Month: Nov 2025

If you vote for Reform they will stop the madness of burning trees at Drax – the controversial power station in North Yorkshire, which is Britain’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, and burns not just wood, but clear-cuts virgin forests.

At the start of a Reform government, they will revoke the long-term contracts Drax has hoodwinked politicians into agreeing, through which it receives billions of pounds in ‘green’ subsidies from you, the billpayers.

Drax’s 375ft cooling towers are a monument to Net Zero hypocrisy. Its furnaces would have never have started burning wood were it not for the folly of energy ministers past and present.

It barely seems credible that this previously coal-fired power station was paid to convert to burning wood, which belches out even more CO2.

Drax consumes one tree every second. Since 2012, 300 million have been incinerated in this tree crematorium, which is six times more than there are in the New Forest.

Only, none of them come from these shores. They are imported, mostly from North America, making the 6,000-mile journey on diesel freighters for good measure.

And these are not just any trees. Last year the firm was fined £25 million by the regulator Ofgem for misreporting where its wood pellets came from – primary forests in British Columbia, Canada.

In the name of climate change, it is ruining these never-harvested forests, which over millennia have become vast stores of carbon, flattening the homes of an extraordinary richness of plants and animals.

In short, Drax is costing the earth and costing you a fortune. And who came up with this madness? Step forward Ed Miliband who in 2009 announced the then Labour government would ‘ramp up’ the burning of ‘sustainable’ wood at Drax.

Let me lecture Mr Miliband on sustainability: If anything on this earth is not sustainable, it is the industrial destruction of primary forests. That the Government has given Drax £8 billion in subsidies since 2012 makes this carbon catastrophe also a political scandal – one that is 12 times more expensive than the Post Office one.

Mr Miliband is the author of this disaster, but others share the blame.

Back in 2010, he was replaced as climate secretary by two Lib Dems in the coalition government.

First was Chris Huhne. His political career ended in ignominy when he went to prison, but that didn’t stop him walking into a job at a wood pellet company – one with which he had held an official meeting when in power. Nothing to smell there then, apart from burning wood.

Mr Huhne was replaced by one Ed Davey. And things got no better under the Tories. On their watch, Drax CEO Will Gardiner personally trousered £5 million in just one year – emptying your pockets for polluting the skies.

Now we are back with Mr Miliband, the destroyer of forests and jobs. Because the electricity that comes from wood transported halfway round the world costs twice the price of gas. British industry is dying because our electricity prices are the highest in the developed world.

The Government claims that it will get a better deal. Better for Drax, not you.

For Mr Miliband has promised Drax bosses that he will not just extend their ‘welfare payments’ for another four years but also increase the price you have to pay by 11 per cent. So you will be forced to pay higher priced ‘renewable’ subsidies to a company that, in 2023, was responsible for almost 3 per cent of Britain’s entire CO2 emissions.

Not that the power station’s annual 12 million tonnes of carbon ever appear on our Net Zero ledger. Why? Because Mr Miliband pretends that replacement trees immediately reabsorb all the CO2 from the atmosphere, when science says that takes the best part of a century.

So despite burning wood being more polluting, Mr Miliband makes Drax’s emissions magically disappear. Net Zero made easy.

Still worse could come, because Drax executives are trying to persuade him to give them even more billions to capture the power station’s emissions.

It’s an additional process that would make the firm’s electricity absurdly inefficient – Drax would consume twice as much energy than it would supply to the grid.

Oil and gas are far more efficient and therefore cost much less. For instance, our wind farms require huge amounts of cement and steel. These vast machines are made in China at enormous cost to the environment and your pocket. They also require hundreds of miles of unsightly pylons.

If the wind does not blow, gas-powered stations have to be fired up at great cost. And if there’s too much wind, more than the infrastructure around the remoter farms off the coast of Scotland can handle or store, their owners are paid millions to switch their turbines off.

This lose-lose farce is killing our economy. Efficient decarbonisation must be led by technology, not hare-brained central planners in our energy department.

In government, Deputy Leader of Reform UK Richard Tice says “I will stop this economic suicide by high energy prices. Reform UK is preparing to repair the damage. In redesigning the grid we will get the balance right between decarbonisation, affordability and engineering common sense.

We have already told the subsidy vultures that the reckless 20-year wind farm contracts that Mr Miliband is trying to saddle us with will be null and void.

Today, I am telling Drax that they will get the same treatment. The deal they have done with Mr Miliband will be over. The subsidies will stop. Immediately.

The same will happen if the Energy Secretary tries to rush through a multi-decade carbon capture scheme. He can sign contracts – but they will not bind the hands of the next Parliament. He will not wreck the British economy for a generation.

I am making two further announcements. First, we will set a date for the last tree to be burnt in a British power station. To that end, I am inviting firms to write to me with a timetable to replace this unacceptable fuel. Since burning wood is the most inefficient of fuels, every alternative will produce lower emissions and costs.

Second, if Drax threatens to turn out the lights, then, in a blink of an eye, it would be put under new ownership. Without compensation.

If Drax shareholders want to salvage their position, they can start today by getting rid of the executives whose serial dishonesty has placed the company in the crosshairs of so many regulators.

Those regulators are investigating matters so serious that Drax has become a career graveyard for its executives. Its shareholders need to understand the eye-watering sums Drax’s CEO has paid lawyers in an attempt to wriggle free from accountability like a greased piglet.

Reform will put an end to the Drax scandal, something the other parties have singularly failed to do.

The Tories, Lib Dems and Labour are hopelessly compromised by the firm. The Greens – led by Zack’ Polanski are not a serious party.

It is because of charlatans like him that billpayers were saddled with this environmental and economic nightmare, which only Reform has the will to fix.

Daily Mail 25/11/25 Richard Tice.

Saplings from the felled Sycamore Gap tree are to be planted across the UK, including at a pit disaster site, a town still healing from the Troubles and a place which became an international symbol of peace, protest and feminism.

The National Trust said planting of 49 saplings, known as “trees of hope”, would begin on Saturday. It is hoped that the sycamore will live on in a positive, inspirational way.

The Sycamore Gap tree, on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, was one of the UK’s best-known and most loved trees. When it was criminally cut down for no apparent reason on a stormy night in September 2023 there was widespread anger.

Hilary McGrady, director general of the National Trust, said it was “the quick thinking of our conservationists in the aftermath of the felling that has allowed the Sycamore Gap to live on”.

Seeds from the tree were collected and have become 49 saplings, one to represent each foot in height of the tree, which was probably planted in the late 19th century.

Nearly 500 applications were received for one of the saplings, which are now between four and six feet tall.

The Trust said the first five saplings would be planted on Saturday, followed by many more in the days after, during National Tree Week. All will be in publicly accessible spaces.

One of the saplings will be planted next to a military control tower at Greenham Common in Berkshire.

As a base for US cruise missiles, in the 1980s the common became the site of women’s peace camps, which had a dramatic effect on public awareness of the dangers of storing the weapons there. At its height, more than 70,000 women were there and it became the biggest female-led protest since women’s suffrage.

Today the tower is used as a community centre and museum. Helen Beard, of the Greener Greenham Common Group, called the sapling “a powerful way to spread a message hope – for nature, our environment and for peace”.

“It will be seen by the many visitors using the control tower and we think they will be quite moved by it,” Beard said.

Another sapling is being planted on Saturday in Strabane in County Tyrone. On the border to the Republic of Ireland, Strabane suffered heavily during the Troubles but is today a place with a vibrant arts and music scene where much has been done to foster a sense of resilience and hope.

The tree is being planted as a symbol of the town’s “collective journey towards healing” and a tribute to John Gallagher, a beloved member of the Strabane community who died last year from motor neurone disease.

Three other plantings will take place on Saturday: at a site commemorating the Minnie Pit mining disaster in Staffordshire, at the Tree Sanctuary in Coventry where three teenage friends helped set up a project to rescue their city’s trees, and at Coton Orchard in Cambridgeshire for a grassroots project called Coton Loves Pollinators.

The Coton tree will be planted by Sir Partha Dasgupta, a professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, who is considered one of the world’s leading thinkers on nature’s value to people and place.

Later in the week, saplings will be planted at places including the Rob Burrow centre for motor neurone disease at Seacroft hospital in Leeds, at Hexham general hospital in Northumberland, and at a veterans’ charity, Veterans in Crisis, in Sunderland.

Andrew Poad, general manager for the National Trust’s Hadrian’s Wall properties, said: “It’s incredible to think that this weekend, the first ‘offspring’ of this very famous tree will be planted.

“Over the next couple of years, the saplings will really start to take shape, and because sycamores are so hardy, we’re confident they’ll be able to withstand a range of conditions.”

Mark Brown The Guardian 22/11/25

The National Trust News

The Hereford Times

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Forest Chronicles fb page.

If you want to plant a light woodland perhaps underplanted with wild primroses and bluebells or are looking for a luminous specimen tree for the garden, consider a birch, advises Charles Quest-Ritson

Most of us can recognise a birch tree when we see one. The dainty leaves, catkins, drooping twigs and rugged white bark are distinctive enough, especially the colour of the bark. Betula Pendula is our native species and one of the most widely dispersed of all trees. It’s geographical range extends all through Europe – in Mediterranean countries only in the cooler mountain areas – but in Morroco and then right across central Asia and Siberia to Alaska and Canada. Yet B. Pendula is only one of more than a hundred species of birches, some of which have limited natural distribution.

Our silver birch is a pioneer species, rapidly colonising bare earth, for example after a fire. Conservationists know that birch seedlings are a threat to heathland if not properly grazed. Many of our birch woods date back to myxomatosis, when there were not enough rabbits to nibble the seedlings, but birches cannot compete against stronger species for access to light, so they tend to be short-lived denizens of woodland edges.

In 2018 the British champion birch at Ambleside in Cumbria was found to be 30.3m high, a few inches short of 100ft. In mixed woodland, alongside massive English oaks, 30ft-40ft is the more usual height for birches.

However, in colder places, such as the countryside around Moscow, it is the birches that have all the height and vigour, growing to 100ft, whereas the oaks remain as stunted in-fillers, seldom reaching 20ft high.

The silver birch is the national tree of Russia, where they say it represents the grace, tenderness and natural beauty of Russian women.

‘Most beautiful of forest trees, the Lady of the woods’ was Coleridge’s description of our native silver birch.

Several cultivars of B. Pendula are popular garden plants. ‘Tristis’ has a stout trunk, but weeping branchlets; ‘Dalecarlica’ also has weeping branches but with deeply cut leaves; ‘Youngii‘ has dense, twiggy, weeping growth with no central leader; ‘Fastigiata’ makes a slender upright column, good for small spaces and ‘Purpurea’ is extremely useful in colour designed gardens for its dark purple leaves.

Almost all birches are easy to grow in English conditions. They may have a preference for certain situations – the river birch, Betula Nigra, from New England, US, is said to prefer sites where its roots can run deep into water,but,in practice, they seem to flourish anywhere. B. Pendula as equally as happy in the poor, dry sandy soils and brackish lakes of Surrey’s commuter as in the stony uplands of central Scotland.

How are birches best used in a garden? They make very good light woodland, creating a mini habitat where many other plants can flourish alongside them. The wild species are best, especially B. Pendula. Almost everything will grow happily in a woodland of silver birch – camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons and hydrangeas flourish. Many bulbs and low herbaceous plants do too – wild primroses, bluebells, wood anemones and lily-of-the-valley.

Selected cultivars are more difficult to place, especially those with super white trunks that call out for admiration and are not good for sharing their beauty with other trees. Plant them as statements, in avenues, or individually, as focal points. Perfect trees of any sort are rare in the natural world and woodland gardens should not be unnaturally bright.

Their colourful trunks offer year round beauty, but early autumn brings another dimension when birch leaves turn yellow or brown. No species takes on the shades of orange and red that so many other trees and shrubs do and, in hot, dry summer birches start to colour up and drop their leaves in August – but the autumn colour of birches is nevertheless one of their qualities. Betula Utilise is one of the last to drop its leaves.

Taxonomists have enormous fun sorting out the genus. Their job is complicated by the fact that all birches depend on the wind to disperse their pollen and their seeds, which means that when two species meet in the wild they give rise to large numbers of natural hybrids. However, DNA testing is beginning to confirm the existence of micro species of great rarity.

Gardeners tend to distinguish the species and forms by the colour of their bark. Caféau-lait Betula Platyphylla from Alaska, but pink or buff for Betula Ermanii {the cultivar known as ‘Grayswood Hill‘ is especially fine}, whereas Betula Albo-Sinensis starts out as rich toffee-brown then fades to fawn. It is worth noting that almost all birches have bark with long horizontal stripes known as lenticels in it and larger trees often have dark, rugged patches that burst through the colourful bark. Look at the black scars on the trunk of a silver birch and ask yourself whether they improve or detract from its beauty.

The garden value of birches has led to the commercialisation of an ever growing range of cultivars, selected for their bark. Good cultivars are usually grafted on rootstock of B. Pendula, but most species can be propagated from cuttings with surprising ease.

To consider all the possibilities, you really need to visit a good arboretum. Plant Heritage lists several with National Collection status. all in well-established gardens with much more than birches to admire. An interesting modern one is the late Kenneth Ashburner’s fine collection of wild-sourced birches at Stone Lane Gardens near Chagford in Devon, which is now an RHS Partner Garden. The most comprehensive, however, is at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, best known as the country cousin of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which has nearly 350 hybrids, cultivars and species, more than half of them grown from wild-collected seed. These include several that, although considered very rare or endangered in the wild, are actually available from several nurseries in Britain and sometimes grown from wild seed. Buy the tongue-twisting Betula kweichowensis from China and B Chichibuensis from Japan to make your own contribution to conservation Botanically minded collectors love the very rare B. Megrelica, a multi-stem shrub from the Caucasus, because its ploidy is inexplicably duodecaploid (12n = 168). Yes, the botany of birches is complicated.

Wakehurst’s National Collection is probably the largest in the world. The species are planted in groups in sparse mature oak woodland and visitors will notice that there is much variation among seedlings of the same species-scope for further selection. Some, including Betula Populifolia from eastern North America are naturallv multitrunked. whereas others exhibit much stouter growth than our own B. Pendula. The yellow birch, variously known as B. Alleghaniensis and B. Lutea, native to much of eastern Canada and south to the Appalachians, is one that makes a broad, strong tree with stout low branches. Use the RHS Plant Finder to check the ones that interest you and then go to a good nursery to make your choices.

Finally, a postscript. In spring, large quantities of sap rise up the trunks of deciduous trees. Birch sap contains abou 1% sugars and can be tapped in a similar way as sap from Canadian sugar-maples. Drink it fresh. boil it to concentrate it or ferment it. as the Russians do. It is said that birch beer contributes to the natural beauty of their womenfolk.

Reference Country Life UK 5th November 2025

Now in residency at Lichfield Cathedral. A spectacular 13 metre long ‘Table for the Nation’ was created from a section of the nation’s most significant tree, a gigantic 5000 year old Fenland Black Oak.

Y O U R   T A B L E   A W A I T S

You can experience ‘A Table for the Nation’ at Lichfield Cathedral, where it is in residency until May 2026. The table is accompanied by an insightful exhibition which details the history of the project, Black Oak and our ancient high forests.

Many of the craftspeople who made the table feel an affinity with the work ethic of the people who built Lichfield Cathedral. We believe this results in a similar aesthetic as both the Cathedral and the table, in their own ways, evoke a sense of wonder.

SCALE AND SCALE MAJESTY
3 0 0 0   B C

The story begins 5000 years ago when an incredible ancient high forest of massive oak trees once stood deep within the Fenland Basin of East Anglia. Over time, and with a rise in sea levels, these spectacularly tall trees fell into the silt of the flooded forest floor. There they lay, unseen and undisturbed, preserved in the peat for five millennia. Until now…

During routine cultivations in the spring of 2012 on a farm in the Wissington Fens of south-west Norfolk, a 13.2 metre section of one of the greatest of these buried giants was unearthed.

This magnificent tree represented the greatest creative opportunity to give a unique insight into the scale and majesty of the ancient high forests growing 5000 years ago.

Against all odds, specialist craftspeople successfully milled and dried this remarkable discovery, preserving it at full length and in perpetuity.

Discovered in the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, it is now known as the ‘Jubilee Oak’. This is one of Britain’s most important oak trees—not just for its vast size and ancient provenance, but for the work of art now fashioned from it.

The planks from the Jubilee Oak have been used to create a unique artefact to form part of our national heritage—‘A Table for the Nation’.

An official inscription carved at one end of the Fenland Black Oak Table acknowledges the tree’s discovery in 2012, in commemoration of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee year. At the opposite end, a second inscription acknowledges the table’s completion in 2022, in commemoration of Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee year.

D I S C O V E R Y

During routine cultivations in the spring of 2012 on a farm in the Wissington Fens of south-west Norfolk, a 13.2 metre section of a 5,000 year old subfossilised Black Oak tree was unearthed.

“I have been processing Black Oaks for over 30 years but when I saw the Jubilee Oak it took my breath away.

It was not just its size but the degree of preservation; there was no evidence of insect infestation or fungal disease, and large areas of bark were still intact.

It was not until I was asked which end was the canopy and which end was the root ball that we began to fully appreciate what we were looking at. This branchless tree was so parallel that we realised it was only a small section of a much, much bigger tree.

This explained the very unusual degree of preservation; when it fell, this vast tree would have smashed and crushed everything in its way before burying itself deep into the peat—where it lay, undisturbed, for the next 5000 years.”

Hamish Low
Expert on the preservation of Black Oak and project leader

S A W M I L L I N G

With the aid of an excavator, two telehandlers (a type of telescopic forklift) and the longest sawmill in the country, some of the rarest planks in the world were milled from the Jubilee Oak. This posed several challenges.

They could not find a mobile sawmill in this country capable of milling such a huge tree, so a generous Canadian company via their UK agent loaned one. It proved easier to build the sawmill on site in the field rather than move the tree itself.

Since the Jubilee Oak had been buried for over 5000 years it was impossible to predict what this tree might gift to them when ‘opened up’. Nothing could have prepared them for what this extraordinary tree yielded. Ten magnificent, breathtakingly beautiful, consecutive planks unlike anything ever seen before.

D R Y I N G

This was the most difficult challenge: Black Oak needs to be dried artificially and very slowly. Over a period of nine months, 1795 litres of water were extracted from the planks in a purpose-built dehumidifying kiln. The planks shrank to almost half their thickness, a quarter of their width and even 150 millimetres in length.

The drying process reduced the weight of the planks by a staggering 1.8 metric tonnes!

Once successfully dried out, the Jubilee Oak planks became even more precious and a charitable trust was established to protect them, the Fenland Black Oak CIO.

D E S I G N

A multi disciplined design team was assembled under the direction of a lead designer to decide how best to preserve this incredibly rare discovery. So why did they decide on a table?

With a table, the Jubilee Oak planks could be kept at their full length and at the perfect height to be seen and touched in all their glory. Their majesty can be seen, unimpeded, from any angle.

As well as existing as a sculptural object in its own right, a table has many practical functions, such as for dining, meetings and display. A table can also be of huge symbolic value at important summits, traditional ceremonies and state events. It is, in so many ways, a perfect gift to the nation.

The design team had to come up with innovative and creative solutions to meet the various challenges of the design brief—not least that the table should be able to fold-down to mitigate its huge size, and that it should satisfy all the conservation concerns relating to the historical buildings in which it is likely to be housed.

C R E A T I O N

The planks were retained at full length and many new techniques were developed to work on their unprecedented size. The ‘River Joint’, for example, was created to not only reflect an important Fenland feature, but by using the shape and character of each individual plank, the scale of this tree can be fully appreciated at a glance. The unique visual details of the top are inspired entirely by the tree itself.

U N D E R S T R U C T U R E

The table’s understructure is made from patinated phosphor bronze, (archaeologists refer to the centuries after 3000BC as transitional between Stone and Bronze ages). Aside from its strength and beauty, it also helps with the smooth dismantling and rebuilding of the table as it moves from location to location.

The bronze hinges allow the two outer planks to be folded down, reducing the width of the table to just 900 millimetres, and the entire structure can then be wheeled effortlessly and silently by just two people to the side of a room and used as a serving table or for display. The River Joints are stunning when exposed in this way.

Reference: https://www.thefenlandblackoakproject.co.uk/our-story