A forest for Coralie

Our baby is turning 1!!

Can you help us plant some trees in her honour, to grow into a forest over her lifetime?

We’re inspired by a village in India where they plant 111 trees for every girl born. We’re partnering with an epic reforestation project driven by the community in Wootton, not far from us, so Coralie will be able to see it grow.

$10 buys 1 tree

We really don’t want ‘stuff’.

Coralie has enough toys, we seem to acquire heaps of them at non-birthday times. She hardly plays with them anyway. Her favourite game at the moment is moving passionfruit from their basket to dad’s lunchbox. Or mum’s shoe. And unrolling the toilet paper ?.

She has enough clothes, and plenty of linen.

We have a small house which is already too full. 

More than that, this world doesn’t need more stuff. Coralie is inheriting this planet and all its over-plastic’d, desertifying, acidifying, warming mess. That stuff we don’t even want has a footprint too big for one little baby. (For a great rundown on the situation check out The Story of Stuff.)

She’s also inheriting our ideas. The culture that says we personally and collectively become poorer in the act of giving. It’s bizarre, when you step back and think about it. We can teach Coralie that there are other ways to give and show love, which don’t literally cost the Earth. (On this, George Monibot gives us a great read.)

We really do want more trees.

We are big fans of trees in this family. Not only are they pretty, but they provide homes for lots of things, help the water cycle and carbon cycle to function, and lots more. We thought how cool would it be to create this gift of life for Coralie to honour her birth (yeah, we weren’t quite organised enough to pull this off a year ago). We are also inspired by a Village in India whose story went viral on Facebook, where they are addressing social, economic, and environmental issues in their community by planting 111 trees for every girl born. While we live in a very different society, there’s plenty of social, economic and environmental problems here too which could do with a few more trees. Luckily, we have friends in the right place…

The tree planting project

The trees of Wootton were once exported across the world – for example there are railway sleepers in the New York subway from Wootton, and there are hardwood cobbles in Bath, England, that were cut from the forests of Wootton. The new community of Wootton is working hard to return their botanical diversity, to help Wootton be the forested gem that it once was. This project sees landholders planting trees into what is largely degraded farmland with the aim to leave it better than they found it, and help return the biodiversity of plants and animals that once existed (bloody legends). There are heaps of community members on board, donating parts of their land to this project, so the connectivity and ecology of the forest as it once was has a chance to return! These landholders are planting the trees and looking after them, so we’re confident that Coralie will see something fantastic there in her lifetime.

Our trees will be in the property of our friends Craig and Pat Tate. Craig is spearheading the project, and has vast knowledge of trees, and turning pasture back into forest. We’ve visited a few times and have always been impressed by what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Read more about the reforestation project in Wootton. 

Can you help us reach our goal of 111 trees?

Craig has costed each new tree in their forest at $9-10. This includes not only the cost of the seedling, but tree guards, weeding, supplements, watering, etc. There will be lots of different types of plants put in, so any individual tree might not survive to become part of the mature forest, but all of them play a part in building it. If you can spare ten bucks to put towards a tree for Coralie’s forest click the button below*, we’d be very grateful!

*This link takes you to PayPal. Money will go into Kirsty’s account and we’ll make a bulk payment to the project at the end of May. Choose your amount, $10/tree. Sorry, not tax deductable.

If you’d like to write Coralie a message, we’ll collate them and give them to her when she’s older! Please email to [email protected]