Tony Kirkham MBE, VMH was on a lecture tour in the Midwest and eastern USA at the Morton Arboretum, Chicago Botanical Garden, and the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago in the state of Illinois, Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis, and Oak Spring Garden in Virginia and was so excited to meet some of the remarkable oak trees in these states.
Woodland Heritage Trustee Adrian Jowitt shows how a desire to use timber, coupled with a simple phone call, led him to the milling of Western Red Cedar in a Devon woodland en route to a more sustainable solution. Here’s one way to use more homegrown timber at home.
When Christian Gaze and I started Gaze Burvill 31 years ago, we had a vision of creating a beautiful collection of outdoor furniture using entirely oak grown in the UK. I was inspired by my one-year course at John Makepeace’s Hooke Park in Dorset where I had learnt about the necessity of adding value to British-grown woods to feed a virtuous cycle of growing and improving our woodlands.
On Thursday, 2nd April 2026, the charity Woodland Heritage launched Open Woods & Workshops, a network of woodlands and workshops hosting open days across the UK throughout June 2026. The initiative enables over 1,000 attendees to see first-hand the role trees and timber can have in our future.
Today Woodland Heritage announces a £238,442 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to create ‘Woodland Heritage Skills’; two years of educational workshops, digital educational assets and collaboration with its members and partners to deliver the charity’s new Open Woods & Workshops initiative.
James Wood, the charity’s demonstration woodland, is more than a plantation of trees to grow fine timber. It is a project that gives back in terms of information and education. Inspired by James Stratton it lives on the kindness of volunteers.
As July began, a group of ‘early career’ forestry professionals toured James Wood, Somerset. The event was run by the Institute of Chartered Foresters as part of a study tour with the group guided by Norbert Kovacs of Pryor & Rickett Silviculture.
A few weeks’ ago I visited the remarkable Alice Holt Research Station as a guest of Principal Pathologist Dr Sandra Denman, of Forest Research. I made the journey to Hampshire to meet Alice Dibley who is undertaking her PhD as part of a new partnership between UWE Bristol and Woodland Heritage. Alice’s work will focus on the effects of management practices on Acute Oak Decline.
A sawmill is at the centre of the timber supply chain although it has become increasingly rare as a type of business with a huge reduction in the number of hardwood sawmills in the UK in recent years. Woodland Heritage believes that, with the right approach, a healthy future exists for those that remain; something that it wanted to demonstrate by taking over Whitney Sawmills.
