In 1996, British publisher Felix Dennis began a tree-planting mission; his Heart of England Forest has grown to more than 2 million trees

Felix Dennis made his fortune building a magazine empire that included titles such as Maxim and The Week. But as he told The Guardian in September 2013, the achievement he was most proud of wasn’t a magazine cover or a bank balance. It was a piece of English farmland that he had gradually turned into a forest. By the time of that 2013 interview, Dennis was already suffering from cancer. He didn't leave his forest incomplete when he died the following June.

A magazine mogul who wanted to leave more than money
Dennis wasn’t an environmental scientist or lifelong conservationist. A self-made British publisher, he started with underground magazines, then went on to hobby and lifestyle titles, eventually launching brands that reached millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1990s he had the sort of money most people only dream about, and a well-earned reputation for spending it loudly. He wasn't the type of man you would expect to go out and buy farmland and grow trees on. Rather than blow it all on art, property, or another spree of indulgence, he started buying land in Warwickshire, in the English countryside, with one particular aim in mind: planting trees.

From one small wood to a lifelong mission
The Heart of England Forest’s version of the story of its founder says Dennis planted his first small wood at his home in Dorsington in 1996. This was not a publicity stunt. Year after year, long before “billionaire climate pledge” was a familiar headline, he quietly and without much fanfare kept buying land and kept planting. By 2003 the project had become serious enough for him to register it as a charity. The aim was ambitious: to re-create a native broadleaf woodland in a part of England that had lost most of its trees centuries before, and to create something wild enough for animals and open enough for people to walk through, rather than a private estate closed off to everyone but him.


The forest that outlived him
In September 2013, Dennis hit his millionth tree. At the time, he was already suffering from cancer and died in June 2014. But he didn't leave his forest incomplete. He left most of his estate to the charity, specifically for it to keep buying land and planting long after he was gone. That plan succeeded. The charity has now planted well over two million trees across more than 7,000 acres of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The charity’s long-term vision is to grow the forest to 30,000 acres, making it one of the largest new native woodlands in England.

Why one man's trees matter for the whole planet
Dennis's project was personal and local, but it taps into something researchers have been studying at a global scale. According to a 2019 study published in the journal Science, the Earth has enough available land, outside of cities and farmland, to support hundreds of billions of additional trees, and restoring forests at that scale could store a meaningful share of the carbon that human activity has added to the atmosphere. The paper estimates that, excluding existing trees plus agricultural and urban land, there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover worldwide. The authors calculate that restoring those areas to their natural woodland or forest state could store about 205 gigatons of carbon at maturity, making tree restoration one of the largest carbon drawdown options they identify.

Later technical critiques, published in the same journal, argued the 205-gigaton figure was too high, one estimated it was roughly five times too large, and the authors themselves later added a wide uncertainty range to the original number. So it's not a silver bullet But the core idea holds up: putting native trees back into the ground, the way Dennis did for nearly two decades, helps.

What this means for readers back home
You don’t have to own 7,000 acres of the English countryside to get what Dennis was chasing. According to a 2019 study titled ‘Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing’ published in Scientific Reports by researchers at the University of Exeter, based on survey data from nearly 20,000 people, those who spend at least 120 minutes a week in nature, whether that's a city park, a greenway, or a real forest, report noticeably better health and wellbeing than people who spend little to no time outdoors. The same study found that it didn’t matter if that amount of time was spent on one long walk or several short ones throughout the week. That finding isn't just relevant to the English countryside; it's part of why urban tree-planting and park-access campaigns have also gained attention in US cities in recent years.

Dennis did not convert his forest into a wellness project. He loved trees, and he loved the idea of leaving something that would outlive every magazine he'd ever published. Just over twelve years after he died, that forest is still growing, just as he planned.