Thirty-five years after Scotland planted two million trees on a desolate Highland estate, something extraordinary returned to the landscape. The barren moor, once stripped bare by centuries of grazing, was transformed into a thriving ancient forest.
In 1991, volunteers in northern Scotland planted some of the first new trees to grow in parts of the Caledonian forest in two centuries. The work was part of a 250-year restoration plan announced by Alan Watson Featherstone in 1986. Over the following decades, more than two million native trees were planted across dozens of sites in a Highland landscape that had been treeless for so long that many…