Scouts for Trees
During 2007 the Trust planted over a million trees through the Tree For All programme and as part of this the Scouts for Trees Project celebrated the Scouts Centenary.
Thanks to a £200,000 flagship award from The Veolia Environmental Trust and support from other funders including the Heritage Lottery Fund, over 67,000 scouts planted thousands of trees to create one hundred Centenary Groves across the UK.
This unique project created fantastic opportunities for young people to actively take part in conservation. It allowed them to acquire new skills and knowledge which can only serve to benefit them later in life.
The highlight of the project in 2007 was the World Scouts Jamboree. As part of the celebrations, five hundred scouts were involved in a week of activities at our Fordham site near Colchester in Essex. These included building an otter holt, digging a wildlife pond, building bird and bat boxes and making charcoal at a bodger camp.
Back to the future
Thanks to a grant of £18,000 from The Veolia Environmental Trust, work has started at Penn Wood in Buckinghamshire to remove planted conifers from this ancient woodland site. Instead of using high-tech mechanical methods, two teams of heavy horses are being used to extract the timber in the traditional fashion.
Using horses really reduces the environmental impact of the work by cutting noise and pollution and preventing unnecessary damage to the surrounding woodland, and they are also very popular with visitors to the wood! What’s more the extracted timber is due to be chipped and used by a local school to power their wood-fired burner.