Founded after a single felled hedgerow.
In the spring of 1998, a small mixed hedgerow in north Hertfordshire — by some accounts more than four hundred years old — was levelled overnight to widen a country lane by half a metre. There were no permits, no consultations, no recourse. The local landowner who had tried, in vain, to stop it was a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Whitby.
By the autumn of that same year, Margaret and three friends had registered Spring Forest UK as a charity. The aim, as the founding minutes record, was simply this: "to make sure that next time, someone is paying attention."
How we work.
Spring Forest UK is funded entirely by member subscriptions, modest grants and the occasional bequest from supporters. We do not accept corporate sponsorship from extractive industries, and we publish our accounts in full each financial year.
Our team is small — eleven part-time staff and a council of seven trustees — but our volunteer network now covers most counties of England and Wales. We work in close partnership with local Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust, and a number of universities whose researchers help us monitor the long-term health of the sites we protect.
"Forests are slow. Charities should be too — patient, watchful, and stubbornly local." — Margaret Whitby, founder, 2003
What we believe.
That a woodland is more than the trees inside it. That biodiversity is built over centuries and lost in afternoons. That children who grow up walking in real, complicated forests — with bramble, deer ticks, and the occasional muddy boot — make better adult stewards of the natural world.
And that a small organisation, working steadily within its means and refusing to overreach, can outlast the planning cycles, political fashions and financial crashes that come and go around it.
