Have a look at this lovely project from the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Have you got a forest to add? Or are you near enough one of the those already listed to go and visit it? Forgotten Forests
All the forests that grow to my mind are either lost and long ago fell to the axe or I don't know if they still thrive...need to do some checking!
My forgotten forests are lots of small places: tucked away corners out of my childhood like the wood of twisted oak and fierce hawthorns that ringed a flooded quarry near Cumbernauld where I grew up. In the spring the woods were filled with smoke of bluebells and the quarry thronged with toads. Then there was Glencryan Wood near Palacerigg Country Park: stately beech trees and caves eroded out of the sandstone.
ReplyDeleteAnd far away woods: tree aloes in the Eastern Cape and the odd rainshadow woodlands on individual scattered hills in Malawi: Ntchisi and Dedza mountains. On Ntchisis there were even elephants, walking into the forest was like stepping out of one world into another, where we could never know what we might meet.
O, and the birch woodlands of western Scotland where the trees sport lichen as beards and the ground is spongy with moss
But of recent years maybe it is Black Wood by Gradbach in the Roaches of Staffordshire
Hi Creeping Toad,
ReplyDeleteI love this: a child's perception of the hawthorns in Cumbernauld aside an adults wonder at the Ntchisis forest elephants.
You might be interested in our project which is part of forgotten forests (I have quoted you in my blog!)
http://starcatchersforgottenforests.wordpress.com/
Hazel