‘The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago,” runs a Chinese proverb. “The second-best time is now.” We know this to be true, climate science tells us so. Trees clean the air we breathe, forests are the lungs of the land, the lockers-up of carbon and the providers of leafy shelter for wildlife.
They have an emotional function too, turning the planting of a sapling — a tree that is likely to outlive us — into a kind of contract with our children and grandchildren. It is a combination of these factors that has prompted The Times to mark this year’s Celebration Day, next Sunday, with a campaign to plant 5,000 trees. The National Trust has pledged to select and implant this number of trees for Times readers.
What is to be celebrated? The memory of lost loved ones. The pandemic that swept through our families left many bereaved, still searching for ways to fill the gap left by the virus. Trees are not a trivial memorial. They are more than a seed that grows into a stem, then a living trunk and ending as dead timber. A grown tree, wrote the French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky”. The stuff of fortitude and a confident future.
The National Trust has set itself an ambitious target to plant 20 million trees by 2030. At their peak the trees will store about 300,000 tonnes of carbon a year. One million donated saplings have already been dug into the ground — oak, beech, crab apple trees. The Times plantation will help. Young trees, of course, have to be properly tended. There is a case for visiting a donated tree in its first five vulnerable years, to clean weeds, to mulch and check ties: that too can be part of honouring the memory of a friend or family member. After the protracted misery of Covid, this is a worthy way of celebrating the joy of spring.
