TEN MILLION TREES

November 6, 2015

Local environmental groups advocate the planting of ten million trees in order to replenish our country’s forest cover.  Hopefully, they’ll be successful with it. 

As for my part, I believe I should admit this is one of the reasons for moving back here in the province, from my birth- and growing-up place, which is the city.  In the city, one would have a hard time planting trees or even just having a miniature garden because everything is concreted: the ground is thin, dry, fallow, salty and sandy, and space is a problem due to urban explosion.  That is why, even when we had window flower pots back then, for one who really loves green living things (since being named also after an evergreen vine), I felt frustrated because I believed it was never enough.

But here, in the last seven years since we moved, our backyard now looks like a miniature version of a fruit-tree farm.  We were able to enjoy the fruits of the coconuts, pineapples, bananas, guavas, papayas, calamansis, and in a few years’ time the mangoes, avocados, langka, guyabanos, dalandan, durian, santol, and even cacao.  Plus, we were able to enjoy the sweet potato harvests many times over, and the vegetables that we planted and replanted over the years, especially the malunggays, bell and chilli peppers, the mongo beans, tomatoes, okra, petchay, and alugbati.  Also, the fuchsia pink roses, santans, and other flowering ornamental plants we bedded in the plots never fail to give joy whenever they flower and bloom every other month.  It is terribly hard work though, the cultivating of the soil, planting, cleaning, pruning, watering during summer and warm days, using organic fertilizers from fruit peels and vegetable cuttings, spraying soapy water to eliminate pests, and the never-ending weeding.  Not for the faint of heart and limbs, really.  Hence, one would be well-advised to really allocate sufficient budget for periodic gardeners who can do the weeding and cultivating even just once a month.  We can only pray the weather will cooperate, since during typhoon Yolanda, only 3 of the original 13 coconut trees remained standing.  The seedlings which we have replanted are still in infancy stage, and will not be productive until many years hence.

Environmental groups and related government agencies advocate the planting of timber and fruit trees in order to both sustain the forest cover and livelihood of the people.  In our case, our good tipolo trees had to be cut down for rebuilding the trusses after the typhoon, but good thing their saplings are already growing stout and strong.  In a few more years’ time, they will be rising high up in the air again, and resume their positions as the land-markers in each of the subdivided lots of my grandmother and her siblings.

When I heard about the ten million trees, I felt it was too big a number.  For my part and that of my mom’s, maybe we could only promise about 30, or at most 50, if we count those which we have planted in the lot of my grand-aunt.  But I believe that if every other Filipino of proper age and sound mind would be given an incentive to plant trees and take care of them (like they do their own children) until they grow tall and strong and bear fruit or be ripe for lumbering, then be replenished right away, we would be able to exceed the ten million mark and more, and help ease the pressures on our environment.