A dream come true: Planting tens of thousands of trees in the Lake District

A few weeks ago, I spent a blustery day halfway up a mountain in the Lake District talking to some trees.

“Good morning, Dorothy, aren’t you looking fabulous today? Hi there, June, you’re looking great,” I said as I mingled among the slender fledgling trunks of aspen, oak and beech. The trees didn’t reply. But, then, they never do – as much as I’d like to imagine otherwise.

Now, before you start worrying too much, I would like to make clear that there is no need to be alarmed. This blog is not a cry for help following a George-the-third-like episode of insanity and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for my behaviour.

That explanation is that I was making a film for my company Alertacall, which this year planted 20,000 trees in our beautiful home of the Lake District National Park to mark our 20th anniversary. It’s only a few minutes long – perhaps take a watch?

However, these trees are only the beginning and my ultimate goal is to plant one million over my lifetime, fulfilling a long-held ambition driven by a deep love which I developed at an early age.

A forest childhood

I count myself extremely lucky to have grown up in a place and time where we youngsters were able to spend many childhood hours running feral in the woodlands which surrounded my home in the Yorkshire Dales, or at the weekends visiting the Lake District and playing with other kids whilst my father was cementing his reputation as a committed fell racer.

Free access to ‘play out’ in the countryside is one of the greatest blessings any child could ask for. It teaches the young mind endless lessons about nature, the cycle of life, risk and exploration and all through the medium of pure fun. Again, I was very lucky in this respect.

Whenever we could, my friends and I would head out into the woods on our bikes to play hide and seek and build elaborate dens, as well as camping out overnight and letting our active young imaginations frighten us silly as we imagined the blood curdling screeches of foxes to be serial killers, or at least – mythical beasts.

The forest was our playground and hideaway; knee deep in the violet mist of bluebells in the spring sunlight, or tense with a dark, mysterious magic in the gloaming as each tree took on a distinctive character of its own. As a young devotee of the works of JRR Tolkien, it seemed entirely plausible to me that the surrounding trunks and boughs could come to life and walk like the ancient, tree-like Ents of Middle-earth, especially those in the woods near Bolton Abbey.

A family tragedy

My affinity with living trees extended into a fascination with all things hewn and carved from wood, thanks in large part to my two uncles; My uncle Hugh who is one of the country’s leading experts on and restorers of early oak furniture – and my uncle Tony, who is world-renowned as a master rocking horse maker (and founder of The Rocking Horse Shop at Fangfoss).

I would spend time in their workshops, enthralled by their skill in imbuing inanimate blocks of timber with a second life, resurrecting trees which had already been growing for hundreds of years so they could be passed down the generations as beloved family heirlooms. It was dizzying to imagine the depths of time, experience and humanity which these objects had witnessed and which they were yet to see in times to come.

Tragically, it was the death of Uncle Tony’s son, Sam – my cousin – which also brought home to me what a lasting tribute and legacy trees can provide. A talented and passionate rock climber, Sam died in a fall at Mount Arapiles, in Victoria, Australia, shortly after the dawning of the new millennium at the age of 21.

As a way to honour and remember him, Tony and my aunty Pat joined with family and hundreds of other friends to spend several days planting a wood near the family home on the outskirts of York. Despite the grief and trauma we felt at his death, it was an incredibly cohesive and cathartic way for us to come together and it has provided a forest of remembrance for Sam ever since.

Several years after it was first planted I visited my Uncle Tony and went to look for ‘Sam’s Wood’. I was initially confused because I could not find the stand of saplings which we had planted out. Indeed, if anything it seemed Sam’s Wood had been subsumed into a much larger forest of dense, towering trees.

Of course, it soon dawned on me that these were the very trees we had planted, but they had simply grown faster than I could ever have imagined. The wood remains somewhere that I visit at least every couple of years and where my family go to enjoy the peace and quiet and remember Sam, and is now open to the public.

It also germinated the seed of an idea that one day I would love to create something similar.

A chance meeting in Buckingham Palace

My desire to plant trees stayed with me as I founded and ran a series of businesses, most recently Alertacall.

As the business grew I came into contact with more and more older and vulnerable people who use our products and services to remain safe and connected each day. I vowed to myself that at some point Alertacall would create a forest in the Lake District, filled with enough trees to represent every one of our customers across the UK.

As well as fulfilling our purpose as a company which does good in the world, it also gave me a deep, tingling sense of happiness to think of leaving a beautiful haven for wildlife and the environment which would outlast my time on the planet.

The only problem was that I don’t own any land where we could grow trees and I didn’t really have the time, knowledge or connections to set about planting them even if I did.

The solution presented itself during a chance meeting at Buckingham Palace, which I was visiting to receive the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation on behalf of Alertacall in 2022.

The only other company from Cumbria which was receiving an award that day was Chimney Sheep, founded by Sally Phillips, which makes draught excluders from local Herdwick wool which people can put up their chimneys to prevent heat from escaping.

To date the company has helped people save over £16m in energy bills and prevented nearly 120,000 tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere. Now that’s a company it’s easy to like!

Sally and I naturally made a beeline for each other as the two local representatives of Cumbria and got on well. I soon discovered that, as well as doing her bit for the environment through Chimney Sheep, Sally had also started Buy Land Plant Trees, a community interest company which does exactly what its name suggests. And, she was figuring out how she could find those first donors and partners.

So it was that in a room in Buckingham Palace, with the (now) King Charles and Princess Anne just metres away, that Sally and I agreed that Alertacall would buy and donate tens of thousands of saplings to Buy Land Plant Trees. All of these trees were delivered and planted on the gorgeous Low Fell, overlooking Loweswater in the Western Lakes, this winter.

This – you may be relieved to hear – is the reason that I was wandering the flanks of Low Fell this summer with a film crew chatting to the saplings.

It was not pure eccentricity but a way of making the point that each tree really does represent one of our customers. The woodland which will grow there is as much for them as it is for me and, indeed, everyone who works at Alertacall. Tree planting seems to be one of those activities which captures people’s imaginations and I know the team are just as buzzing about the idea of visiting our wood in the Lakes in the coming years as I am.

The term Corporate Social Responsibility has acquired a whiff of greenwashing or virtue signalling these days, as something which it is all too easy for companies to do as a token gesture to prove their credentials as a caring organisation.

However, I do believe that businesses really can and should make a positive difference and it is a lot easier to do this with genuine buy-in from your team, clients, customers and partners. The reaction to our tree planting project over the last year has shown this is something we can categorically say we have.

From little acorns

Sally and her team plant native species which will thrive in the harsh, boggy, mountainous environment, without any plastic tubes or wooden stakes, taking a ‘safety in numbers’ approach by putting in so many that a good proportion are bound to survive, even if some are nibbled away by deer.

By doing so they are attempting to return parts of the Lake District to the state it would have been in many years ago. Although I love visiting and admiring the national park as it is now, it has only become that way due to the felling of the native forests which would once have covered it to make way for farming. I believe projects like Sally’s can sit alongside and even complement Lakeland hill farming to provide a valuable home for flora, fauna, birds and insects.

What I also love is that as a community interest company the land and trees which Buy Land Plant Trees owns have to continue fulfilling its environmental purpose. This means they cannot be sold or transferred for profit and the woodland is destined to continue growing, locking up carbon and providing a habitat for wildlife.

In the future I have an ambition to plant – either personally or via Alertacall – as many as a million trees.

I would love to think that, years from now, long after I am gone, new generations of children will spend their time playing, camping and letting their imaginations run wild among the canopy of branches which we dug into the earth as saplings today.