LIFESTYLE - SUMMER 2017

WHY I LOVE TO  PLANT TREES ! says BBC Radio’s ‘Axeman’ by BBC Radio Lancashire’s Stephen Lowe

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efore I start to tell you about my love of trees, perhaps I should start with a bit about me. Born and raised in Accrington, I ammarried to Freda, we have two boys, Thomas 22 who is a soware developer and Oliver who is nine and loves Stanley, XBOX and geing muddy! Aer leaving Mount Carmel High School (and its nuns) I went on toMyerscough College at theWinmarleigh site on a YTS in Horticulture in 1988 before moving on to a City &Guilds course at Newton Rigg College, Cumbria. I worked on a countryside estate in the hills above Garstang called Barnacre between 1989 and 1995. Employed on the estate as a trainee woodsman it was here that my love of all things outdoors developed. I felled and planted trees, dug ditches, erected fences, learned how to lay hedges, drove big tractors and carried out all the other tasks required in the woods on an estate. Barnacre was sold when I was 21 and I had to look for a new job and my life took a very different path as I worked my way up through the ranks of one of Europe’s largest Forestry companies, Fountain Forestry, from subcontractor to senior management. When I started as a subcontractor I took the back seats out of my old ford Fiesta car so I could use it as a van and I travelled the country felling trees and cuing grass in plantations. 10 years of hard gra later and aer several promotions I was a senior manager, responsible for over £1 million pounds of work per annum, directly supervising over 50 staff, all a bit of a change from the old Fiesta van days! During my time as an employee for Fountain Forestry we won many planting contracts across the Northwest including several for Hyndburn Borough Council. I have recently walked back through some of the plantations that are nowwoodlands. We are very lucky in Hyndburn that various councils over the years have had the foresight to invest in the future environmental benefits for the area and have planted so many trees. Back in 2006 I won a competition on BBC Radio Lancashire to present a one off show on the radio. They liked the show I produced and they asked me back! I now present “Lancashire Outdoors” every Sunday between 11am and 2pm. The programme is an outside broadcast which changes location every week and reports on all things concerning the great outdoors in Lancashire whatever the weather!

Whilst broadcasting outside on the radio for three hours is sometimes not the warmest of jobs, the coldest days of my life were spent planting trees to create a woodland on the former farmland above Miller Fold at the top ofWillows Lane in Accrington. The site preparation had all been done in some glorious summer days with the spraying of over 16,000 spots with weed killer and carefully marking out the areas to be planted. Day One of the planting went very well with all the planting locations now easily spoed in amongst the long grass, the trees were flying in, well on piece rate of 12p a tree there was no point in hanging about! Day Two and the Accrington weather dealt a bier blow to me and my tree planting chums with many inches of snow falling over night. Undaunted we set off up the hill fromMiller Fold and aempted to find the rows of freshly planted trees from the previous day. Within the first hour of work the wind started to whip the snow

I report on all things concerning the great outdoors in Lancashire, whatever the weather

over the crest of the hill in front of us and create a dri ofWinter Olympic proportions. Aer my slightly smaller colleague became stuck in the dri and needed to be dug out we beat a hasty retreat to the relative warmth of the nearby stone wall. It feels strange to think about the cold but happy days planting those small trees as I now stroll around the woodland that I helped to create. Birds fly all around making happy song in the early spring sunshine and the walk up past the powerlines reveals the cherry trees we planted are nowmature enough to create a splendid array of blooms that can be seen fromway across the valley. The best feature of ‘my’

wood is in the top corner of the Ash and Southern Beech section of the woodland, where there is a brand new Forest School. To think that the next generation of Hyndburn children are now benefiting from outdoor learning in a woodland I helped to plant is a great feeling indeed. Hopefully with a dose of the outdoors and not too much by the way of harsh AccringtonWeather some of themmay just end up as foresters too!

Being a presenter on the radio has changed my life, I have made hundreds of new friends and I am asked to give talks and speeches on my life and the great outdoors - not bad for the YTS lad!

Above: • Keeping warmwhilst broadcasting outdoors. • Pictures of ‘Little’ Lowe. • With childhood hero David Bellamy. Left: Proud as punch in ‘His’ wood.

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