TWO BILLION TREES?

by Peter W. Gribble

In December 2020, Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan announced funding of $3.16 billion to plant two billion trees over ten years with the aim to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Planting trees in vast numbers is nothing new. One of the earliest was Sumeria’s Sargon the Great (2334-2279 BCE), history's first empire builder, who proudly claimed he began as a gardener.

Yet what can we do in our little empire of one tiny balcony?

Sometimes it seems as if the balcony itself decides. It’s a little miracle when something green sprouts all by itself from a crack or a corner on a high windswept balcony. Moss in the Pacific Northwest is a given which we mostly ignore, but moss provides a foothold for ferns, a blade of grass and more. When a tree germinates in our part of the concrete jungle we feel something akin to parenthood.

Walking through the West End, you’ll see small cedar, fir and certainly alder saplings emerging out of tight or neglected spaces. In my backyard I’ve had hawthorn, katsura, holly, salal and maples grow out of the joins in wooden deck chairs and cracks in concrete or asphalt. In the past when they showed up in my garden beds I rescued them and potted them up. As agents of the dispersal, squirrels are keen to sow their own harvest from sumac trees, the occasional cherry tree and the rarer hazelnut tree. I’ve found one squirrel burying peanuts in the shell and pieces of popcorn hoping they would germinate. Gardeners are such optimists.

With the number of baby trees I was rescuing I ran out of room fast. To utilize the space more efficiently, I turned some of the progeny into bonsai, mostly in two miniature classes called, “Mame” (pronounced Ma-Mĕ - the “e” is short) 5-15 cm. tall, and “Shohin”, 15-20 cm. tall. It’s an amateur’s pleasure. With a little care, bonsai are ideal trees for the small balcony. The one caveat; the small pots they’re in dry out quickly. In the growing season, you may need to water them every day. One day in full sun exposure can kill them.

Larger trees on balconies are possible but like bonsai - and depending on the type of tree - require a pruning both of roots and branches at specific times of the year to acclimate them to the reduced quarters. I’ve seen eight-foot tall fruit-producing apple, Italian prune plum and persimmon trees (one of each in its own large pot) all on a single 17th-floor balcony.

My own large scale tree planting experience was as a boy scout in the Ottawa area. Open fields were all around us. We planted hundreds of trees that Saturday – fall or spring I don’t remember except we were dressed for cold weather. The three-man team of digger (the adult), tree dispenser (me) and my same-aged buddy who tamped down the tree and firmed the soil around it. We broke for lunch then carried on and finished mid-afternoon until it had turned too cold to work.

With care, trees can thrive on your balcony.

Years later my parents drove me past it and the entire area was unrecognizable. We stopped and got out. Other teams had come after us and had planted their trees. Mine was one of the oldest, a tall tight phalanx of identical trees standing at attention in rigid rows. All around us were similar large block formations growing at different heights. Nothing grew beneath them. It was silent, eerie and the most unnatural forest I have ever experienced. Such was their colour, height and uniformity, I suspected they were all clones of the same tree but, too late, I wondered who we had done this for. Ottawa had its Experimental Farm but no one told us that day whether it was for them. If I were to do it again, I would certainly demand to know ... and why.

The inadequacy of my tree planting experience came back when I first saw the 1989 Oscar-winning animated short, The Man Who Planted Trees, which I’ve written about before. Based on the short fiction story by French writer, Jean Giono, it describes how one man planted thousands of trees and restored a desolate land. Oscar fame sent the short around the world inspiring many volunteer tree planting projects as far-flung as Africa and India.

Two billion trees planted over ten years is laudable, but let’s do it right and not just to achieve net-zero gas emissions. A proper forest will go much further by improving soil structure, restoring plant and insect diversity and animal populations.

If the aim is merely to solve the gas emission problem via carbon sequestering, simple tree planting may not provide so quick a solution despite two billion trees, $3.16 billion and a ten-year timeline. A recent study from the University of Stirling in Scotland published in June 2020, found a 39-year-old planting of birches on heather moorlands in four different sections had not increased the ecosystem carbon stocks during that period. One of the authors summed up the findings by saying, “The climate emergency affects us all – and it is important that strategies implemented to mitigate climate change – such as large-scale tree planting – are robust and achieve the intended outcomes. Changes to carbon storage – both above and below ground – must be better quantified and understood before we can be assured that large-scale tree planting will have the intended policy and climate outcomes."

Endless rows of identical trees do not a forest make.

By contrast, Akira Miyawaki, one of the foremost plant ecologists, developed his “Miyawaki Method” over decades of careful study and research. The method restores native forests with seeds from native plants and determines key role species, matches them with complementary species and supports them with companion plantings, thus building a balanced forest community. His practices have achieved great success around the world from the tropics to temperate regions.

So let us insist our two billion trees do not come from clonal replication or are slips grafted onto a stronger rootstock to force rapid growth. Let us insist our two billion trees be started from seed, grown in appropriate conditions and planted where they will contribute to a balanced forest dynamic. Let this be planned and organized by knowledgeable, experienced silvologists (forest ecology scientists), environmentalists, First Nation stewards and arborists.

Given the popularity thirty years ago of volunteer planting projects and the heightened environmental awareness now, volunteer tree planter programs should be formed for people who want to help. Years from now they will be proud to point out to their children and grandchildren, “This beautiful forest we’re walking in? I helped plant it.”

But let us also insist the Natural Resources Ministry remain vigilant. $3.16 billion will surely attract scammers and invite waste.

In the meantime, we can nurture the little trees blown to our windswept balconies by Nature herself ... for free.