FTA: ““There was a fateful moment when there was a small article put in the Farmers Journal which ended with something like: ‘Free trees: call this number’. That started a huge list of people who are interested.” Conversations over garden fences and farm gates meant a lot of the applications came in clusters. She lost count of the people who told her she was “completely crackers” if she thought she could get farmers to plant trees.
“Most farms can accommodate 10,000 trees without too much difficulty,” she says, “just not necessarily all in one place. The real key point is that on farmland where you fence lands and have boundaries and bits of scrap land, corners you can’t get tractors into, you can get quite a lot of trees without any impact on your farm payment. There are huge misconceptions, the idea that trees mean forestry, but you can have useful trees that are part of working farmland, or trees in hedgerows.”