The man who planted trees

Have you planted a tree lately? It's never too late to start. I recently came across this enchanting book, The Man Who Planted Trees, and feel more inspired than ever to start my own, unofficial re-afforestation programme in north London.

As it happens, I've been running a kind of "tree ambulance service" for several months, with a neighbour who works as a gardener.

Every so often Brian (my neighbour) is commissioned to dig up a tree by customers who wish to put something else in its place. And rather than trash the sapling he leaves it on my doorstep - whereupon I pot it and add it to my collection, pictured below. (The largest is six feet tall. Several, as you can see, are barely a foot. Most are oaks.)

The plan is to get hold of a fluorescent yellow workman's jacket and plant them unofficially on bare verges alongside one of the wide, traffic filled avenues nearby - and keep watering them till they've grown to full size.

Among my collection, the first to come into leaf were the ash - which traditionally means that we're in for a wet year (ash rhymes with splash). We shall see.

Comments

[Tim]

I recently spotted a company selling the opportunity to buy a share in a woodland with a few other people for only £5,000? It seems a good deal. Does anyone know about this. The company is called ancientwoodland.com.

I fancied bying a share and helping to plat new trees and generally renovating it?

[Ian Blair]

Hello, Jean-Paul,
I used to have a flat in North London which backed onto a park with mature beech trees. Every autumn, the trees dumped leaves into my back yard, which was mainly concrete. My ‘soil’ was a combination of clay, brick, rubble, concete and compost from the beech trees, but the trees and some other plants still thrived. Each autumn, I would brush the leaves into a heap and in early spring (at this time of year), small green shoots would appear from the heap. Trees also self-seeded in the yard’s two small raised beds. I transplanted seedlings into containers and within weeks they had grown into small trees. Believe it or not, the trees thrived in waxed orange juice cartons. Some of the self-seeded trees grew a foot or more a year and had to be pruned viciously. My fence was about 8ft high; 2 trees that had planted themselves in the cracks in the concrete were 2ft higher than the fence. London's relatively low rainfall and poor soil didn't seem to affect the trees. They grew anyway.

Beech trees also grew in the gutters and downpipes of the building. Every couple of years, I would climb a ladder to clear the gutters and more than once, I lifted a beech tree complete with long root like a carrot with a ‘pot’ of compost attached, directly out of my gutter/downpipe.

In Cumbria, the soil is beautiful, dark stuff, but plants that thrive in London either fail, or struggle to survive in the colder, damper conditions. I fetched a lot of beech seedlings from London and gradually planted them in my Cumbrian garden. Some are now growing quite well, albeit more slowly than in London. I now have a beech hedge between my lawn and vegetable patch. They were transplanted last year and most seem to be doing well. With a bit of luck and judicious pruning, they should spread out nicely this year,

Several years ago, there was a reading of ‘The Man Who Planted Trees’ on Radio 4. I missed the introduction and didn’t realise it was fictional, but I like to think it was true. Your guerilla planting scheme is a great idea. Let’s hope you can make it work. The mowing machines that councils use eliminate everything in their path. You’d have to somehow protect the young saplings. Maybe you need a guerilla fencing campaign as well?

Did you see the TV programme about the Indian man who took rubbish from the streets to a part of the city that nobody cared about and built a garden. He created paths and walls from concrete rubble, a waterfall, a mosaic made from broken urinals and planted lots of trees. Nobody knew what he was doing, but the authorities eventually caught on and his garden is now a tourist attraction.

[L Sunder]

While talking about planting trees, I wonder why in many parts of London I see the respective councils have laid bricks/concrete or similar material to be laid around the base of young trees. Some of them are laid tightly around the base of the trunk. Common sense tells me they will soon die for want of water.