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;
