Thousands of trees planted in Devon’s Bowden Pillar rainforest

The charity said more than a 100 local people planted species including oak, rowan, alder, hazel, birch, willow and holly.

Nick Biggs, an 83-year-old volunteer, said he got involved with the project after being inspired by his apprenticeship with the Forestry Commission in 1958.

“That introduced me to the environment,” he said.

“I was really keen to carry on with it and it’s good for your fitness just to get out and do something.”

The trust said in decades to come the new trees would form a temperate rainforest with high rainfall and humidity.

Helen Aldis from Moor Trees, which supplied some of the saplings, said many had been gathered locally.

She said: “The oak that’s going in today is from acorns that we’ve gathered on Dartmoor that have come back to our tree nursery.

“Our volunteers process those, pop them into the root trainers and then they come out a year or two later to become the woodlands of the future.”