Queen + Adam Lambert – Brian May
Queen + Adam Lambert in concert, BMO Stadium, Los Angeles, California, USA – 11 Nov 2023
Brian May is best known for the guitar riffs of We Will Rock You and Bohemian Rhapsody. But for more than a decade, the Queen guitarist has also been working on a very different kind of project: turning English farmland into a forest. Today, more than 100,000 trees and shrubs grow there.
In short
- In 2013, Brian May bought farmland near the village of Bere Regis, in Dorset, in the south of England.
- By the project’s 10th anniversary in 2023, 101,000 native trees and shrubs had been planted, according to the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
- Known first as Save Me Woods, the site is now officially called May’s Wood.
A field that became a forest
The story began in 2013, when May bought farmland near Bere Regis, a village in the county of Dorset. The ecological transformation officially began in September of that year, as La Nación recalls.
The original site covered about 63 hectares, around 155 acres. Roughly 64 more hectares of neighboring fields were later added to the project.
From Save Me Woods to May’s Wood
The project was carried out with Save Me Trust, the animal welfare organization the musician founded. It was first named Save Me Woods, but locals quickly started calling it May’s Wood, and the name eventually became official.
The goal was to give nature back its place. Instead of crops, the land now hosts native trees and shrubs, along with insects, birds, small mammals, bees, butterflies and ground-nesting birds.
101,000 trees and counting
By the 10th anniversary of the project, in 2023, the total had reached 101,000 native trees and shrubs. For a site that was ordinary farmland just over a decade earlier, the change is spectacular, and May regularly shares images of the woodland on his Instagram account.
The man behind the riffs
May co-founded Queen in London in 1970 with Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, later joined by John Deacon. He wrote some of the band’s biggest anthems, including We Will Rock You, Fat Bottomed Girls and I Want It All, and still plays the Red Special, the guitar he built with his father as a teenager in the 1960s.
A rock star with a scientist’s mind
The project fits a man who has never been only a rock star. May, who turned 79 in July, completed a PhD in astrophysics and was knighted in 2023. He has long campaigned for the protection of wild animals, and May’s Wood is perhaps the most lasting expression of that commitment.
Celebrities who give land a second life
He is not the only star to have transformed a property into something bigger. Brad Pitt turned his Provence estate into an organic vineyard, while in Wyoming, the family that founded Kanye West’s former ranch bought it back.
More than half a century after Queen began, Brian May’s most surprising legacy may not be a song, but a forest that will keep growing, season after season, for future generations, long after the last encore.
