Who we are

Named for the river, Avon Needs Trees (ANT) is a registered charity creating new, permanent woodland at a landscape scale throughout the Bristol-Avon River catchment to tackle the climate and nature emergencies.

We fundraise to buy land to create woodlands that will stand for generations as part of a mosaic of habitats including species-rich grasslands, wetlands, hedgerows, existing woodland and riparian corridors.

Our woodlands deliver a range of benefits from locking up carbon and boosting local biodiversity, to providing natural flood management and publicly accessible green space where appropriate. Our charity is community driven, with over a thousand local volunteers getting involved with tree planting and aftercare each year. Our work with communities particularly focuses on engaging and empowering children, young people and communities most impacted by future climate change.

Avon Needs Trees was founded in 2019 by environmentalist Nikki Jones and a small band of volunteers. They were concerned by how deforested our area had become and that no charity existed to buy land in our catchment to guarantee the permanence of new woodlands.

Since our formation in 2019, we have had two incredibly successful projects in Wiltshire, purchasing two sites of 47 acres, planting and caring for 22,000 native trees with the help of hundreds of volunteers from local and surrounding communities.

In 2023, we started planting Great Avon Wood; a ground-breaking 113-acre woodland project in partnership with the Forest of Avon Trust, with 35,000 trees supplied by the Woodland Trust. We also planted Ed Woods, our first Land Partnership venture, which means we are working with the site landowners to create permanent woodland.

In early 2024, we achieved our biggest land purchase yet: a 422-acre site at Wick Farm between Bristol and Bath. Over the next few years, this will be transformed into the Lower Chew Forest, the South West’s largest new woodland in a generation.

Both Great Avon Wood and Lower Chew Forest are part of the Avon Needs Trees organised Landscape Recovery in the Lower Chew project, a collective of landowners planning how to manage our wider landscape for nature.