National Tree Week is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year from the 25^th November to the 3^rd December. Some of you might be old enough to remember “Plant a tree in ‘73” when it started – I’m not by a few years, but I do remember the thick white t-shirt I inherited as a child from the event that had a big oak leaf logo on the front.
The week marks the start of the winter tree planting season. Now is a great time to plant new trees because they’re dormant and slowing all of their processes down ready for the winter, and the soil is steadily damp which makes it the perfect combination to establish roots. This got me thinking about us humans, and how similar we are to trees. Stay with me on this – I obviously realise we’re not covered in bark (most of us), and we have a few more options in life than standing in the woods all day (as delightful as that sounds). Nature tends to encourage us to slow down a little this time of year – it’s dark when we wake up, it’s dark by the time we get home from work, daylight never seems to really fully happen and the cold weather encourages us to hunker down inside. Just like the new trees tentatively spreading their roots to create the foundations for their growth, we start to naturally look towards the New Year, thinking about how we would like our coming year to look.

Trees roots aren’t actually that deep, they just spread out to keep themselves sturdy. My mum has always called them ‘tree bones’ and I’ve always done the same, telling friends to “mind the tree bones” when we’re walking through the woods. It somehow makes the trees a bit more human, a bit more deserving of the respect they are due. Trees work hard for us, with each fully grown tree creating about 270 litres of oxygen a day. Unfortunately, humans need around 550 litres per day, and then with the amount of CO2 all of our production work and pollution makes, we’re making them work even harder. If we can all plant a tree, we can help ease the work, and make the world a bit lovelier. Because they are lovely, aren’t they? I love it in the spring when the new, dark green leaves are unfurling with the promise of all they will be. I love it in the summer when the leaves turn that almost lime green colour, and you can look up into the canopy and see the sunlight dappling through. I love it in the autumn when the beautiful golds and reds and browns of the leaves dance on their stems until the winds come and they swirl around creating mini tornadoes of colour. And I love the winter, with the bare bones of the tree exposed, solid and sturdy, sometimes with a coating of snow, more often dripping raindrops onto my head as I walk under them. Changing all the way through the year, but still a tree.