On a small island in the Irish Sea, a team of volunteers just finished planting 30,000 trees and completed their work two full years ahead of schedule. The Manx Wildlife Trust acquired a 105-acre site called Creg y Cowin in the Baldwin Valley on the Isle of Man in 2023, and in just three years its volunteers planted every tree needed to establish a functioning temperate rainforest on the land. The chief executive of the trust called it incredible work and said the volunteers should be genuinely proud. The project is part of a larger Temperate Rainforest Restoration Programm led by the Wildlife Trusts across the British Isles, Ireland and the Isle of Man, funded with nearly 39 million pounds to restore woodland in areas with the right climate and geography. The Isle of Man, it turns out, has both in abundance.
Temperate rainforests are among the rarest ecosystems in the world, and the trust describes them as plants growing on plants growing on plants: dense layers of mosses, lichens and native species covering every surface in a way that improves biodiversity, flood defense and water quality all at once. The trees planted at Creg y Cowin are native mixed-species, chosen for the island’s conditions, and the trust hopes to eventually bring cattle and sheep onto the land once the trees are large enough to handle it, roughly 15 years from now. The full woodland could take close to half a century to reach maturity, meaning many of the volunteers who planted it will not be alive to walk through it. The chief executive noted something that stuck: many of them had brought their children along on planting day. He said he loved the idea of those children returning one day with their own kids, to a proper woodland they had helped begin.
