ABSTRACT
Scotland is one of the least wooded countries in Europe. Most of its forest cover had already been lost by the Bronze Age through a long process of deforestation, the result of a combination of climate change and human intervention. This trend was essentially reversed during the twentieth century, particularly since the Second World War, largely through establishment of new commercial conifer plantations. Native woodland decline, however, continued until the closing decades of the twentieth century, when a signifi cant “reforesting Scotland” movement developed, intent on halting this. The movement embraced the ideas of prominent ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling, who in the 1950s had described the Scottish Highland landscape as a “wet desert,” at the same time lamenting the destruction of its “natural” climax vegetation, the Caledonian pine forest.1
