{"id":992201,"date":"2026-11-14T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T23:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&#038;wetrend=2b50a76f-0"},"modified":"2026-11-14T08:04:16","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T13:04:16","slug":"in-2013-brian-may-bought-farmland-in-england-today-the-queen-guitarist-79-has-planted-more-than-100000-trees-25497-c1","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/in-2013-brian-may-bought-farmland-in-england-today-the-queen-guitarist-79-has-planted-more-than-100000-trees-25497-c1\/","title":{"rendered":"In 2013, Brian May Bought Farmland in England. Today, the Queen Guitarist, 79, Has Planted More Than 100,000 Trees and Shrubs There"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_992209\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-992209\" style=\"width: 6048px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-992209\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/11\/shutterstock_editorial_14205792au.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"6048\" height=\"4024\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-992209\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mandatory Credit: Photo by Boston Schulz\/Shutterstock (14205792au)<br \/>Queen + Adam Lambert &#8211; Brian May<br \/>Queen + Adam Lambert in concert, BMO Stadium, Los Angeles, California, USA &#8211; 11 Nov 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em><strong>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.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<b>In short<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2013, Brian May bought farmland near the village of Bere Regis, in Dorset, in the south of England.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">By the project&#8217;s 10th anniversary in 2023, 101,000 native trees and shrubs had been planted, according to the Argentine newspaper La Naci\u00f3n.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Known first as Save Me Woods, the site is now officially called May&#8217;s Wood.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><b>A field that became a forest<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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 Naci\u00f3n recalls.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The original site covered about 63 hectares, around 155 acres. Roughly 64 more hectares of neighboring fields were later added to the project.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>From Save Me Woods to May&#8217;s Wood<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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&#8217;s Wood, and the name eventually became official.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>101,000 trees and counting<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>The man behind the riffs<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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&#8217;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.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>A rock star with a scientist&#8217;s mind<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">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&#8217;s Wood is perhaps the most lasting expression of that commitment.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Celebrities who give land a second life<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">He is not the only star to have transformed a property into something bigger. <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/brad-pitt-turned-his-990-acre-provence-estate-into-an-organic-vineyard-and-its-rose-sold-out-25497-c1\/\">Brad Pitt turned his Provence estate into an organic vineyard<\/a><\/strong>, while in Wyoming, <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/in-2019-kanye-west-bought-a-6713-acre-wyoming-ranch-six-years-later-the-family-bought-it-back-25497-c1\/\">the family that founded Kanye West&#8217;s former ranch bought it back<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">More than half a century after Queen began, Brian May&#8217;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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42690,"featured_media":992209,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[23],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v18.5 (Yoast SEO v20.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Brian May, 79, Turned English Farmland Into a 100,000-Tree Nature Reserve | Grazia USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 2013, Queen guitarist Brian May bought farmland in Dorset, England. 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