Would You Gather 11 Million Seeds by Hand to Help Save Depleted Forests? A Hundred People in Scotland Just Did
A Huge Reforestation Effort in Scotland Was an Immense Success Thanks to a Handful of Volunteers
Even though Scotland has enormous areas of remote wilderness, it’s one of the countries in Europe with the least amount of woodland cover. According to the Woodland Trust, the country had only 19.4% wooded area in 2025, compared with the rest of Europe’s average of 38%. In particular, the region’s rare Atlantic rainforest has shrunk considerably.
However, a hundred people in Scotland just spent three years gathering seeds by hand to help restore the country’s forests. Although expectations when the project began were to gather around one million seeds, the hundred volunteers managed to gather 11 million in total.
Those seeds should help regrow approximately 7.8 million trees in Scotland, making it an immense reforestation effort.
How Did Volunteers Gather All Those Seeds?
In 2023, the Tree Seed Collection Project, run by the Woodland Trust Scotland and Trees for Life organizations, set out to collect one million seeds over three years to help restore woodland habitats.
In what may be the largest citizen-led rewilding effort, a hundred volunteers, including retirees, young families, and office workers, combed remote woods in search of specific types of seeds. Often, the areas they were traipsing into were remote pockets of ancient woodland, set in challenging terrain. The volunteers didn’t let that deter them, though.
They spent thousands of hours looking through the Western highlands and islands for seeds, including yew, hazel, elder, willow, wild cherry, and juniper. The seeds from these areas are better suited to local microclimates and soils due to the genetic traits they carry. That means trees grown from them are more likely to survive, even in a constantly warming climate.
As the Tree Seed Collection Project Officer, Roz Birch, stated in a Trees for Life release, “Collecting these precious tree seeds is about hope. It’s about committing to a better future for ourselves and for future generations, and for Scotland’s biodiversity.”
What Happens to the Seeds Now?
Once Trees for Life collected the seeds from its volunteers, the organization then graded and checked them at its tree nursery. Once saplings were produced, Trees for Life sent them back out to accredited nurseries in their correct zones across Scotland.
Overall, this rewilding project has been so successful that, even though the original three-year period is up, it will continue for at least another year. Hopefully, by the time all the new trees have been planted, significant restoration will have been made to both the rainforest areas and the remaining Caledonian forests.
(featured image: Wikimedia Commons/Valenta)
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