In 2017, I continued my conservation work: publishing research on sloth bear habitats in Mirzapur district based on various indirect signs of the animal. However, to make a case for the government to protect these forests, I realised that documenting wildlife there through photographs and camera traps was an essential tool. In the following year, I conducted a camera trap survey in collaboration with Mirzapur forest division to create an inventory of wildlife present there and we finally had photographic evidence of not just sloth bears but several other species like Asiatic Wild Cat, Rusty Spotted Cat, Small Indian Civet, Ruddy Mongoose for the first time in the history of this landscape. This evidence enabled us to make a strong case for having the forests of Mirzapur declared Protected Areas under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The Divisional Forest Officer of Mirzapur agreed, proposing that these forests be declared a ‘Sloth Bear Conservation Reserve’. This has been endorsed by the Indian conservation community and pending government approval.

My biggest learning from these experiences has been that you don’t need to be rich or politically connected to fight for the conservation of wild spaces. Indeed sometimes all you need to facilitate legal and policy interventions for protection of lesser-known wildlife habitats is faith, and a couple of simple camera traps.

Author: Debadityo Sinha, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
About the Author: Recipient – The Sanctuary Wildlife Service Award 2019; Managing Trustee, Vindhyan Ecology and Natural History Foundation
Images Credit: Debadityo Sinha

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He polices the forest with missionary zeal. Locals claim that his Public Interest Litigations (PILs) – challenging the construction of mines, dams, resorts and more – have helped not only maintain but regenerate the unique flora and fauna of this biodiversity hotspot in Karnataka, India. Indeed, the catalytic role DV Girish played in facilitating the government-sponsored voluntary relocation of more than 450 families from the forests of Bhadra from 2001-3 is inspirational. Even today, twenty years later, the lessons from India’s most equitable conservation swap (in which 13 villages were relocated to sites away from the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary, a part of the Project Tiger) remain the blueprint for socially minded conservation interventions. Here’s how he did it.

Karnataka-born, Girish grew up within a stone’s throw from Bhadra Reserve. “Over the years, my forays into the jungle brought me in contact with people living inside the forest,” he recalls. “They had no schools, limited livelihoods, poor access to the world outside and lived in constant fear of encountering elephants and big cats. No family wanted their daughters to marry men from these villages as life there was so tough.”

Although the forest had been declared a sanctuary in 1974 and plans were afoot to relocate these villages out of the forest, government machinery was slow. In the late eighties, Girish and his team conducted a socio-economic survey of these villages and drew a blueprint for the relocation process.

“First, suitable land had to be identified outside the forest where these villages could be shifted in their entirety,” he explains. “Each household was counselled and given land corresponding to their landholding in the village. Being local, we became the bridge between them and the government.” When the central government finally disbursed the funds in 1999, the relocation began. First to move was a village 17km inside the forest. Girish and his team provided them with temporary shelters, communal kitchens, even loans to build their new houses. By 2003, Bhadra became the first ‘inviolate’ (people-free) wildlife sanctuary in the country.

His job, however, didn’t end there. Girish has kept in touch with the villagers he’d helped relocate. “The reason why our effort was successful could also perhaps limit the replicability of this project: my being a local, speaking the same language and understanding their culture made it easier for them to be convinced by me,” he says. “Would they have taken so kindly to an outsider asking them to leave their homes? Possibly not…”

Today, the veteran conservationist is Bhadra’s most vigilant watchdog. He has successfully opposed the construction of three dams on River Bhadra, fought the powerful bamboo lobby which wanted to extract bamboo from the forest, and stalled the construction of resorts, windmills and mines in and around. “I’ve learnt from all these experiences,” he says, “that whether it’s people or projects – in the long run, relocating them safeguards the jungle more effectively than developing (and enforcing) physical and legal infrastructure to do so.”

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Madhu Venkatesh and Girish DV

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How do you protect a padauk tree in Gabon, central Africa, from illegal logging? Bore a sharp metal tube into its dark red trunk. In a pioneering new conservation project, specially trained samplers drive the gadget called a Pickering Punch into a living padauk tree at waist height. The precious sample they extract then makes a long journey to scientists at Kew Gardens in south-west London for analysis.

Along with organisations including the Forest Stewardship Council in the US, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is part of WorldForestID, an international effort to stop the fraudulent timber trade. This is the wood that ends up as furniture, flooring and paper, but whose identity and provenance is little understood with existing databases of geo-referenced wood samples being limited and documentation poor.

According to the European Union, between 20 percent and 40 percent of the global timber trade comes from illegal sources, and costs the governments of developing countries between €10-€15bn [US$12bn to $18bn] a year in lost revenues, while decimating native forests, reducing habitat for wildlife and depressing world timber prices. Rosewood alone comprises 35 percent of the monetary value of confiscated illegal wildlife trade, according to WorldForestID.

WorldForestID is trying to tackle this by answering two questions, says Dr Peter Gasson, wood anatomist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: What is the identity of the wood and where was it grown? “First of all, we need adequate reference wood samples from which to derive data, and then we can address these two questions,” he says.

The project is complicated by the fact that trees are harvested in one place, transported through one or more countries, and only then processed into manufactured products: oak furniture and flooring imported into the USA and Europe, for example, often comprising several species of white oak from North America and the Russian Far East.

Back in Gabon, the Pickering Punch has worked its magic and the sample is dried and packed off to Kew’s Plant Quarantine Unit, where it’s inspected for contamination. It’s then frozen at -40 degrees centigrade for 72 hours to kill any invertebrates with the sample’s origin. Then the process of identity verification begins.

It’s relatively easy for an expert to identify the genus by eye or hand lens, or using a microscope. But like the forests they’re trying to protect, the population of expert anatomists is in decline. Automated machine learning is being developed by the team to meet this human shortfall. Routes to identification include chemical analysis, DNA sequencing, and stable isotope ratio analysis, which can shed light on the environment the tree has grown in, as well as its age.

To counter the risk of samples being given fraudulent geo-locations, the WFID smartphone app used by samplers in the field, has a time-stamp feature, and GPS coordinates that can’t be overridden.

Getting the data is one thing. Then comes the challenge of getting traders, legislators, scientists and timber consumers to embrace science-based wood authentication. WorldForest ID is optimistic about the prospects. “We envisage the day that scientific methods will be used routinely and successfully by timber traders, manufacturers, retailers and law enforcement to accept or reject identity and provenance claims on internationally traded timber and forest products, and to support prosecutions when laws are infringed,” a spokesperson says.

Author: Clare Dowdy, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: ©FSC International / Loa Dalgaard Worm and Kew

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In Uganda’s Bidi Bidi, the second largest refugee settlement in the world and home to about a quarter of a million people, cutting trees for brick-making and firewood has resulted in one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. As the country loses 2.6 percent of its forest cover every year, the search for sustainable solutions is urgent. Enter Interlocking Sustainable Soil Bricks (ISSB) technology, a cost-effective, environmentally sustainable alternative to burnt bricks. Made and installed on-site, these make construction cost-effective, efficient and environmentally friendly, believe engineers from international humanitarian charity Mercy Corps.

Cut to 2019, when Mercy Corps’ BRIDGE program funded by the UK’s Department for International Development engaged Haileybury Youth Trust (HYT) to employ ISSB technology to construct two innovation centres in Bidi Bidi. They trained ten women and 16 men in all aspects of construction from foundations to roofing, with a special focus on this new technology. This training has boosted the income and confidence of trainees and ensured they spread the technology further. Florence, a refugee and HYT trainee says, “I’m now able to buy clothes for the children and change the diet at home and hope to regain something of what we lost in South Sudan.”

Initially, many doubted the strength of these bricks; testing has proven them durable and sustainable. Today, the Mercy Corps projects using the ISSB technology have saved 45 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 72 tons of CO2 emissions, and HYT-funded water tanks using the same technology have saved 9.4 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 16.8 tons of CO₂ emissions. In 2017 HYT won an Ashden Award, an honour given to leading green energy solutions, for its vital role in using innovative solutions to climate change, poverty alleviation, and community resilience. HTY has gone on to work with and complete ISSB construction and training projects for partners such as Enabel, Mercy Corps, Children on The Edge, Build Africa, Street Child Uganda, African Revival and Catholic Relief Services.

HYT officials say they will soon have an expert team of refugee and Ugandan graduates in Bidi Bidi that are capable of building using ISSB with minimal HYT involvement and replicating the ISSB technology in other settlements. Already, seven Mercy Corps trained graduates have returned to South Sudan to implement ISSB technology and further train others to use it. Others have gone on to use ISSB technology in housing for their families, hairdressing kiosks and poultry houses. 

“We are confident ISSB will become mainstream in the coming years when it is coupled with an environmental construction policy and spear-headed by more professionals, including architects, engineers, environmentalists, and other stakeholders,” says Edmund Brett of HYT Uganda.

Author: Esther Nakkazi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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Plant a tree and save the planet; or so we’re told. Well you might be surprised to discover that not all tree planting is good tree planting. A tree planted in the wrong location can block watercourses or provide a wider vantage for predators of endangered species; it can even, in the case of tree-planting in ancient moor and peatlands, release carbon deposits that have safely been stored in the soil for decades, or longer.

“It’s about planting the right trees in the right location to maximise environmental benefits,” says Alice Crosby, Project Officer of a smart tree-planting project in Nidderdale in the Yorkshire Dales, funded by British conservation charity the Woodland Trust. “An example of good planting would be around existing woodlands to create a new space for wildlife to expand their habitats. Poor planting would be in important habitats such as our heathland and moorlands, which already support rare species and contribute significantly to the UK’s targets for carbon sequestration.” In Nidderdale, bad planting has historically opened species of wading birds, such as the endangered curlew, to predation.

With around eight percent tree cover, Nidderdale is typical of British regions in having undergone historical waves of deforestation followed, after the 20th century’s two World Wars, by a programme of replanting of commercial woods such as conifers; with British fuel security, rather than conservation, in view. More recently, tree planting in the region was on landowners’ instigation, with local authorities only stepping in when these projects were on a large scale.

The idea with Nidderdale’s digital Woodland Opportunity Map says Nidderdale Biodiversity Officer Kelly Harmar, is to “flip that process and make it much less passive”. With 70 different factors accounted for, and data drawn from everywhere from grassroots volunteers taking soil samples to Google metrics, the accessible, traffic-light coded online map means Nidderdale can approach landowners, such as private utilities company Yorkshire Water, with the argument for tree-planting in a given spot.

This is where Crosby comes in, her remit being to approach landowners with data on where to plant, as well as advice on how to best withstand the exposed conditions of the Dales. Thanks to hymenoscyphus fraxineus, a chronic fungal disease that’s killing ash trees across the European continent, ash cannot be planted. Beeches, poorly suited to the exposed conditions of the Dales, are overplanted too. Instead Crosby often advises landowners to plant hardy varietals such as the downy birch.

“The idea is to combat climate change but also make the landscape more resilient, meaning that wildlife can thrive and move around more as it’s not impeded by poor tree planting,” Crosby explains.

The beauty of the map’s layered data is that it captures information across the seasons. “If you visit a spot during winter tree-planting season, for example, you wouldn’t know that migratory birds arrive there in summer,” Harmar adds. “A tool like this, that looks at historical data over a number of years, can tease out the sites where ecosystems might be most at risk.”

The team claims that Scandinavian countries such as Finland, with its 60 percent tree cover, much of which is ancient woodland, are their inspiration. Crosby is also documenting the patches of tree cover which are formed of ancient woodland, which has thrived on the same spot for millennia and is host to a range of ancient flora and fauna, including rare fungi, wild garlic and May-blooming bluebell fields. Surprisingly, the locations of these ancient habitats are poorly recorded, even in national archives.

With many of Nidderdale’s mid-war conifer woods approaching their 80-year harvest time, the plan is to replant hardy native species to 12 percent regional forest cover in the next decade, says Harmar. The Woodland Opportunity Map is a big part of this strategy and is being received well. “We only launched the map in October, but the landowners are responding positively and discussing where we might site trees in the next winter planting season,” Crosby says. The project, of course, is only effective if it inspires landowners to plant trees.

Beyond the arguments from data, the team’s loftier hope is to restore Britain’s woodland culture. “British people used to be woodland people and I think we’re rediscovering what we always knew: that forests are great for the planet, but also essential for our mental and physical health,” Crosby says, adding that her favourite forested spot is Hack Fall, where Victorian follies peep between ancient boughs.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Nidderdale AONB Autumn Colours by David Tolcher

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