Rainforests on our doorstep

When we think of rainforests, the Amazon or the Congo spring to mind, but Britain has its own share, full of wild character, thronging with life and in desperate need of protection. Guy Shrubsole tells the story of these secret forgotten habitats

- Guy Shrubsole

I didn't really believe that Britain was a rainforest nation until I moved to Devon. Visiting woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I found places exuberant with life. I spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns; plants growing on other plants. I was enraptured. Surely, I thought, such lush places belonged in the tropics, not in Britain.

But it's true. Few people realise that Britain harbours fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. Rainforests aren't just confined to hot, tropical countries; they also exist in temperate climates. A temperate rainforest is a wood where it's wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just one per cent of the world's surface.

The temperate rainforest 'biome', or set of ecosystems, is strung across the globe, in areas where oceanic currents bring warm winds and torrential downpours. Rainforests exist along the Pacific north-west coast of the USA and Canada; on Chile's southern edge; in Japan and Korea; across Tasmania and New Zealand; and along the western seaboard of Europe particularly the Atlantic fringes of Britain.

As I got used to the idea, it became obvious to me that rainforests belong here. As a country, we're stereotypically obsessed by our rainy weather. How very British, then, to have rainforests. And, as I was to later discover, half-forgotten memories of our rainforests are woven into our myths and legends, and feature fleetingly in poetry and prose from some of our greatest writers. But why, I began to wonder, have we managed to so comprehensively excise Britain's rainforests from our cultural memory? Why are even environmentalists unaware of their existence?