Rachel Orchard, 24, is originally from Wessex, and for the past year has worked with the Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) team in Durris, Aberdeenshire, as a Trees and Timber Modern Apprentice.

“FLS manages the public estate for the joint objectives of sustainable timber production, environmental protection and public recreation. I am part of the craftspeople team, and we carry out practical tasks to keep our forests working effectively for their multiple purposes. For example, we carry out trail checks, fix gates and clear paths of dangerous trees and overgrown vegetation for the visitor services team. We put up goalposts and clear unwanted vegetation from forest roads to help the harvesting team. We take tree deliveries for the planting teams, plant trees ourselves and then carry out beat up surveys to see how many saplings have survived a year after planting.

In addition, we also have ongoing forest management tasks, for example, we are using clearing saws to respace a block of regenerated Silver Birch to allow the trees to grow larger and be of more use as commercial timber as firewood. My favourite task personally is removing tree tubes as it is satisfying and rewarding to remove the plastic from the landscape and free the trees from the tubes when they have outgrown them.

After school, I took a gap year to work and travel as I had no clue what to do next. I found out about Liberal Arts and Sciences degrees in the Netherlands, which are taught in English and allow you to pick and mix courses from humanities, sciences and social sciences. This suited me really well as I was curious about a range of topics, and over my three-year degree at University College Maastricht, I realised that my main interest was environmental studies, particularly how humans interact with their environment.

I finished my degree during the pandemic through online learning and quickly realised that I did not want a job in an office staring at a screen, so looked into outdoors-based industries. I was particularly drawn to forestry due to a long love of trees, enhanced by visiting national parks whilst on a semester abroad in Ecuador. During the early pandemic, my sister and I started clearing ivy off oaks and I joined the local countryside service to carry out hazel coppicing. This helped me realise that being in a wood was where I felt most happy and so was where I wanted to work.

I applied for the FLS apprenticeship after university as it seemed like the best possible option for someone with minimal outdoors-experience to gain practical skills through a paid job. Over the past year I have completed the SVQ level 5 in Trees and timber, which has helped structure my learning about carrying out forest management tasks. For example, I have been working towards my clearing saw, chipper and chainsaw tickets and gained confidence with a variety of hand tools. I look forward to starting the SVQ level 6 as this will go into more detail about how these management tasks fit into the wider picture of forestry as an industry.

After the apprenticeship, I am hoping to get a job as a craftsperson as I really enjoy the varied tasks and working within a team. In time, I would like to become a supervisor and a forest manager and perhaps be part of the planning or forest research teams at some point. I am really interested in restructuring our forests to enhance biodiversity balanced with sustainable timber production and creating space for nature connection experiences, especially given the challenges of climate change. For example, I want to look into continuous cover practices and better understand how using more mixed species planting improves soil health, and thereby, tree health.

From being inside studying in the homely comfort of southern England to being out in the wet and windy weather of north-east Scotland every day has required a fair amount of adjustment and re-defining what is ‘comfortable’ – with any temperature above 5 degrees now feeling balmy! Yet, the outdoors lifestyle of working in forestry has turned out to be everything I hoped for and I recommend it to anyone that will listen and certainly everyone that loves trees!”