Publishing Magnate Plans Largest British Forest
11/8/99
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Title: For trees he is a jolly good fellow
Source: The Times (London)
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 8, 1999
Felix Dennis was once seen as a menace. A generation ago, when he co-
edited a magazine called Oz, he was sentenced to nine months in
prison for publishing articles that were thought to be obscene. This
one-time hippy is today a multimillionaire, running one of Britain's
largest publishing empires. And he has a new ambition: to plant
Britain's largest forest.
Mr Dennis has certainly turned over more than just a new leaf. The
man who once wrote a cooking column on how to acquire and prepare
"Roast Trafalgar Square Pigeon" is of a generation famed for greater
hedonisms than musing about the delights of a beech tree. Once a
crack willow will have sounded more like a mind-altering substance.
But Mr Dennis is certainly not out of his tree on this issue. It
takes a particular determination - and not one commonly seeen - to
wish to spend hundred of millions of pounds on a creation whose full
glory the planter is unlikely to be alive to enjoy.
Let us hope that, as he did before, he has set a trend. He has
branched out, as it were, and he is addressing a real need. The
United Kingdom is one of the least wooded countries in Europe. Just 9
per cent of the country is woodland, compared with the European
average of 25 per cent. Some majestic trees have managed to survive
axes and gales. Kent has its giant "Majesty" oak, Lincolnshire its
Bowthorpe oak, with room for 20 people to dine inside. There are the
Lake District yews, which Wordsworth thought were "of form and aspect
too magnificent to be destroyed". Yet in the past 80 years, half of
Britain's ancient woodlands have disappeared, leaving the equivalent
of a mere 28- mile-square forest. Thanks to Mr Dennis sharing
Benjamin Disraeli's passion for tree-planting, future generations
might be able to see the woods as well as a few trees.
When Mr Dennis was sent to prison, the judge gave him a shorter
sentence than his co-editors on the ground that he was "very much
less intelligent" than they were. He should perhaps have remembered
William Blake's words: "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man
sees."