Because it's an evergreen shrub it shades out native deciduous saplings, also stopping them from growing. But the wonderful thing about nature


Many of the lichens, mosses, liverworts and fungi that grow in Britain's rainforests are internationally scarce and also intensely weird. You get wonderfully bizarre species growing here like tree lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria), which to me looks like scaly dragon-wings, and gets its name from being considered a cure for respiratory diseases in the Middle Ages (it isn't, so please don't be tempted to pick any if you find it!). Another of my favourite denizens of British rainforests is hazel gloves fungus (Hypocreopsis rhododendri), which grows on old uncoppiced hazels, parasitizing another fungus, and looks like little mittens clasping a branch. Or, as a conservationist once described it to me, like Donald Trump's tiny orange hands. I've gone on many happy botany missions in Cornwall searching for these critters; every unexpected discovery is a delight. I've fallen in love with these


incredible places. They really are the pinnacle of Britain's woodlands.


Why did Britain lose its rainforests and how do you think we might get them back?


The awful truth is that Britain is a rainforest nation which cut down most of its rainforests. Around 20% of Britain has a climate that’s rainy and mild


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enough for temperate rainforest to thrive – places like Cornwall, Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Lake District, Snowdonia and the western coast of Scotland. Around 5,000 years ago, during the ‘Atlantic Period’ of prehistory, pollen records show that places like Dartmoor were covered in trees. But Bronze Age settlers began the task of forest clearance, deploying the same sort of slash-and-burn agriculture that we see today in the Amazon. We know that the Celts revered the oak trees that form the mainstay of our Atlantic rainforests, so that may have led to some of the woods being preserved as sacred groves. But later came Medieval tin-miners and Victorian charcoal burners, who continued to hack away at the remaining woods. What I find unforgivable is that some of Britain's temperate rainforests were felled as recently as the 20th century, by modern forestry – cleared to make way for conifer plantations for timber! Today, the main things threatening


our rainforests aren't chainsaws but sheep and rhododendrons. Overgrazing by sheep threatens the viability of Atlantic oakwoods because sheep love to nibble young saplings, meaning new generations of young trees are prevented from coming through. Many of our old-growth rainforests are dying on their feet. That also creates perfect conditions for the rainforest understorey to be invaded by Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive plant that the Victorians casually spread around our western woods to use as game cover.


is its ability to bounce back. As the doyen of British woods Oliver Rackham once said, ‘…in England, trees grow where people have not prevented them’. Birds and mammals help trees spread by scattering their seeds far and wide – like the jay, which is nature’s greatest planter of acorns. We can bring back many of Britain's lost rainforests, if only we let them spread and regenerate. That can be done by controlling overgrazing around the edge of our rainforest sites. Look at Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor, for example. It's tiny, just 8 acres. But it actually doubled in size during the 20th century because grazing pressures were temporarily reduced. Unfortunately, the grazing pressures around Wistman's Wood have increased again in recent decades, deterring regeneration, but this could be resolved if there was a new agreement made between the owner, the Duchy of Cornwall, and the tenant farmer. Of course, in order to do this across the country, we ought to be paying farmers and landowners to restore rainforests and compensate for the small amounts of unproductive land lost in the process. That's one of the things we could do with a reformed system of farm payments post-Brexit – which is why it's been concerning to read recently that the Government might have given up on this process of reform. Fortunately, however, there are a number of forward-thinking landowners and farmers who are already pushing ahead with ambitious plans to restore temperate rainforest in Britain, like Merlin Hanbury-Tenison at Cabilla in Cornwall, and the RSPB at their Wilder Haweswater site in the Lake District.


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