I went for a walk with Financial Times journalist, broadcaster and forester Joy Lo Dico in her 100 acre wood in Gloucestershire.
“Let us cultivate our garden” – Voltaire
“I think he found a hash cake in the woods and ate the lot! He was showing all the signs; disoriented, lying sphynx-like staring into the middle distance and looking like he was going to throw a whitey.” The gear was probably left by campers “at least it wasn’t mushrooms or anything mad like that.”
Joy and I had cancelled our first walk in the woods together as she had been waiting at the vets wondering if she was going to have to say good bye to her dog. The spun out toker in question was the foxy Hungarian vizsla who rushed up to greet me when I arrived at his cottage. “He was fine, but it did turn out to be a very expensive spliff.”
Joy bought the ancient woodland, then called Hazel Woods, in 2015. It is now renamed Voltaire’s Woods, not after the dead French chap, but after the aforementioned narcotised gundog. A pedigree puppy has to have a grandiose name, right? “I’d got divorced and sold my house in the London suburbs.” As the editor of the Londoner’s Diary, the social and political pages of the Evening Standard, work was all encompassing and she craved an escape. The 300-year-old Gloucestershire cottage she chose “just happened to have 120 acres of woodland attached to it.” As flippant as that sounded, there was nothing about Joy that gave me any sense that anything she ever does is accidental.

Voltaire
We start to walk up the track into the woods and look over verdant herb layer with butterflies busying and tired looking parent birds collecting snacks for their offspring. “How’s your bird song?” I admit it only really stretches to pigeon. Joy produces her phone and brings up an app to identify the yawpy young chiffchaff we were hearing.
She sparkles through her glasses and asks “what do I want to tell you about….and what is it that you want to know?” I wondered, perhaps because of the teasing tone she used, whether our wishes would align. My interest was less in forestry and more around where the roles of being a ‘high-profile journalist in the capital’, and ‘custodian of woodland’ converge?’
At first, we spoke woodland.
It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection. – Voltaire
After buying the land she spent the next 4 years devouring forestry knowledge. “I know pretty much everything that has ever happened on arbtalk.” The idea of managing woodland was incredibly romantic; “I loved the idea of a cycle of death and regeneration.” Her father whose father was a Sicilian market gardener warned of the hard work facing her. “How hard can trees be?” she thought “They don’t die at the same rate as vegetables.”
This held true until ash dieback landed. 1 in 10 trees in the UK is ash. “It became apparent that, though I had lots of lovely woodland, quite a lot was dying.” There is no cure for this fungal affliction and, along with the devastating loss of habitat the disease is estimated to leave the UK with a £15 Billion bill.
Joy’s romantic notion of cycles of death and regeneration is now being played out in quick time.
The eponymous vizsla slaloms past us and we head towards a nursery of immature trees. Each is encased in a translucent tube protecting it from nibbly deer. I peer down one, asking how high up deer can chomp young leaves but get no answer. Joy is on her elbows, completely absorbed, taking a photograph of a visitor. “It’s a Vagrant Darter! They are rare!” She said, thrusting her phone at me to show me the Latin name of the waspy coloured dragonfly she had found. Her intensity is infectious, and I find myself back at home on the British Dragonfly Society website furrowed brow reading about this migratory species with its ‘prominent vulval scale.’
“Use, do not abuse, neither abstinence nor excess ever renders a man happy.” – Voltaire
So how are the woods used?
Joy describes a fable-like a succession of people who simply ‘turn up’ after she moves in. Just as COVID-19 hit there were 8 people living in the woods. You get the hippies who arrive and want to just ‘feel’ the trees and ask them what they need. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who simply want to Drott the lot. She rolls her eyes at both. There needs to be a middle ground.
Everybody sees Voltaire’s Woods through their own lens. A forager sees dimensions of food, biodiversity surveyors spot multifarious living things, a tree hugger who dreams up low impact but sometimes uneconomic management ideas, campers spy fixing points for a tarp and I see Joy, standing right at the centre of it all both as overseer and protector. One chap appeared wanting to open a woodland restaurant specialising in pizzas topped with scavenged wild mushrooms. Whilst it sounds wonderful; there is the issue of planning, fire, access “And the fact I don’t want a pizzeria slap bang in the middle of the woods.” Tucked off the footpath we pass one of the forester’s homes; a tent with “Wood is Good” painted on the canvas. Joy has to find a way to balance all of these dreams, make money and yet also allow the forest remain in the possession of the wild.
“Human nature is such that it always wants to expand.” Here, she and the workers have to consciously resist this basic urge. “The trouble is, we always think we are innocent of it and it’s the next person who is doing the harm.” “It is important that we recognise that it is a whole woodland, and we manage it as such. No one has a long-term patch of space here. The land gets used and then let go again, for nature to do the job of improving it.” I think on my own hankering to have a field, a place of my own to be, camp and have a fire, and wonder quite how I can justify it.
Some of the woodland must be used for timber. She shows me the scattered human spaces marked by the signs of forestry: cords of billets, car sized toothy saws for planking, a couple of old sofas under an A frame, and criss-crosses of mudded access roads. “There is an incredible layer of infrastructure in forestry; you have to learn to talk (mainly) to men about bigish woodland machinery. I now have a mad passion for it.”
She admires those who’ve worked land. Whilst Joy (who “loves the maths”) feverishly scribbles calculations of yields of timber, her builder who grew up managing woodland simply puts up a thumb, lines it up with the tree, shuts one eye and gives her the exact same answer her sums on the kitchen table do.
Joy’s identity here is distinct from her London persona. “I come from a world of the political top tier, celebrity.” She adopts an exasperated, parental tone “Here we go…Oh, we are having another party, are we? Ok. We are having another political melt down, are we? Fine.” It’s rinse and repeat. “I know how to deal with that.”
Landing in a needy woodland in Gloucestershire has pruned her ego beautifully. One crew brought in early on to move wood filched the lot and disappeared. She has been perceived as both Londoner and foreigner, considered as not having a right to the land. The local resistance to a newcomer manifesting in the rates she is charged for work. “It’s called the plum in the mouth price.” This doesn’t happen now.
“I know there is a lot of stuff I don’t know, and though I don’t automatically select the right person for the job first time. I do now have a good eye and ear for the over confident young men who promise everything and don’t deliver.” And she knows when someone is taking the piss.
There is of course the natural economy of the wood and although Joy is uncomfortable with the term ’crop’ there needs to be an economic purpose to trees growing, and those who do the skilled work of forestry need to be paid. There is a lot of sharing of knowledge now and occasionally resources. Her neighbour Estelle charcoals her fallen ash and Joy mills timber in return.
Managed woodland stores carbon better. Huge trees neglected actually start letting off carbon, and restrict the growth of the forest floor so balance is needed. And before people? “Well, you’d have your woolly mammoth essentially doing what we are doing.” An ash lies ahead of us, precarious at 45 degrees, its roots visible and curtailed by disease. “Dead wood wants to be on the ground, returning itself to the forest floor.”
“Men argue, nature acts.”- Voltaire
We stop, I’m standing in one of the woods’ 3 streams. We start to talk about London.
“I love London, I think about the city suburbs and the flat fields around here as one and the same. The woodland and the centre of London as also the same thing.” She drops sotto voce, I strain to hear her. She purrs, holding gaze “You see; it’s never quiet here.” Nature’s sound frets around us. It’s peculiar, my right boot is letting in water but to move in that moment seemed unfitting. So I stayed put, squelching one sided for the rest of our walk.
“I go to London to chill, to the London library for quiet… for thinking, or picking some poetry off the shelf. I stroll around more in London than here. I usually have to have a good reason to walk through the woods as I have a responsibility to the land.”
Joy’s city space holds a factory of minds; “Rococo-like in their complexity… There is a subtlety and play on ideas that you don’t get here.” There is a self-sustaining culture of people having opinions on the opinions of others. She looks over, saying deadpan “though having opinions for the sake of having opinions is fundamentally useless.”
The path forked beneath, separating us naturally. I asked a question about another part of her London life and was told, “no, that I can’t talk about.” Joy seems comfortable expressing her boundaries. She leaves you spaces to think within a conversation, and won’t immediately rescue you if you say something thoughtless. I was deadly curious, but this part of her was not for me. I changed the subject and we rejoined the route alongside one another again.
“The woods are more inward looking. Interests here are so different, and there is just so-much-to- do!” Of course woodfolk discuss the politics around nature, but on the whole they just get on with it. The brief sighting of a vagrant darter ignites the same fire in Joy that she is known for in London editorial mode. “I’d be scouring papers for political news tucked away on page 16 with just the same intensity.” It was very clear to me which one of those pursuits she feels really matters. It seems Joy’s intellectual needs shire-side are still met, but perhaps in a different way.
“Every man is guilty of the good he did not do.”- Voltaire
As a journalist who writes on the environment Joy is interested in influencing realistic behaviour change. When we ask people to make an idealistic change, such as everyone using electric cars, it can only really be supported by people at either end of the financial spectrum; either those who live in woodland who have very low living costs, or those who are very rich. The majority of the people in the middle are unable to make the change and therefore might show resistance to it. She gives the example of a recent by-election where Labour failed to win due to their plan to impose an Ultra Low emissions Zone. How to make change in this middle ground without force is what fascinates her.
We chat together walking through woods that have probably been here since feudal times. As 2 women in our 40s we probably won’t get to see the whole devastating impact of climate change, so why is it important she still cultivate her garden? “When you realise you have got halfway through your life you want to make a difference, or at least do no harm.”
We dodge a broken eggshell on the path.
“We realise we are going to die, don’t we?”
“I rarely put myself forward to talk about this part of me, I suppose I’m nervous of seeming to say ‘I’m doing better than you.’” The woods bring out an unpresuming side that boasts nothing of her counsel with celebrity in that London. A quick google and you’ll see that this woodland life is nestled pages beneath images of her at cocktail parties
“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.” – Voltaire
“Really [the woods] own me. I’m just looking after them”
It makes me think of parenting. Joy’s laughs saying her role as parent is now as secretary and therapist. “The trick to parents is …a child needs to manage their parents, their irrational and emotional needs.” Just tell your parent enough to prevent them from catastrophising. Where were Joy’s emotional and irrational needs? She spins all the plates in both of her worlds. Do town’s thinkers and country’s do-ers give her any space for her to leave anything to chance? To loosen control?
We pass one of the foresters and she asks “Is there anything I need to know?” There wasn’t, and we carried on, her parental anxieties allayed for now. “I want to always be a part of this woodland.” But she knows the woods, like our offspring, don’t belong to us.
I felt a yearning in her for freedom. She spoke of not liking rain, hating feeling trapped by weather or anything for that matter. I wondered where this fear came from. I understand some of Joy’s need for control, perhaps over the questions she answers, and the woodland she is responsible for. She hails from a world where a misplaced word can be ruinous and unpopular opinion can swipe away column inches. Harsh judgement of your carefully crafted prose has to be painful. If a dying ash falls on a public road squashing a car the buck stops with her. I didn’t see the woods much on our walk, I saw Joy’s need to get it just right.
She has created a place where others can be carefree. The woods want to flourish under her guardianship. Voltaire, the philosopher, wanted for people to be tolerant of themselves. Voltaire’s woods is a forgiving space that buffers mistakes with time and with abundance. Even the biggest errors covered up with ambitious shrublings in weeks. By nature woodlands are a shared space, and Joy’s work here shares them further. Her dream of a place that sustains itself, offers a haven, a place to think and place to rest is realised. Aside from its ecological and sustainable waves it is a place of love and nurture which is something we all deserve. Joy shows us a great part of herself by loving Voltaire’s Woods and it returns the sentiment by allowing her space to sometimes just throw up a hammock and be.

Joy Lo Dico: Photographed by Habie Schwarz
“No matter where my travels lead, paradise is where I am.” Voltaire
Insightful.
I so love reading your blogs. You have a fantastic way of taking the reader on the journey with you. So well written….again xxx
What an incredible woman and another beautiful read