Our clients say it best - Tomorrow’s Forests

Nick and Liz started their commercial reforestation business Tomorrow’s Forests six years ago, and in September 2020 began a new sister venture called Creating Tomorrow’s Forest, which gives businesses the opportunity to go greener by planting trees.

Nick grew up in Manchester without much access to trees, while Liz is from Quebec where she was surrounded by trees and the industry around them. It was when Nick moved to Canada that he began to gain expertise in tree-planting. They are now based in Hazelbury Bryan, Dorset.

Tell us a bit about your business

Since we started Tomorrow’s Forests six years ago we’ve been concentrating on commercial reforestation, planting trees for the Forestry Commission, around roadworks and HS2. We both worked in the industry in Canada for around 10 years and then decided there was an opportunity here to set up a business putting into practice what we’d learned. Over the last six years we’ve managed to plant about 8 million trees.

On September 21, 2020, we launched our new venture, Creating Tomorrow’s Forests, helping businesses go green as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes.

When we started Tomorrow’s Forests we always knew we wanted to do this work but we needed to have a name for ourselves first, so worked on establishing our commercial business.

How did Covid-19 affect your business?

We shut our existing business down for three months so financially that was a massive hit for us - but what it did allow us to do was to take a step back and assess.

During the pandemic the world shut down for three months and everyone watched as, very quickly, the planet got a little better – the skies became bluer, the seas got cleaner and we were seeing video clips of animals walking round city centres in other countries. It was the perfect opportunity to see that we can effect change if we want.

Previously, climate change and habitat destruction just seemed like it was inevitable and there was nothing we could do to stop it but the silver lining of Covid and the world shutting down for three months is that we realised that with a little bit of effort it won’t take long to correct the damage we’ve done.

The mission of Creating Tomorrow’s Forests is to help facilitate that for other businesses.

Some of the initial businesses which have jumped on board so far have been brand-new start-ups which have started up during Covid and are planning to go forward in a green way.

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. There are a couple of options. Businesses can plant two trees per month per employee, just helping that business be a green workforce. The other option is to just dip in and dip out when they want, and they can select a random amount of trees each month to plant, depending on their circumstances.

Some of the businesses which are signed up are going to invest five, six or seven percent of their monthly profit and will dedicate that amount to planting trees. There are loads of variables. A bookkeeper has pledged to plant five trees for every new client they take on and is using that as a marketing tool.

We believe we’re the only company to plant all our trees in England – we decided that if British businesses are going to contribute to greening they should have the option of doing that here in England. We select sites which are no good for farming where the land is poor and degraded, strip them back to zero and then build them back up as a whole forest ecosystem.

Every time a business plants a tree it gets a GPS co-ordinate of exactly where that tree is. All our sites will be protected, and in the future businesses will be able to hold corporate days there.

All the trees are native woodland trees and each site is going to be very different. It’s not only about the trees – currently we’re creating a wet woodland which is an extremely endangered habitat, but within that wet woodland we’ve seeded one acre of wild water meadow and included bird and bat boxes so it’s a complete package.

We think it’s important to show that businesses can be green and profitable - and do something other than making money.

We’re now slowly winding Tomorrow’s Forests, our commercial timber business, back up to normality. We plant two million trees per year for the commercial timber market and all the associated programmes that go along with that including vegetation maintenance and surveys.

How has Blanchards Bailey supported you?

Blanchards Bailey have been our solicitors for 18 months and they act on our behalf in all our land purchases. These are quite quick and small and often unusual purchases, and their expertise in getting those deals across the line has been invaluable, allowing us to move the business forward.

We can concentrate on what we do best while leaving the legal details to the experts in their field.

They’ve been brilliant, helping us out and putting us in contact with all the different land managers and really helping us source the land we use as well. We really value their expertise.