Our Non-Fiction Book of the Month for May, The Lot Rainforests of Britain, leads the reader on a journey from the Western Highlands to Cornwall to explore these spectacular, neglected ecosystems. In this exclusive piece, the author Guy Shrubsole talks about how he first came across temperate rainforests and how this discovery led him to ask why have they all but disappeared from our public consciousness and cultural memory – and what can be done now to bring them back.
I didn’t really believe that Britain was a rainforest nation until I moved to Devon. Visiting woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I found places exuberant with life. I spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns; plants growing on other plants. I was enraptured. Surely, I thought, such lush places belonged in the tropics, not in Britain.
But it’s true. Few people realise that Britain harbours fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. Rainforests aren’t just confined to hot, tropical countries; they also exist in temperate climates. A temperate rainforest is a wood where it’s wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1 per cent of the world’s surface.
Awestruck by what I found in Devon, I spent months delving into what’s known about these extraordinary places. During my research, I came across an astonishing map made by the ecologist Christopher Ellis showing 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. This zone covers about 11 million acres of Britain – a staggering 20 per cent of the country.
Once, this vast area would likely have been covered with rainforest; but no longer. The entire woodland cover of Britain today is just 13 per cent, and much of that is regimented plantations of conifer, planted for timber. Over the millennia, we’ve destroyed our rainforests, so that now only tiny fragments and relics remain. We’re so unfamiliar with these enchanting places, we’ve forgotten they exist.
Yet, as I got used to the idea, it became obvious to me that rainforests belong here. As a country, we’re stereotypically obsessed by our rainy weather. How very British, then, to have rainforests. And, as I was to later discover, half-forgotten memories of our rainforests are woven into our myths and legends, and feature fleetingly in poetry and prose from some of our greatest writers. But why, I began to wonder, have we managed to so comprehensively excise Britain’s rainforests from our cultural memory? Why are even environmentalists unaware of their existence? Why was it a surprise to me to find rainforests here, when this should have been something I was taught in school?
This loss of cultural memory, this great forgetting that we once had rainforests, is almost as heartbreaking as the loss of the forests themselves. It points to the phenomenon that ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: society’s ability to grow accustomed to environmental losses. What appears to us today as a ‘green and pleasant land’ is, in reality, a desert compared to the glory of what once existed. There were giants on the Earth in those days. If we are to stand any chance of restoring our lost rainforests, we first need to remember we once had them.
It’s hard to appreciate the awe and beauty of a temperate rainforest without visiting one yourself. Their rarity and remoteness mean most people in Britain have probably never seen one. My first, abiding memory of visiting one of Britain’s rainforests is how lush and green it all was. All woods are green in summer, of course: but our rainforests are green all year round, due to the plethora of mosses and lichens clinging to their branches. Even when the leaves have fallen from the trees, they glow with a verdant luminosity. I remember the earthy smell of fungus and leafmould, the distant roar of a river in spate, the drip-drip of falling rain.
A visit to a rainforest feels to me like going into a cathedral. Sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows of translucent leaves, picking out the arches of tree trunks with their haloes of moss. They’re places that at once teem with life, and yet have a sepulchral stillness to them. Small wonder that the Celtic druids once revered them as sacred groves.
Britain’s rainforests, in short, are truly the pinnacle of our country’s woodlands. Not only are they extraordinary places to experience, providing a feast for the senses. They’re also treasure troves of biodiversity, home to globally significant populations of rare species of lichens and mosses, birds and mammals. And the carbon that our rainforest trees are busily soaking up – not just in their trunks, but also via the epiphytic plants that festoon their branches – make them some of our best allies in the fight against the climate crisis.
Britain’s rainforests conceal other secrets, too. Overgrown ruins of forgotten buildings, like abandoned farmsteads and tin-miners’ huts, their tumbledown walls carpeted in moss and enmeshed in tendrils of ivy, like lost Mayan temples. Who once lived here? Why were these places abandoned? These mysteries led me deeper into the histories of our rainforests. And contained in those histories of human exploitation and interaction, I started to find seeds of a possible future; of how Britain’s rainforests might one day return and spread.
Because our rainforests aren’t irrevocably lost. Fragments survive. And as I was to discover, in some parts of Britain rainforests still thrive. Far from being dying relics from some bygone era, they’re living ecosystems – growing, regenerating and spreading, whenever they’re given half a chance. As Jeff Goldblum memorably intones in Jurassic Park: ‘Life… finds a way.’
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