Creating Images for Moor Trees

On Friday I had the pleasure of attending a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Moor Trees, a charity dedicated to creating broadleaf woodland on Dartmoor from seeds gathered locally. The charity is doing great work to try and restore areas of Dartmoor’s forests once lost. Their vision sets out the need for this really clearly.

Much of Dartmoor used to look like this:

But large areas of the national park now look like this:

Not a tree in sight, either on the crests of the open moorland or, more importantly, in the valleys. Tree planting is a contentious topic with some, but woodland can provide a lot of benefits to society and its not black and white case of if you have trees you can’t have farming etc with things like agroforestry becoming increasingly popular in similar locations. So, woodlands are important and charities having meaningful ways to engage people in their mission are equally important.

So, it was a great pleasure to be commissioned by Moor Trees to create images of some of the woodlands they’ve created.

The images, along with some others that i’ve donated for their use, now form an image bank they can use for promotion, to engage landowners, and to feature in publications such as their impact report - a document that shows the great benefits of the work they are undertaking.

In the 25 years they have been operating they have planted 200,000 trees, many of them within the boundary of Dartmoor National Park - a location notoriously difficult to plant any trees.

In the last 12 months volunteers have gathered 141,160 seeds to become trees of the future.

The last year has seen almost 30,000 trees leave their nurseries to form over 20 hectares of new woodlands.

In total 175 woodlands and hedgerows have been reinstated through their work.

Here are a selection of the images created from the young woodlands. I’m very grateful to have been asked to work with Moor Trees to create these photographs for them.