Woodland Therapy Taking Root in UK

Sunday Times – September 14, 2008
By Richard Goss

Disturbed and troublesome teenagers are having their lives turned around by the calming influence of trees. “Woodland therapy” is credited with helping children learn to remain calm, busy, and self-sufficient.

Young people, often excluded from school for bad behaviour, spend their days being taught traditional woodland management techniques and learning about the environmental importance of trees and the animals they support.

The schemes have the enthusiastic backing of the Woodland Trust, a charity that helps to protect and manage Britain’s ancient treescape.

The therapy will form an important part of the trust’s planned new wood of 600,000 native trees, covering 850 acres at Sandridge, near St Albans, Hertfordshire.

The Sunday Times is inviting readers to give £15 to buy land for a tree, pay for its planting and provide five years of care. Readers have already pledged 1,500 trees, and the newspaper has given another 100.

A report for the Countryside Agency, English Nature and the Rural Development Service concluded that the therapeutic effect of woodland included “a multitude of benefits on young people’s physical development, emotional and mental health and wellbeing, as well as their social development”.

At a centre in Hill Holt Wood near Norton Disney, Lincolnshire, up to 20 youngsters with difficult backgrounds work among the trees on the 22-acre site. Their woodcraft work includes coppicing overgrown trees, clearing dead undergrowth and cutting wood for use in gardens.

Those who have benefited include David Watson from Newark, who had been suspended from school for aggressive behaviour. He was drinking heavily and mixing with drug dealers who tried to make him act as a delivery boy. “When I got there I said no chance – I couldn’t see what it could do for me,” said David, now 19.

“I was a townie and had hardly ever been inside a wood. But the experience got me back on the straight and narrow and eventually I took and passed my exams, and I have now got a good job in a shop.

“If you had told me 10 years ago I would be helped by a wood I would have used some choice language. But I still go back to Hill Holt and I feel really comfortable there.”

As well as woodcraft, teenagers at Hill Holt are involved in projects to create environmentally friendly buildings. Nigel Lowthrop, owner of the wood and founder of the centre, said: “They arrive often angry and confused. The wood is an alien environment for them and they are completely out of their depths. Eventually it has an incredibly calming effect.”

The therapy has spread widely in America, championed by the author Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, who coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe the psychological problems he claimed are caused by children spending their lives cut off from the natural world.

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