England

Our first wood was in the Avon Valley in Devon and since then our portfolio has grown rapidly to include more than 1,000 woods across the United Kingdom.

We have a good spread of sites across the country from Northumberland to Cornwall, Hereford to Essex. They include rural and urban sites, ancient and newly created woods.

Our largest site in England is now Heartwood at nearly 350 hectares (nearly 850 acres) but we also have some very small sites, such as Crossfield Wood in Cumbria which is only 0.08 hectares (less than a quarter of an acre).

The Woodland Trust's founder was retired farmer and agricultural machinery producer, Kenneth Watkins.

Concerned about the rapidly disappearing small broadleaved woods, spinneys and copses which had been plundered during the Second World War or planted with softwoods, he started the Trust with the assistance of three friends in 1972 and built up the Trust’s membership with his wife, Mary, from their farm in Devon.