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The Building of Charlotte's Wood

Last year, Milk & More started an exciting new partnership with Creating Tomorrow’s Forests as part of Green Friday, which aims to shift the focus away from consumerism and towards sustainability. As part of a drive to help businesses be more sustainable and give back to nature, CTF creates forests and restores lost habitats across the UK.

For every new delivery signup or every twenty one-off orders during Green Friday week, CTF planted a tree for Milk & More on our beautiful wetland site in Somerset, Charlotte’s Wood. In total the Milk & More customers planted an amazing 1,445 trees of species including oak, black poplar, alder, bird cherry, and willows. These trees will absorb an estimated 361 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the next 30 years and contribute to restoring rare wet woodland habitat as well as fighting climate change. With each tree we have also planted an area of floodplain wildflower meadow, and you have helped to create 246m2 of meadow, which is now alive with bees and butterflies. This contribution is invaluable to restoring our beautiful countryside back to its natural state and we would like to say a huge thank you Milk & More and their customers for prioritising sustainability.

Charlotte’s Wood was a marginal agricultural field on the Somerset levels which was unused by the farmer due to overwinter flooding. Prior to being used for grazing, it had been a willow plantation, so we decided to replant wetland tree species such as black poplar, which will thrive in the damp conditions. Our aim is to restore a wet woodland, which is one of the UK’s rarest woodland types, characterised by lush, green mosses and ferns and teeming with rare insect species. It will provide vital habitat for threatened bird species such as willow tits, for amphibians including great crested newts, and even otters.

We planted almost 24,000 trees of mostly wetland species using an innovative technique called the Miyawaki Method. This technique replicates a natural forest regeneration process that occurs when there is a break in the canopy, accelerating tree growth and creating a forest structure in a much shorter timeframe. Miyawaki forests also have biodiversity that is 18 times higher than neighbouring plantations, so it is a great way to speed up the restoration of a woodland ecosystem. We also dug a pond, which would have been a common feature on the Somerset levels, and planted a floodplain wildflower meadow with flowers including flag iris, ragged robin, and red campion.

The trees are absolutely thriving, and the wetland specialist tree species such as alder, willows, and black poplar are growing particularly fast as they love the wet conditions. We are measuring them at regular intervals to monitor their growth rates and regularly surveying the whole site to look at biodiversity and tree health. The flower meadow is alive with meadow brown and small skipper butterflies, bees, and ground invertebrates. We have recorded emperor and broad-bodied chaser dragonflies, and azure damselflies by the pond, and found pond snails, water boatmen, and diving beetles. The meadow has been filled with flowers including cuckoo flower, meadowsweet, buttercups, and a high diversity of grasses and we have a booming population of voles, which draws in hunting kestrels and barn owls. We have recorded common whitethroats breeding in the vegetation beneath the trees, and Cetti’s warblers singing from the reed areas on the margins.

Milk & More customers have made a real-world difference to restoring lost forest and increasing our native biodiversity and we cannot thank you enough for helping us to rewild the UK for people and wildlife. If you would like to find out more about how we are working to increase biodiversity and plant more trees, then please do visit our website.