Guest post: Everywhere there is room for tree planting
Originally a comment by Laurent on 8 years.
When I advertised a project at work to plant fruit trees and thus asked people to bring us back seeds or plantlets from their garden, out of 250 people, 1 gave 3 seeds and another one gave 6 young trees. That’s how people commit to a very easy task that would have sucked up tonnes of carbon over 20 years.
Eventually I did and do contribute to planting trees at work, currently possibly worth a commercial value exceeding several thousand bucks (and I don’t count my time).
I’m really amazed, because everywhere there is room for tree planting, even if we avoid places where trees falling are a potential risk. (Though when people argue about the cost of lumberjacks I ask them about the cost of climate change).
There is room for mitigation, quite room, and actually quite mitigation. We won’t avoid the disaster, but we certainly can attenuate its strength. Now.
There isn’t even the need for trees to grow up huge, even if we cut them down after a few years and maintain dense cover and use the wood even for composting it will still displace carbon from the atmosphere.
Down here in the Wonderful Land of Aus we have a number of non-profits doing just that – Men Of The Trees, Trillion Trees, Trees for Life, etc.
I’m always glad to hear some optimism. I’ve heard mixed things about trees as carbon offsets (that they have to be grown in specific places, and that that’s not being done), but I’d love to hear more and, if it’s efficacious, to participate.
Roj:
“Down here in the wonderful land of Aus” I have been a tree-planter since I was a kid. But these days I concentrate on pyrophobic species, as eucalypts and wattles (pyrophytes) are designed by nature to burn; as are N hemisphere pines. Fire goes through, cleans out their competition, their cones and fruiting bodies spring open, and deposit seeds in a lovely bed of ash.
So I plant mainly casuarina species these days, otherwise known as ‘she oaks.’ My favourites are river oaks (Casuarina cunninghamii) and belahs (Casuarina cristata.)
It just now hit me that the Laurent on facebook is the same Laurent here.
I may be slow, but nobody can say that I can’t read a blog for ten years and not figure out at least one obvious fact.
Well he doesn’t comment here very often! More’s the pity.
There’s fruit trees, and there’s fruit trees. If you take the seed of a lovely apple you just ate and plant it, it won’t grow a healthy tree that bears such lovely apples. It may instead be a spindly, disease-ridden wreck that produces, ten years (and twenty fungicide applications) later, tiny, lopsided, bitter fruit.
Those lovely apples are all heterozygous, were all produced on clones, and can only be produced to type by grafting more of the same clones. The seed could be half honeycrisp and half crabapple. Additionally, if one wishes to grow them low enough to be picked without a ladder, they must be grafted on dwarf rootstock.
Playing Johnny Appleseed can be fun, but it’s unlikely to result in fruit anybody wants to eat.
That will be the opening paragraph of my autobiography. Thanks, Papito!
@Omar,
Eucalyptus trees are lovely, with a beautiful fragrance, and when planted outside of Oz* can increase the fire hazard. Many of the recent forest fires in Portugal and northern Spain were caused, or at least exacerbated, by the overplanting of eucalyptus trees, which suck up all the water and leave everything else drier.
*I know that you’re not promoting that.
@ Roj Blake #1
Down here in the Wonderful Land of Aus we have a number of non-profits doing just that – Men Of The Trees, Trillion Trees, Trees for Life, etc.
Yep, these (usually international) non-profits do a great job, because that’s actually one of the thing to do, while we transition to a non-offsetting carbon neutral way of life (which is still to invent from scratch). I especially like Trees for the Future, which actually tackles the issue from an obviously perennial perspective, as small farmers will care for trees if they have economic worth. And agricultural land is a place with ‘quite room’ for more trees, even without considering agro-forestry per se (where trees are the crops themselves).
@ GW #2
I’m always glad to hear some optimism. I’ve heard mixed things about trees as carbon offsets (that they have to be grown in specific places, and that that’s not being done), but I’d love to hear more and, if it’s efficacious, to participate.
My concern is more about the way arguments about tree planting limitations are proclaimed (and usually either by people who want to sound smarter than the others, or people who do not get the full thing), because its main consequence is that we do less than we could.
Of course the idea is not to plant trees anyhow anywhere, especially at natural places with low forest cover. Basically efficient reforestation/afforestation/restoration may take three forms:
– slightly degraded forests are best left alone with protection status, natural recovery is self-sustaining,
– degraded places in special conditions may best be restored using ‘assisted natural regeneration’, where (usually farmer based) action is only designed to help tree cover improving back. This is typically the best path for restoring in the Sahel for example.
– overused human settlement places sensu lato can be afforested with or without extreme care regarding local species composition.
I was of course speaking about the later: my work-place is not going back to a natural space before long, so it does not matter that much if we plant tree species that are strictly endogenous, we can chose species that are fast growing for offsetting purposes. I intended fruit trees, since as an agricultural institute it would make sense to bank on food-based genetic resources (because I try to reforest with both intra/inter genetic diversity in mind). As a matter of fact, I also went for more or less local species with high ecological services (such as offering foods for bats), but the idea is still that we can have a mixed approach. This place will stay a human setting for quite some time.
You can financially contribute to the kind of non-profits highlighted above, or you can act at a small scale (which also scale up quite high if we are numerous enough) by planting trees yourself. All you need is to realise that you have a place where a tree can grow and plant (if you’re the owner of that place), or try to convince people that the place could safely have a tree grow (if you don’t own the place, and either because it is privaltey owned or if it is a public place –the latter is often more effort and work around).
@ James Garnett #4
I may be slow, but nobody can say that I can’t read a blog for ten years and not figure out at least one obvious fact.
That’s also because I’m slow here. I often arrive after the debates and discussions actually occurred. Which is also interesting, because of that amount of discussion.
@ Ophelia Benson #5
Well he doesn’t comment here very often!
True, but as commented above, I am not fast enough. I’m still probably a regular of some sort, but sometimes there are time lapses. I would probably need days to include a few more hours… :)
Commenting late is often too late.
@ Papito #6
There’s fruit trees, and there’s fruit trees. If you take the seed of a lovely apple you just ate and plant it, it won’t grow a healthy tree that bears such lovely apples. It may instead be a spindly, disease-ridden wreck that produces, ten years (and twenty fungicide applications) later, tiny, lopsided, bitter fruit.
I’m glad when (lay) people get that, it’s way too rare.
Though as a breeder by education and phytopathologist and plant mating systems folk by trade, I must say that you are overstating it ‘a bit’, and moreover while chosing the outstanding example (which helps for the sake of your argument, but ends up burning a bit the facts).
Those lovely apples are all heterozygous, were all produced on clones, and can only be produced to type by grafting more of the same clones. The seed could be half honeycrisp and half crabapple. Additionally, if one wishes to grow them low enough to be picked without a ladder, they must be grafted on dwarf rootstock.
Yes, grafting is required to save the qualities to protect varietal ‘identity’. But should we care about preserving varieties here? Not obvious, since a first aim is carbon drawback. We could take the opportunity for generating diversity from which selecting good luck events (see below).
In industrial apple orchards, wild species of apple are grown alongside the fruit trees, simply because it improves fruit set efficiency by quite a factor, and therefore yield (and for an industrial orchard, yield is the main goal). As a result of course, seeds from such mating events will not grow apple with interesting characteristics, but only hybrids of much lower economic interest, if at all.
Seeds from gardens will share these unhappy characteristics only if people also planted wild apple species for the sake of helping pollinators. So this may still happen, but at much lower frequency, and not everywhere. If I had asked people for seeds from their gardens, there would be good odds that these seeds bring about new varieties (as new genetic combinations), all combining to some extant the characteristics of their parents. And I can tell you that there are great odds that some of these ‘varieties’ or new combinations will actually be better than parental combinations, including resistance to pests and antagonists. That’s because of course you can expect worse, but then of course you can expect better obviously, even in crops with long standing varietal selection.
Playing Johnny Appleseed can be fun, but it’s unlikely to result in fruit anybody wants to eat.
True for apple from industrial orchards. Wrong most of the times for other settings.
Also, I live at a tropical place with most fruit species having not undergone longstanding genetic improvement beyond farmers based domestication. I am arguing for going on in that precise direction, because another crucial aspect of climate change adaptation for food plants will be available diversity, and thus creating opportunities for increased mating events from diverse and open pools will also increase the odds of creating material of interest for future issues.
We have a mango collection here under management, constituted with carefully selected varieties producing what we call a core-collection, i.e. a minimal subset of diversity aimed for future breeding programs. Mango is exactly in the same situation as Apples above, save there are no “wild species” to increase fruits production. I asked the people in charge to let me pick seeds randomly. They were objecting for varietal purity arguments but they understood my goal quite immediately: we wish to create further uncontrolled hybrids, some of them will have potential as intermediate breeding parents, _before hand_. And since we will grow them dozen miles aside, they all have the potential to either generate interesting combinations with immediate benefits (new variety straight out of the game) or have potential in the future, all without risking admixing with core collection.
As a summary, yes we can play that fruit seed game here. This is even more interesting that I am willing to keep track of diversity used, so as to increase benefits (there are other local species like Acerola where I am mixing plants with fairly different characteristics to increase genetic admixing and potential for varietal creation).
So yes we can. And last, if the idea is carbon drawback, it doesn’t really matter if some of these trees don’t have the inner characteristics we aim for first. They can always be counterselected later to make room for other genetic stock, improved or not.
My initial comment (made a guest post here) was specifically:
– people are not contributing to things like this, most probably because they don’t realise climate change is not even closer than we think –it is already happening, and they don’t realise they can already play a big role in mitigation.
So I am disappointed, really disappointed. My argument was not “look at the good I do” (since I’ve taken charge of most of the trees I plant at work, this is the result of lack of initial collective commitment), I would prefer people read it as “I can do this too”, even a very small scale. And contribute to mitigation.
– There is a lot of space that can be devoted to growing trees in urban and human managed spaces. Enough that it helps reaching the goal of a trillion trees in the decade. Even if you have the space of a single tree, you should plant one, we are billions in that situation…
Laurent, I am familiar with how different agriculture is in the tropics. I wish I could grow mangoes here, and would be plenty happy to plant whatever mango seed I encountered, confident that whatever came from it would be tasty. Not so with an apple.
I would also be happy to plant a fenceline with mandioca by chopping branches off and just poking them in the ground, confident they’d root, or to compost waste into fertilizer in a matter of weeks (being careful not to let the heap catch on fire). But I don’t live in the tropics anymore, and those things don’t work here.
With apples, as you say, wild varieties intervene, and the only apples native to Europe and North America are crabapples, so if we’re truly talking about wild varieties and not just abandoned orchard trees, we’re talking about crabapples. Crabapples are also planted all over my region as ornamentals, so if you wanted to plant apples out of the pollinator range of crabapples I’m not sure where you’d go.
“I advertised a project at work to plant fruit trees and thus asked people to bring us back seeds or plantlets from their garden” might have different results north vs. south, especially as far as useful seeds goes. I have known a number of people who successfully propagated healthy and productive mango trees from mangoes they ate, and avocadoes too. I have never met a person who has succeeded at that with an apple. I would think it a very silly thing to bring you fruit seeds I gathered myself. I might dig you up a wee oak, though.
Also, up in the US, people don’t tend to recognize or appreciate urban fruit trees. The fruit falls, rots, and creates a nuisance. Inebriated deer can present a humorous sight, but if the goal is carbon capture, one might do better to plant broadleaf shade trees, as they might last longer.
One of the greatest differences I noticed between north and south is the effect of a heavy winter on what land does when you leave it alone. Most of the northeastern United States was deforested during the colonial period, and most of it is again forested, without anybody doing anything to accomplish that except stop farming it. Up here we don’t really have to go out of our way to plant trees so much as we have to stop cutting them down. Anywhere we don’t actively cut trees down reverts to forest within a generation.
Mangoes are wonderful trees. I’d happy trade the huge oak in front of my house for a mango the same size.
Also, I agree with your larger point, Laurent. I think most people with yards would do much better to plant orchards instead. I have planted eleven fruit trees in my yard, and I encourage others to plant as many as they can. In my previous house, I had very little space, but got to watch the sour cherry trees I planted grow big enough to provide much beauty and many pies.
A backyard orchard is doubly good if it means people stop using gasoline-powered mowers and leaf blowers.
WaM @ #8:
The eminent forester Richard St Barbe Baker in his autobiography My Life, My Trees produced a simple solution to the problem of fire in plantation and other forestry projects. He advocated and practiced surrounding the lots, compartments, paddocks, call them what you will with suitably thick belts of fire-resistant species, that stubbornly refuse to burn. His favourite was the tall and elegant Lombardy poplar (known commonly as ‘poplars’ though there are many species.) The polars can be planted so close as to form living, fire-proof and wind-proof walls to protect the fire-prone species so enclosed.
A priority job for forestry researchers IMHO is finding ways to develop sexual reproduction in Lombardy poplars, as that valuable species consists entirely of males, which began as ‘sports’ from some other poplar genetic line, and can only be multiplied (asexually) by the deliberate planting of cuttings; which sooner or later must develop some disease that wipes them all out, 100%. (cf Dutch elm disease, which killed <100% of elms.)
@ Papito,
Years ago, when I was still living in temperate mainland France, I found by sheer luck an apple tree with what I call “royal variety” characteristics: the fruits were the size of small cantaloupes. These landraces were originally the property of high status people in France feud system, as apples were the main vegetable of aristocracy in these times (typically, apple pies were not considered a dessert but were more seen as veggie pies going with meat). I would never have thought finding some out of scientific collections (we have public apple collections for scientific purposes), but there it was. I explained the owner they had a treasure here and may take steps to preserve it.
You can grow new varieties from seeds here (as long as you don’t pick industrial apples), because wild apples are not used in the landscape. I’ve found some that were not only edible but quite good. They often do not bear big fruits, though it would be interesting to see what happens be they grafted.
Laurent @ 10 – No, I know it wasn’t “look at the good I do”! I made it a front page post because it’s “look at what you can do.”
@ Ophelia #15,
Yes, I was just thinking loud about the way I wrote the comment first, and willing to take a chance at clarifying my thoughts.
Even the part about price worth (finally it is a bit off here and more useful in other contexts), the aim is only emphasizing the added value (it did not cost me anything save gardening time), just a comparison to the hypothetical situation where my institute would have had to buy the same trees.
I got into evaluating this contribution to highlight the worth beside carbon drawback, because some people can’t help questionning our action