Forester - Tom Warburton

Most people are interested by it because they've never really met a Forester, especially in a city like Brighton, even though there are more true surgeons than trees in Brighton. So a lot of the time if I tell them what I do for the first time and I say forester, they say, "so do you climb trees"? We do all our management on the ground, and we do big spaces rather than just a single kind of species.

I personally feel that the public still perceive forestry as ripping down a rain forest somewhere. We try very hard to make it neat and tidy and sometimes when we've finished it doesn't look pretty. Give it six months or three months for the spring to start, and it will be beautiful again. My boss Andrew, he explains our business as conscientious forestry. So we try and be a bit more careful.

I can go for months without felling a tree. One of the things I really do like is that we plant the trees, we fell the trees, we mill the trees, and then we use the trees. The variety of every season is different. You're out there and you see so much different wildlife. You see you see the foxgloves and bluebells popping up. You see the different butterflies and the birds migrating.

I value my job massively because I'm outdoors and I'm not that stressed. My wife has quite a stressful job, she runs her own company, I don't have that issue. I go to work, I do the job, I come home and I can I can switch off. I quite enjoy that.

It's the physical side of it as well, I value that because I don't have to go to the gym. I feel fit, I'm out in fresh air, I eat well. There's not a great deal of money as an employed Forester. I think it's an average wage in the UK, so I'm never going to make millions. But I'm okay with that.

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