The Spessart is range of low wooded mountains located in the German states of Bavaria and Hesse. Sprawling across an area of almost 2,500 square km (940 square miles), it is home to many species of Specht, or woodpecker, from which it is thought to derive its name. Badgers, wild boar, deer, racoons and martens are among the other wildlife that live between and beneath the trees.

Looking after a forest the size of the Spessart is no walk in the park. Besides managing and maintaining existing trees, foresters are forever thinking ahead to the next generation of woodland. What they plant today will be what people walk through in decades and possibly centuries to come. If, that is, the wind and weather doesn't bring their well-laid plans crashing down.

In January this year, a violent storm tore through the forest, uprooting as many as 20,000 big trees. They have gradually been moved from the site, and work is now underway to see if enough saplings have survived beneath the debris to serve as the basis for a whole new area of woodland. If there aren't enough, the foresters will have to plant anew.

A group of volunteers with the conservation group Bergwaldprojekt or forest mountain project have come to the Spessart for a week to help assess the situation. They clear old branches and twigs, and use them to help prop up smaller trees that became buried or bent out of shape by the storm. In many places, there seem to be enough small trees to avoid replanting.

Although the number of women who work in Germany's woodlands is gradually rising, it is still a male-dominated environment. The situation is more acute in the former West German states, such as Bavaria, than in the East, where there is a longer history of women in the field. Nonetheless, just over half of those who volunteer to take part in Bergwald's 100 nationwide annual projects, are women.

After a long day out in the forest, volunteers are keen to freshen up. There's no long luxuriating in a bath, but something altogether more exhilarating. A can of cold water in the open-air. No fuss, no waste, but perfectly clean participants.

The Spessart has more than its fair share of blackberry bushes. For foresters, it can be a tough job to keep them from smothering young trees in the early stages of ensuring the next generation of forest gets to see the light of day. Because no pesticides are used in the woods, the only way to control their barbed branches, is to cut them back.

There are countless species of tree growing on the folds of the Spessart, but two are particularly illustrative. The beech and the oak. To make sure young oaks get the best possible start in life, any other saplings, such as conifers or birches, or grasses growing too close to them, are pulled up or scythed down.

Many of those who work as foresters in the Spessart, also hunt. It is regarded as a means of controlling deer and wild boar numbers, which in turn is a way of protecting young trees from their hungry jaws and thereby giving the next generation of woodland a chance to establish itself.

With its abundance of trees to climb, hide behind, walk between and sit on, the Spessart also serves up all manner of details for the imagination. From moss covered elevations that have a vague look of giant hedgehogs, to giant fungi growths, to roots that could pass for some kind of deep green reptile asleep among the leaves. Or maybe it is…