Almost nothing in the British landscape is natural. After the last ice age Britain would have been covered in wildwood; six thousand years of clearing, grazing, burning and ploughing produced what is there now. The famous British landscapes — open moor, close-cropped down, patchwork fields — are all products of farming.
Why there are so few native trees
Britain has only around 35 native tree species, against several hundred in comparable parts of Europe and North America. The reason is timing: the last glaciation stripped the flora entirely, and as trees recolonised northward from southern Europe, rising sea levels flooded the land bridge to the continent around 6,000 BC and cut the process short.
The natives include oak, ash, beech, birch, hazel, hawthorn, rowan, alder, willow, holly, yew and Scots pine. Sycamore, horse chestnut and sweet chestnut — all thoroughly familiar — are introductions.
Woodland
About 13% of Britain is wooded, well below the European average of over 35%, and much of that is twentieth-century conifer plantation.
Ancient woodland — continuously wooded since at least 1600 — covers only around 2.5% of the country and is effectively irreplaceable, holding soil communities and species assemblages that take centuries to develop. Its destruction for development, notably for the HS2 railway, has been among the fiercest British conservation fights of recent years.
British woodland has an indicator worth knowing: a carpet of bluebells in late April usually signals ancient woodland. Britain holds roughly half the world’s bluebells, and the native species is threatened by hybridisation with the introduced Spanish bluebell escaping from gardens.
Moorland
The open upland of the Pennines, the North York Moors, Dartmoor and much of Scotland — heather, bilberry, cotton grass and rough grass over peat.
It looks primeval and is not. Most of it was wooded until cleared for grazing, and it is maintained in its treeless state by sheep and by rotational burning for grouse shooting. Whether it should be restored to woodland and blanket bog — which would store far more carbon and reduce downstream flooding — is one of the most contested arguments in British land management.
Chalk grassland
The short, springy turf of the South Downs, the Chilterns and Salisbury Plain, grazed by sheep and rabbits on thin alkaline soil. It is astonishingly species-rich — up to forty flowering plants per square metre — and supports orchids, cowslips and rare butterflies. Britain has lost around 80% of it since the 1930s to ploughing and fertiliser.
Hedgerows
The defining feature of lowland England, and a habitat in their own right: wildlife corridors of hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and field maple, some over a thousand years old. Britain grubbed out roughly half its hedgerows after the war to make fields bigger for machinery, and protection arrived only in 1997.
The autumn harvest
Hedgerow foraging is a live British tradition: blackberries in September, along with sloes for gin, elderflowers in June for cordial and elderberries later, wild garlic in spring woodland, and rosehips. It is one of the few genuinely free things left in the countryside, and it is entirely legal on public rights of way for personal use.