[7] The charity was founded in Devon, England in 1972 by retired farmer and agricultural machinery dealer Kenneth Watkins.

[citation needed] Its first employee and director, John James, came from Lincolnshire and was living in Nottingham at the time.

[15] The building, designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios as architect and Atelier One as structural engineer,[16] incorporates light shelves to distribute natural daylight around the 200 workstations, and concrete panels to absorb daytime heat, to provide the thermal mass that the lightweight wooden structure would otherwise lack.

[17] It is estimated that compared to a concrete framed construction, the timber structure saved the equivalent in carbon production as nine years of the building's operation.

Its largest current projects include the 41.7 km2 (16.1 sq mi) Glen Finglas Estate in the Trossachs, Scotland and the Heartwood Forest near St Albans, Hertfordshire, England, which will cover approximately 347 ha (860 acres).

[26] The largest of these, owned and managed by the Trust itself, is the Flagship Diamond Wood within the National Forest in Leicestershire, which will be planted with 300,000 trees.

[27] Beginning in 2014, a project commemorating the First World War involved tree planting and the establishment of new woodland sites across the UK.

[28] As part of the project, the Woodland Trust entered a partnership with the National Football Museum to create team groves to commemorate all the professional football players involved in the First World War, giving supporters the chance to dedicate trees at the English Centenary Wood, Langley Vale in Epsom.

[29] This citizen science project encourages members of the public to record the signs of the seasons near to them in order to show and assess the impact of climate change on the UK's wildlife.

[30] Thousands of volunteers send in their sightings, providing evidence about how wildlife is responding to the changing climate.