Gabriel Hemery
Dr Gabriel Hemery is an English forest scientist and author. He co-founded the Sylva Foundation with Sir Martin Wood, a tree and forestry charity established in 2009.
Career
He began his career at the Northmoor Trust, now the Earth Trust, in Oxfordshire. He later became director of development for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, returning to forestry to establish the Forestry Horizons think-tank in 2006. He is currently chief executive of Sylva Foundation, which he co-founded with Sir Martin Wood in 2009.He is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Foresters.
In 2011, he co-founded the ginger group Our Forests with other environmentalists, including Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, to provide a voice for the people of England in the future of the country's public forests.
In 2022, he was elected chair of the Forestry and Climate Change Partnership
which exists to help Britain's trees, woods, and forests to be resilient and adapt to a changing climate.
With Sarah Simblet he wrote a contemporary version of John Evelyn's Sylva – The New Sylva – published by Bloomsbury in April 2014.
He has written several fiction works including with Unbound Publishing Green Gold: The Epic True Story of Victorian Plant Hunter John Jeffrey; a biographical novel describing the true story of an expedition to North America by Victorian botanist John Jeffrey between 1850 and 1854. He has published two short story collections and a poetry anthology.
He completed work on a series of three guidebooks to British forests published by Bloomsbury Wildlife, the first of which was "The Forest Guide: Scotland" published April 2023., with the Wales guide published in 2025 and the England guide coming 2026.
Forestry research
He designed and established a new woodland and centre for hardwood forestry research; Paradise Wood.He was a founding member of the British and Irish Hardwoods Improvement Programme establishing a number of forestry field trials across the UK and Ireland.
He gained a DPhil degree at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford on the genetic improvement of walnut. His research took him to the walnut fruit forests of Kyrgyzstan where he collected thousands of Juglans regia seeds for field trials back in the UK. He then researched and published numerous articles pertaining to the silviculture and genetic improvement of walnut.
He initiated an agroforestry research project in the mid-1990s, combining free-range broiler chicken with newly established woodland.
Books
Non-Fiction
- Gabriel Hemery and Sarah Simblet – The New Sylva: a discourse of forest and orchard trees for the twenty-first century. 400pp...
- Gabriel Hemery – The Forest Guide: Scotland. 320pp...
- Gabriel Hemery – The Tree Almanac 2024. 336pp... Foreword by Tracy Chevalier.
- Gabriel Hemery – The Tree Almanac 2025. 346pp... Foreword by Levison Wood.
- Gabriel Hemery – The Forest Guide: Wales. 320pp...
Fiction
- Gabriel Hemery – Don't Look Back. in Adrian Cooper – Arboreal: a collection of new woodland writing. ..
- Gabriel Hemery – Green Gold: The Epic True Story of Victorian Plant Hunter John Jeffrey...
- Gabriel Hemery – Tall Trees Short Stories: Vol.20...
- Gabriel Hemery – The Man Who Harvested Trees. in Fiona Stafford – Stories of Trees, Woods and the Forest. ..
- Gabriel Hemery – Tall Trees Short Stories: Vol.21...
- Gabriel Hemery – The Wolf, The Walnut and the Woodsman...
- Gabriel Hemery – Blough: an Anthology of Tree and Nature Poems...