Treeline UK turns ten
Ten years ago this was two people and one nursery in Kenya. It is now seven landscapes and a few million trees. A short, honest look back.
Treeline UK turned ten this year. We started in 2014 as two people and a single nursery in the Kenyan highlands, with one belief that has shaped everything since: that planting trees without staying to protect them is a waste of everyone's money.
A decade on, that belief has held up better than some of our early plantings did. We are now working in seven landscapes and have something on the order of a few million trees in the ground across them. We want to be careful about that number, though, because the trees that count are the ones still alive, not the ones once planted.
We are still a small charity. Seven landscapes sounds like a lot, but each individual site is modest, run with a local cooperative or ranger collective rather than a large field operation. The reach comes from the partners, not from our size.
The honest part of a ten-year look back is the mistakes. We planted too few species in the early years and lost whole plots to it, learning the hard way that six fast trees make a plantation, not a forest. We once underpaid a nursery contract and very nearly lost a partner we could not have replaced.
We have also learned what works, mostly by staying. The Kanam women's cooperative, Dona Marlene's nursery, Espérance Bofenda walking the Mbeli forest, the Salish stewardship council in Cascadia. The durable work is the work built on people who live where the trees grow.
Forests do not care about anniversaries. The only timescale they understand is the long one, and the projects of ours that lasted are the ones we stuck with for ten years rather than ten months. That is the whole lesson of the decade, and it is the one we intend to keep applying.
