Trees and Stuff

Some thoughts on National Tree Week and Buy Nothing Day

I’ve been very busy for the last couple of weeks and struggled to come up with ideas for posts. I did initially intend to post once a week on a Wednesday morning, but it’s realistically going to be less frequent. I’d prefer not say anything one week, rather than feel pressured to throw something together just for the sake of it.

National Tree Week, organised by The Tree Council and partners, brings together the conservation sector, volunteers and tree-lovers to mark the start of the annual tree planting season. The Tree Week website includes lots of valuable resources about how to plant and look after trees along with ideas on how to celebrate trees and lists of events across the UK.

Trees are wonderful for many reasons, but there sometimes seems to be a fashion for thinking that trees should be planted everywhere they can be planted to mitigate the effects of climate change. Trees and woodlands are vital for absorbing emissions and can play a valuable role in combatting climate change. However, you need to plant trees in the right places! Sometimes well meaning people plant trees on peatland bogs, without realising that “peatlands are the largest natural terrestrial carbon store. They store more carbon than all other vegetation types in the world combined.” (see this report from IUCN). So we need to preserve peatlands because they absorb carbon as well as for the valuable wildlife that can be found there. Trees shouldn't be planted on peat bogs, nor should wind turbines for that matter (see this series of posts on Mark Avery's blog).

Wildflower meadows are vital for the wildlife they support, but are disappearing fast in the UK, yet sometimes people decide that they're good areas to plant trees. (They’re not).

The other thing that people often get wrong when planting trees, is to forget to look after them once they've been planted. The number of times that I see poorly looked after saplings in Edinburgh is disappointing. Trees that were neatly tied to stakes, but then no-one has ever checked on them and the plastic ties are digging into the tree, sometimes even killing it (and it's usually impossible to remove the ties once they've become embedded in the tree trunk). Also, the plastic tubes that are used to protect the trees from herbivores are often left on well beyond the time they're needed, frequently coming loose and becoming just more plastic waste scattering the landscape. Ruth Bradshaw wrote about the plastic tubing problem in her recent post.

It's good to plant trees of course, so if you have space in your garden, a tree could become a perfect addition. But you need to look after your trees and if you want to plant on a larger scale beyond your garden then make sure that you aren't damaging valuable habitats. And of course, it's better to allow or enable existing natural woodland to regenerate and spread by itself than it is to deliberately plant large numbers of trees.

Read about the trees of the Scottish Highlands in this post from the High Life Highland Rangers.

Read about some of the rarer birds found in British woodlands in this article from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).

This year, Buy Nothing Day falls within National Tree Week. Buy Nothing Day (29 November) is a 24 hour detox from consumerism and an opportunity to think about the impact we have on the environment through shopping.

Dr Nature Girl has an excellent post about Buy Nothing Day here.

I fell to thinking about how you can enjoy nature without buying anything, just go outside your front door and even if you live in a city, the chances are that you will see at least a couple of plants and birds. However, the more interested you become in nature, the more you may need to buy: binoculars, all-weather clothing, and field guides to the species you're interested in (though these days there are some excellent websites and apps that help you identify the wildlife you see, there's a list of many of the useful UK based wildlife identification websites on my blog). On the other hand, once you've made the initial outlay, getting out and about to enjoy nature in your local area isn't an expensive hobby. Spending a day in nature is a real antidote to the pressured lives many of us live and is a perfect way to spend a day as an alternative to the intense consumerism of Black Friday.

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Read my review of Alchemy, the second collection of poetry from Rae Spencer.