Creating a forest of opportunity for all to enjoy

Local effort is making the notion of a White Rose Forest across swathes of Yorkshire a reality. Michael Hickling reports.

PHIL Baxter wades through the undergrowth, kneals under a small cherry tree and neatly slices off a plastic guard which has been protecting the bottom of the young trunk.

Along with weeding and bracken bashing, this is how Phil spends quite a bit of his spare time just now and on a warm summer evening this spot on the hillside is a good place to be.

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It's not always as pleasant as this. Phil's main interest is planting trees and that happens when the weather is often doing its Pennine worst. Phil, a veteran volunteer of 20 winters, is a member of the Colne Valley Tree Society – locals committed to transforming their landscape. Where we are standing, the ground vegetation is dense and trees flourish everywhere in what is classified in the trade as a W16 woodland mix.

Phil and co restore upland species – oaks, rowan, birch – and also put in nurse species such as pine and larch to give the native trees a chance to get going. These take the battering from the weather up here at about 900 feet and create a microclimate that fosters growth.

Not so long ago this valley was one of the remotest spots in Yorkshire. Today the thousands who travel daily across Scammonden dam on the M62 in West Yorkshire have a grandstand view of it. The drivers won't appreciate that the vigorous growth just here is the product of nearly ten years of painstaking effort. Nor the fact that what got the ball rolling here was a private cash donation from a local man called Peter Skye whose story is worth a book in itself.

This woodland beside the reservoir is now part of a big idea called the White Rose Forest. It's a concept which brings together all community woodland and parks into an over- arching regional plan for the greening of the landscape. It came into being on Yorkshire Day, August 1, 2000. Local councils signed up to the goal of improving the 'green infrastructure' and they support schemes on their patch. Kirklees council for example backs the Colne Valley Tree Society to the tune of about 5,000 a year. Yorkshire Forward has provided 2m.

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The next aim is to make the wider public more aware of what's going on, to get them involved and to dig into their pockets. A new website to be launched next weekend should help to do that with a Trees For Yorkshire campaign. The project manager, Guy Thompson, who works for Kirklees Council in Huddersfield explains: "The White Rose Forest is not a separate organisation, it's the name given to the agreement. We want to encourage the private sector and local people to sponsor tree planting –10 will buy you a tree, stake and guard on an approved site."

Guy, 45, is no desk-bound bureaucrat. He's a passionate forest fan too. His home is not far from Scammonden and on our evening ramble he points out some of the willows he planted during his spare time a year or so ago.

"There will have to be investment in forests as part of our adapting to climate change," he says. "They can play a big part in preventing storm damage and flooding."

For all sorts of reasons, wood is good. Just being in and among trees is a stress-buster. People like living in greener, wooded environments and inward investors like investing in them. But we have been slow on the uptake. The German Ruhr Valley, which went through a similar de-industrialising in the late 20th century as the Aire Valley, was far quicker to see the benefit of re-inventing itself through systematic and extensive planting of woodland. Munich, Guy points out, has 15 per cent woodland where Leeds has seven. Europe's average of 20-25 per cent woodland is far ahead of ours. Our most wooded county (20 per cent) is Surrey which is where Guy comes from. He trained as a social worker and was in the probation service before switching direction. "I went to a Zen meditation retreat with the question, 'What should I do with my life that would be useful?' " The answer that came to him was trees and forests.

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He admires what has been achieved in his adopted locality – 300,000 trees planted by the Colne Valley Tree Society since they dug their first hole in 1964, many years before the green agenda became fashionable.

"This group quietly got on with it when people thought they were wasting their time," he says. "When they started out, a lot of the sites were on old quarry tips. We don't just stuff trees in. We ask what the landowner wants and plant accordingly."

Phil Baxter once took part in a challenge to plant 1,000 trees in one day. It was accomplished, with the aid of a mobile soup kitchen, one draughty December. Their plan now is to plant 5-10,000 trees a year on 284 sites in the valley. Phil, 40, from Linthwaite, works as a supervisor in a textile mill and is a third generation volunteer. He's out planting every Saturday in the winter.

"We have a nucleus of ten to twelve planting from the beginning of November to Easter. A lot of people have inside jobs now and they like a chance to get out into the fresh sir. It's certainly fresh up here in December.

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"It's a work ethic group. For me it's a green gym – with all these cloughs and slopes it's like an assault course. It's good to look at some of the sites and some of the stuff you've planted which is now woodland. We're planting for the future, who knows what the future holds?"

Benefactor Peter Skye, who gave the money to plant the first two acres, goes back much further and has good cause to feel wary about forests. He's 92 and originally from eastern Poland. In the spring of 1940 he was in the Katyn Forest west of Smolensk as a prisoner of war of the Russians.

Laverntiy Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, reported to Stalin that thousands of these officer prisoners were 'uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority' and ordered they be shot. The Soviets denied responsibility for the massacres until owning up in 1990. Peter was not caught up in the mass murder and aged 22 he arrived at Liverpool docks, via Iran, in 1941 and trained as a tank commander.

Back in civvy street, he married an English girl and found work in a Huddersfield textile mill. He changed his name from Piotr Sieminski when the mill's customers complained about them employing a Pole instead of someone local.

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Today he recalls the place he came from in what is now Belarus. "It was a village with a nice little river and a little forest. People would come and stay all summer."

Not quite Scammonden, but the pleasure to be taken from combining woodland and water must be universal.

White Rose Forest: tel 01484 234079.

Guy.thompson@kirklees.gov.uk

www.whiteroseforest.org.uk

CW 24/7/10

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