Why Plant Trees?
Growing an oak tree at New Chelsea. This is my fourth shot.
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now”
— Chinese Proverb
The photo for this post shows the English oak tree that I planted (in vermiculite in my fridge) last fall. There were three other acorns in the bag. They didn’t sprout. This will be my fourth attempt to plant an oak tree on our land, which lies near the bottom of a steep valley, a few hundred metres inland from the sea. Over the past 30+ years, I’ve established a horse chestnut, a beech, a linden and a sugar maple along with many conifers, but not everything worked and the oaks have had an especially hard time. They get eaten.
My first oak was put in unprotected and, when it disappeared, I thought rabbits had eaten it. Everything that shouldn’t be eaten by rabbits needs to be protected in my garden, as I’ve learned over the years. So, next year, the second oak seedling went into the ground under an elaborate cage of chicken wire. It disappeared the second spring. We host a lot of mice. I didn’t know they would eat small trees but nothing else is small enough to get through the chicken wire. The third attempt went remarkably well. The tree grew in my backyard in town for a few years and was planted near the front of the house. It’s still there, flourishing, it’s just not an oak. When it spouted thorns, I realized it was a hawthorn that I’d lost track of. The leaves look similar though their small size should have tipped me off. Nobody eats hawthorn trees. I’m hoping it’s a pink flowered variety that I’d collected haws from in a cemetery near my house in town. Time will tell.
The fourth attempt is now ready to go to the garden. It will be protected by chicken wire lined with those lovely tree protectors that come for free with onions and Plantskydd, a natural Swedish product that scares the herbivores away for reasons best left unexplored. Will my little oak survive? I don’t know. I just keep planting trees. Since the pandemic started, I’ve added three sweet chestnut trees and three sea buckthorns to our land. I keep telling myself I’m getting too old for this, but I’ve already got two more trees (a Japanese pine and fourth hazel) in pots, waiting to be planted soon.
“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.”
This quote comes from Thomas Fuller, an English doctor who lived, appropriately enough, in Seven Oaks, Kent, from 1645 to 1734. He was ahead of his time. Trees take carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester it. Like all lifeforms on this planet, trees are carbon based. Unlike most lifeforms, their bodies can be put to good use after death. Buying things made of wood, and building with wood, are ways to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A mature deciduous tree, my oak for example if it survives, sequester about 21 kilograms (48 pounds) of carbon every year. My patch of land. with its mature native birch, rowan and conifers in addition to the trees I’ve planted, removes several hundred kilos a year. We plant trees because we love the people who will come after us, the unseen ones we should try to be mindful of as we move through this vast and confusing world.
