![]() But I did not realise growing up that we had already destroyed our own rainforests here in England. Halting tropical deforestation remains utterly essential, a task made more vital by the rise of anti-green populists such as Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil. When I was five years old, my mum organised a Save the Rainforests fundraiser we painted a mural for our local library of colourful toucans, parrots and rainforest trees. I grew up with the Save the Rainforests movement of the 1980s and 90s, spearheaded in Britain by groups such as Friends of the Earth, which campaigned to stop deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. ![]() We have, in other words, lost a lot of our rainforests. For comparison, the entire woodland cover of England today is just 10%, and much of that is conifer plantations. This zone covers about 1.5m acres of England – around 5% of the country. A map produced by the academic Christopher Ellis in 2016 identified the “bioclimatic zone” suitable for temperate rainforest in Britain – that is, the areas where it’s warm and damp enough for such a habitat to thrive. Temperate rainforests, however, once covered a much larger swathe of England, and even larger parts of Wales and Scotland. With its gnarled and stunted oaks, its remote location marooned within a sheep-nibbled moorscape, and attendant tales of spectral hounds that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, it has an outsize reputation for somewhere so tiny in size: eight acres – about four football pitches. You may have heard of England’s most famous fragment of temperate rainforest: Wistman’s Wood, in the middle of Dartmoor. In woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I’ve spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns. One of their defining characteristics is the presence of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, often in such damp and rainy places. Temperate rainforests are exuberant with life. I didn’t really believe it until I moved to Devon last year and started visiting some of these incredible habitats. F ew people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest.
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