the man who planted trees

Sadly, the creator of the movie passed away yesterday.

I think finding a story about real people planting 1600 hectares of trees by hand is a fitting tribute to the man who planted trees. I'd like to know more about these people. The knowledge these people have gained would be invaluable to permaculturists across the world.

Thank you all for posting these videos. I loved the tale of the man who planted trees then Collin gave us a real life version. So so inspiring!

There was a video I saw once where a woman in the middle of a sandy desert started planting palm trees in a row almost like an orchard and it was her area where she was greening the desert. She ended up having this area that was like 4 acres and the trees on it were like a grid. It popped into my mind a couple years ago because I started meditating so to speak how it all depends on the trees, and so I searched for it, but what I ended up finding was Geoff Lawton's video which completely blew my mind.

Before that, I had never heard of permaculture and then I was hooked. I still haven't found a source for the video I saw when I was younger but I would love to if anyone happens to know what I'm rambling about. I believe it was a national geographic show.

Not sure what the point of this post is, but I thought I'd share.

paul wheaton wrote:A 30 minute video. 

This is on my top 10 list.  For all movies, books, whatever.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYlsIZXCQa4

That is quite possibly the best post and most inspirational video on this whole forum.

This is another true story, not one man, but an entire organization that has planted over 240 million trees.

Thanks for this story of desert restoration in China.

It seems there are different farmers in different parts of this world who had the same idea and wish!

I was deeply touched by Yacouba Sawadogo's story in Burkina Faso's desert. This documentary is for any permie of interest!

The trailer you can see here: http://vimeo.com/20850064

Enjoy

Philippe

Here is another inspiring story about a man who planted thousands of trees over decades in India. It's a new one for me:

http://www.thebetterindia.com/10904/jadav-molai-payeng-forest-man-india/



Someone who is better at embedding than I can maybe get the video to show up here?

Someone who is better at embedding than I can maybe get the video to show up here?

I beat it into submission for you...

That was EPIC! I'd rather live in a jungle than a fancy apartment too

Thanks, Burra. It is inspiring to see people all over the world with the same deep rooted feeling that restoring the trees is worth decades of labor.

R Hasting wrote:This is another true story, not one man, but an entire organization that has planted over 240 million trees.

Thanks for that R Hasting. I haven't thought about the JNF and/or planting trees in Israel in a long, long time. I used to have a certificate of 18 trees planted in Israel my honor. 18 is a common # for such a thing b/c when written out in Hebrew, it spells life.

I planted 350 trees this spring as a fodder experiment & I never once thought about how raising money to plant trees was a big deal in my youth. I will try to make an effort to celebrate Tu Bishvat this year (Feb 4, 2015), a holiday dedicated to trees! I'm sure I'll give it my own personal touch. I'm so keen to appropriate from other cultures it's easy to ignore my own, sometimes.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.....This is so what I needed....all these videos are great! I will pass them along.

Please check out my blog www.cocreatingourworld.blogspot.com Let's put our visionary skills to work!

I wish I knew how to post these youtube videos to my blog.....any help would be welcomed.

This reminds me of a local tv show from my childhood, which was called "Adventures of Professor Yarumo" (the Yarumo, Cecropia peltata is a pioneer tree species from the tropical forests of the Americas).

I don't think many people remember much about the show itself (I think it was probably very conventional agriculture oriented) but I bet most people in Colombia will remember the theme song, which in my opinion had a message more important than any other the show might have wanted to convey. It translated to something like this:

Up there by the mountain top
Where the creek is born
There was a very beautiful forest
And water was never scarce

But an irresponsible man
Cut and burnt down the woods
there are no more birds or firewood
the creek ran dry

Noticing the lack of water
the people planted woodland plants
the birds came back again
and the water did too

The music is a type of folk music called trova composed of rhyming verses of equal syllables.

The original in Spanish goes like this

Allá arriba en aquel alto
donde nace la quebrada
había un monte muy bonito
y el agua nunca faltaba

Pero un hombre irresponsable
tumbó el monte y lo quemó
ya no hay árboles ni leña
la cañada se secó

La gente al verse sin agua
plantas de monte sembró
volvieron los pajaritos
y el agua también volvió

That's wonderful! Thanks for sharing.

Trees make rain. A little hard to grasp, but it's true. They help to hold the rain that falls, and they move water up from the soil into the air.

Thank you for sharing this video, I really enjoyed it, so very inspiring.

I used to sell tree seedlings, which I did not grow from seeds, but I cleared a patch of ground one year, and as there was so much to do, where I was living, I did not get around to using that patch, until later the following year. I will explain that the patch was in a canyon, the rough walls of the canyon were thick with young birch trees, clinging into the rocks. When I went to look at the patch, it was covered in tiny birch seedlings, each with around 6 or 7 leaves, and growing at a density of about one sapling per cm, so far too dense for them all to survive. The entire patch would only have been enough space to contain one fully grown birch, and yet here were nearly 200 seedlings. So I carefully moved them, one at a time. Some I sold, so that they would have a good home with someone, in a garden somewhere. And others I transplanted to spaces where they would be able to grow.

Certainly my little venture was not as inspiring as 'The man who grew trees', but for me, it was a wonderful example of the bounty of nature, and a rewarding endeavor too.

I started this year going around my town and picking up many seeds from a variety of trees that are older and grown here in the area for many years now. I am going to go through out my 30 acres and start planting the seeds and what grows on it's own will be the major start of my forest. Also I plan on getting a few trees from local nurseries to plant here as well. Debating on just leaving the current mesquites and soap berries or thinning out as other trees take over.

Jeremy Bunag wrote:This is a great video.  Very inspiring!  I want to go plant trees everywhere now.  Luckily, I've already got 10 coming to me from arborday.com from my membership renewal!  I can't wait to get these into the ground now!  I wish I had more than 10 coming (though with my luck the ground will freeze by the time I get them with the crazy weather around here!

Good find!

-Jeremy

Look into rooting cuttings. Not only are they free, but it is so satisfying to create another tree from cuttings. By the way, If you have a plant with special or unusual characteristics, the rooted cutting is genetically the same as the parent plant. This doesn't work on trees like orange trees that are made from two types of orange tree grafted together. One has good roots and the other is disease resistant and much better juice. If you root these you will only get the top half of the tree, they still have to be grafted

Collin Wolfe wrote:I think finding a story about real people planting 1600 hectares of trees by hand is a fitting tribute to the man who planted trees. I'd like to know more about these people. The knowledge these people have gained would be invaluable to permaculturists across the world.

So awesome what just two people can do. I don't know what a thousand hectares is but it's a lot. They pretty much MADE A FOREST

Rarna Vanda wrote:Thank you for sharing this video, I really enjoyed it, so very inspiring.

I used to sell tree seedlings, which I did not grow from seeds, but I cleared a patch of ground one year, and as there was so much to do, where I was living, I did not get around to using that patch, until later the following year. I will explain that the patch was in a canyon, the rough walls of the canyon were thick with young birch trees, clinging into the rocks. When I went to look at the patch, it was covered in tiny birch seedlings, each with around 6 or 7 leaves, and growing at a density of about one sapling per cm, so far too dense for them all to survive. The entire patch would only have been enough space to contain one fully grown birch, and yet here were nearly 200 seedlings. So I carefully moved them, one at a time. Some I sold, so that they would have a good home with someone, in a garden somewhere. And others I transplanted to spaces where they would be able to grow.

Certainly my little venture was not as inspiring as 'The man who grew trees', but for me, it was a wonderful example of the bounty of nature, and a rewarding endeavor too.

Living off grid is an awesome teacher. Nature knows exactly what is needed. I have been off grid about 40 or 50 years both on land and sea. At sea I didn't have an engine to charge batteries but nature took care of that.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/DGd_gj0spxM[/youtube]https://youtu.be/DGd_gj0spxM[youtube]/DGd_gj0spxM[/youtube]

Hi this is how I have been planting trees for the last 10 years!!

some years non come up some years many do.

I have apple trees and cob nut trees and cast about 5 builder buckets of each every year.

I do it along virgers of road that are dull.. and some from 10 years ago are now quite big.

It gives me great satisfaction to see the red apples in autumn every year!!

I see it as my carbon offsetting for driving along the road.

So after casting 1000 of seeds I have 100 of trees and it is good.

I’m currently growing 10 apple trees in my kitchen. Waiting until they’re a few feet tall before they go outside. They are currently a foot or less. Jonagold, ambrosia, golden and pink lady. Also growing 2 orange trees. Seeds came from fruit we ate and purchased from the farmers market.

FYI some fruit purchased from you run of the mill grocery store will never produce fruit because the growers treat them so others can’t grow from them.

Stephanie NewComer wrote:I’m currently growing 10 apple trees in my kitchen. Waiting until they’re a few feet tall before they go outside. They are currently a foot or less. Jonagold, ambrosia, golden and pink lady. Also growing 2 orange trees. Seeds came from fruit we ate and purchased from the farmers market.

FYI some fruit purchased from you run of the mill grocery store will never produce fruit because the growers treat them so others can’t grow from them.

Your little trees will grow, and some of them may be fruitful.  But seed-grown trees will not be true-to-type to the parent apple.  Well over 90% of apples grown from seed are really bad.  Birds may still eat them, as might other animals like pigs, but rarely will you get anything close to the parent fruit.

However, occasionally you do get a winner.  You mention Ambrosia.  That variety was a discovered down in a ravine growing close to an orchard in British Colombia.  A farmer was clearing out volunteer apple trees and other brush that was growing down in this ditch below his farm and he was just about ready to take a chain-saw to one of the trees when he reached up and picked one of the apples off the tree.  It tasted fantastic.  There were only 4 apples left on the tree.  He picked them all, took them home, and shared them.  Everyone loved them.   He went back and marked the tree so that he wouldn't cut it down, and that winter he pruned it for production.  The next year he had a great crop off that tree—great apples, high brix levels, very little blind wood or bitter pit . . . a great little tree.

So they grafted a ton of new trees off that mother tree and started growing them for production.  With good root stock and standard growing conditions, they realized that they'd found a winner.  They named it Ambrosia and started to sell graft wood to other growers under an exclusive ownership agreement.  The apple grew in popularity and everything went great until one guy decided to stop paying royalties to the original family.  Other People violated the growers agreement and now there are all kinds of lawsuits about protecting the Ambrosia variety.  But it's one of the most profitable apple varietals in the world, and it was discovered growing wildly of to side of an orchard.

Mark Shepard is calling for American school children to plant seeds (like you have done), with the hypothesis that if millions of children planted a couple of seeds each, and those trees were allowed to grow until their fruit could be tested/tasted, America would be able to discover a bunch of new varieties.  

Best of luck with your seed-grown experiment.  I hope that at least one of those trees turns out to be eatable.  If not, apple is a great wood for smoking BBQ, and any living tree is good for the soil that surrounds it.

Like Jack Dawson of Titanic,

"The story itself is so touching that many readers have believed that Elzéard Bouffier was a genuine historical figure and that the narrator of the story was a young Jean Giono himself, and that the tale is part autobiographical. Certainly, Giono lived during this time. While he was alive, Giono enjoyed allowing people to believe that the story was real, and considered it as a tribute to his skill. His daughter, Aline Giono, described it as "a family story for a long time". However, Giono himself explained in a 1957 letter to an official of the city of Digne:

Sorry to disappoint you, but Elzéard Bouffier is a fictional person. The goal was to make trees likeable, or more specifically, make planting trees likeable."

       I feel a bit cheated.

Peepal Baba on the other hand is real.

Peepal Baba

So, do trees make rain? One way to answer this is to apply some physics.

Africa is the largest land mass in the world. You can hide China and USA in it. The maps are so deceptive. So, some random walk calculations - imagine a  single molecule transpiring from a leaf in the exact centre of mass in Africa. Or do the same calculations for Tannu Tuva, the centre of the land mass that includes India, China, Russia.

Tuva

How long would it take that molecule to travel beyond the land boundary or in the parlance of Naval Aviators, achieve "feet wet"? Then apply meteorology and calculate how many times that molecule enters a raindrop over the same land mass.

I think Feynmann is capable of that calculation - not me.

EDIT: An Oak forest that came about for war reasons:

300,000 oak trees for warships

When I first came across this anecdote in some magazine circa mid 90's, I just thought it was a precursor to "Chicken Soup For Businessmen". Looks like it is legit.

EDIT2: The magazine was full of short anecdotes. This one started off by a puzzled modern Navy receiving a letter informing them that their order of Oak trees was ready for delivery.

Rad movie hope i will be a inspiring as this man was really cool to change nature or help nature flourish

The film is now available in 4k at youtube!

The man who planted trees.

Most certainly a great story. But I wonder if it requires a somewhat more intuitive title.

"The man who planted trees with his God who added the mychorrhizal fungi."

So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.

(John Stafford)

John Stafford wrote:The man who planted trees.

Most certainly a great story. But I wonder if it requires a somewhat more intuitive title.

"The man who planted trees with his God who added the mychorrhizal fungi."

So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.

(John Stafford)

Nice take! My view is heresy to religous folk, but I truly believe that life "is" and in turn it means that God is all, which means God is us (and the bee, the bird, the plant, etc) therefore I am God, and God is imperfectly perfect. It's a perspective of acceptance and cooperation rather than shame and competition. So, if I plant a tree, it's just God doing God's work

Is it possible to get the movie posted on Rumble? I don't do YouTube, so can't get to see it.

Is it possible to get the movie posted on Rumble? I don't do YouTube, so can't get to see it.

One would have to ask the owner of the movie as rumble claims to respect copyright.

It might be there already.  I haven't spent a lot of time there and didn't check if rumble has a search option.

A workaround is to use duckduckgo browser as a buffer between you and youtube. They have some nifty privacy tools.