Meg Coates Palgrave is the local Guru on indigenous trees and has been advocating managing regrowth in indigenous woodland for about 25 years, but it is much easier to enthuse people into planting trees.

And then someone discovered FMNR on the internet. Now it is official, now it has a name! Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration and even an acronym FMNR.

Very often the woodland is already there, but it is under ground and we simply need to give it a chance to get established .

She visited a farm which 23 years previously had stopped growing tobacco. Some lands had been left fallow and were now woodland, albeit quite young, except along the edges which had regenerated more rapidly. When ploughing to cultivate crops the depth is probably not more than 30 or 40 cm and tree roots go well below that, just sitting waiting to shoot again. not even all the pesticides etc. used on tobacco, kills them all off.

The slide show below is a modified version of  the presentation Meg Coates Palgrave uses when addressing an audience. All photos were taken by Meg unless otherwise stated.

Unfortunately, the slide show starts automatically and if too much time has elapsed before getting to the presentation, it may very well have begun. Place the pointer on the picture and scroll left till the first slide appears – named FMNR Presentation Begins.  Sometimes, weird things happen with the slide show, just wait till it settles down before looking at it.  You can scroll to the right or left at anytime. If left alone the presentation will just keep going repeating itself again and again.

Also unfortunately, there is no animation on this slideshow. The presentation that Meg uses is fully animated.