GREENING THE BLACK COUNTRY: THE WORK OF THE MIDLAND REAFFORESTING ASSOCIATION IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

Summary In the early twentieth century a pioneering organisation, concerned with regenerating degraded land through tree planting projects, was established in the Black Country under the name of the Midland Reafforesting Association. Pre-dating a range of organisations involved in facilitating new plantations on industrial wastelands such as the Land Restoration Trust and the Forestry Commission's Woodland Research Unit, the Midland Reafforesting Association existed for over twenty years as the driving force behind afforrestation efforts in the rapidly urbanising West Midlands Conurbation. The ideas that stimulated the formation of the M.R.A. can largely be located within an expanding global forestry sector that was becoming both more professional and more academically rigorous. However, wider developments occurring in British forestry policy in the early twentieth century did not largely serve to help the M.R.A. on a practical level. This article will attempt to explain this apparent failure as well as assessing the wider development of the Association as a unique voluntary organisation concerned with promoting the planting of trees from its establishment in 1903 to its dissolution in 1925.