How we spend your money

We brought 581 hectares (1,436 acres) of new woodland into our care, including Ervey Road in Northern Ireland, Cefn Morfudd in Wales and Buckland Wood in Devon. This adds to the 33,000 hectares (81,545 acres) of green space we already nurture for people and wildlife – all free to explore.

Our campaigns team was hard at work too, fighting 200 planning battles to save threatened woods and trees. This included a legal win against the expansion of a Monmouthshire poultry farm which threatened the ancient woodland at Coombe Valley Woods.

We restored 127 square kilometres of woods on our estate last year and snapped up a new flagship reserve that’s crying out for renewal – Harrison Woodlands, near Louth in Lincolnshire. Our teams were also hard at work restoring 503 hectares (1,243 acres) of degraded peatland at Smithills near Bolton, Snaizeholme in Wensleydale and Glen Finglas in the Trossachs.

We’re committed to restoring land outside our own estate, too, and helped to nurse 667 hectares (1,648 acres) of privately-owned ancient woodland back to health.

We planted more than five million new trees last year, and the 2,548 hectares (6,296 acres) of woods we created represents a 25% boost from 2023–24. Three hundred and thirty thousand of these went in the ground at Gleann Shìldeag to extend precious scraps of Caledonian pinewood and temperate rainforest around Ben Shieldaig mountain. A further 38,587 were planted at Hayhills Wood, near Silsden in West Yorkshire – all by schoolchildren and volunteers.

This is the sum we spent in 2024–25 to enable us to raise our income and invest for future growth. For every pound spent on fundraising, we raised £5.78 in return, while 87p in every pound went directly to support our charitable objectives.