At the end of March, we gathered on a wild and windy day to celebrate the completion of Ambios and The Sharpham Trust‘s Wild About Trees project. What began as an ambitious vision to reconnect people, nature, and landscape has, over the past few years, grown into a living reality. Together, volunteers, schools, community groups, staff, trainees, and supporters have planted 5,875 trees, created 320 metres of hedgerow, delivered 20 events, and contributed more than 1,500 volunteer days to restoring and enriching this special place.
Funded by Plymouth and South Devon Community Forest through DEFRA’s Trees for Climate programme, the project set out to create a diverse wood-pasture landscape across the estate – blending open grassland, scattered trees, shrubs, and hedgerows to support wildlife, strengthen habitat connectivity, honour Sharpham’s historic landscape, and create lasting opportunities for learning and community engagement. We are delighted to have seen this vision take root and flourish.
To mark the close of this chapter, Ambios alumni Hatty and Ellie led a beautiful and moving ceremony in Badger Field, joined by many of the people who had helped shape the project along the way. Together they invited us to imagine the future forest that these thousands of saplings might one day become, and Ellie treated us to a breathtaking song inspired by the project (we highly recommend listening to the full recording via the link below). Hatty is writer, poet, and nature connection facilitator, and Ellie is a folk musician.
The piece that follows is an excerpt from Hatty’s powerful words during the ceremony – a heartfelt vision of a landscape transformed by collective care, hard work, and imagination.
To everyone who has contributed their time, energy, knowledge, and enthusiasm over the past several years: thank you. This project would not have been possible without you, and its legacy will continue to grow for generations to come.
Look around, we stand here, on this beautiful, bright, peaceful day on the tipping edge of the year, in this place that is no longer a field, but a process: a foresting, the first tentative steps of a fledgling forest community have been taken here on this land, and each sapling planted brings its own medicine.
Welcome. Welcome to our forest.
Close your eyes. Listen. Listen to the wind gently hushing the treetops, the trunks half-creaking as they move. Ivy vines and bramble thickets, hazel, holly clumps in the undergrowth and everywhere you turn is the rustle and chirrup of life. You can feel it, this place, it thrums with it. Magic, abundance, certainty of life returned to the land. Look out from the edges and see the great standard oaks, small copses marooned in waving grasslands, cattle grazing quietly, children dancing amongst the pollen-drunk insects. A shrill winking ripples up from the river and your gaze is drawn to an osprey winging up over the wood, salmon clasped in its ripping talons. Breathe in, breathe deep. The land is alive. Place your hand, tenderly on the soft, moss-furred, lichen-dripped trunk of a tree, feel the beat of its heartwood and travel back, all the way back to the here and the now and remember those very same hands planting that tree, sapling-hope, into the eager soil. Look around at all you have created, hope and change, grown together.
The land speaks:
I wish to offer you my thanks, tree-people and dreamers, weavers of hope and a new future. Thanks for your vision, your kind vision of change. It is this beautiful alchemy of what was, what is and what could be. And it makes me want to cry with the joy of it, the hope that you as people, as humans, are pouring into this little patch of land. Hope that you will preserve the past, preserve the memories of those ladies in their carriages, but create something new, something older, something wilder, something a little more me. I love that in doing this, you think of you and you think of me. And you let my wildness scrub up around these trees. You trust me to nourish them to nurse them. You trust them to grow where they are meant to grow. And you plant with hope, that very soon, this land will be full of trees, as well as full of life. Because I am, already, full of life.
All of the labour you have poured into me, so many hands in my soft soil, I have met so many of you, felt your goodness, your care. I have witnessed you, out in it, in all of my weathers, giving all that you had into hope. I feel so nourished, so cared for, so loved. So held and helped. It is such a blessing, sometimes, to receive a helping hand. Thank you, sweet wingless Jays. You have called me back to life, and I, all of me, who was, who is, and who is yet to come, thank you, from the full depth of my dark, mycelial soil.
– Hatty Wigginton
