“We’ve been heroically supported by Plant One”
Marline Hanbury-Tenison - Landowner, Cabilla Cornwall
Merlin Hanbury Tenison is a Cornish conservationist, veteran and owner of Cabilla – a 300-acre farm on Bodmin Moor, with around 100 acres of rare Atlantic temperate rainforest running through the middle. Merlin is on a mission to expand and restore that rainforest in a way that allows them to have a resilient and sustainable farm business model at the same time.
We began working with Merlin in 2021, helping him create and realise an ambitious planting plan to triple the rainforest at Cabilla.
“We’re talking about taking a farm that doesn’t have very many trees on it and planting a lot of trees so it becomes an agroforestry system, which is actually far more natural.”
“It’s moving us from a system where for decades we’ve been incrementally degrading our soil year on year, to one where we’re going to be incrementally improving year on year through the addition of the landscape that would have been here long ago.”
“Funding from Plant One made this restoration possible. They bridged the gap of the EWCO funding that is paid upon completion.
“The volunteer planting days were hugely successful. The Plant One team and their army of volunteers put in a heroic effort across four planting seasons to help plant almost 15,000 trees. They weren’t put off, no matter what the weather was doing each day.”
“There is nothing better that people can do than get out and plant trees. And they love doing it. It’s brilliant to see people and families coming in and doing that all together.”
“Plant One has supported us through the planting, and will now continue to care for the habitats as they go from planted fields to magical mature woodlands. This support is designed to support natural regeneration and make sure that a journey which would take a thousand years with no human assistance, can be achieved in as little as a few hundred.”