A tree is born
On Saturday we planted 30 trees: forestry tube stocks in every break in the canopy of the older trees, which drop branches and sigh with every heave of wind. I wanted to know how fast they’d grow. As we drove around the peninsula later I pointed at every tree. ‘How old is that one?’ ‘When was that one planted?’.
Will those trees still be saplings we are old and bowed? Will we have to plant another generation before it is our time to pass on? It’s an amazing thing to be part of the birth of a forest. A few days of digging, lugging water, mulching and feeling the soft dirt in your hands and then those tiny plants will turn the water and sunshine and years into majestic canopy and trunks. Insects, spiders, birds, and humans shall all find shelter from the sun and rain beneath their arms. One day we might hold hands, read books or sleep beneath them. One day our conversation might be ‘ Do you remember when those trees were knee high?’ I believe that land ownership is an illusion. But we can be stewards.
I wonder how the old trees feel, feeling the tender but insistent roots of the young overlapping with their own?
