Graham Porter’s gardening: Plant trees to give the oxygen for life

Nov 14 2009 by Linzi Nicholson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

HAVE you ever considered what trees do for us?

Perhaps the best way to think about it is to imagine the world without trees and then we can see what we might be missing.

My wife and I have recently spent a week at Clumber Park near Worksop, which is on the northern edge of Sherwood Forest and, cycling along the tracks and roads, through fallen leaves, toadstools and spectacular autumn colour makes you realise how vital these huge carbon stores are to all of us.

In the world’s 4.5 billion year history, trees have made coal and diamonds for us, helped in the formation of crude oil and natural gas and helped to provide us with fresh air to breath through the wonderful process of gaseous exchange – carbon dioxide and oxygen moving in and out of the leaves as photosynthesis and respiration go about their daily tasks.

They have provided material for us to build shelters and provide warmth for us and have built warships for us up to the end of the Victorian period. Having stripped our islands of trees over the past 1,000 years or more, thankfully we are now trying to redress the balance but, at the same time, are also criticising other less developed countries for stripping their forests in their often desperate struggle to survive.

Our modern western society has desperately been trying to plant millions of new trees in hundreds of different circumstances since the early 1970’s when Dutch Elm Disease caused so much devastation to our landscapes and, with National Tree Week coming up from November 25 to December 6, we need to continue the hard work of those thousands of unsung volunteers and workers in every corner of our islands to help ensure a good stock of trees for future generations to enjoy and benefit from.

So, if I were to list all the benefits that trees give us, would I have enough room on this page? Probably not, but if you need a good reason to plant more trees, whether in your own garden, or through helping volunteer projects, here is a shortened list for you to select from. These are not in any order of priority or personal preference.

Provide some of the essential oxygen that we and other living creatures need for our survival.

Soak up some of the surplus carbon dioxide that we continue to produce.

Soak up some of the gaseous and particulate pollution created by our human processes.

Provide some grown fuel for the generation of electricity.

Provide timber for fires and cooking.

Provide the raw materials for houses, furniture etc.

Provide nesting and roosting sites for millions of birds.

Provide us with some of our food.

Provide wildlife with a vital and sustained food supply.

Provide shelter and protection from adverse weather for wildlife and the human race alike.

Provide us with things of beauty to admire, photograph, paint and carve.

Provide noise barriers in areas close to busy roads and industrial areas.

Provide visual barriers from unsightly objects.

Provide millions of people with essential employment to sustain them.

Provide us with historic evidence through dendrochronology.

Help in reducing land erosion in some parts of the world – mangrove swamps.

Create clouds and rainfall from evaporation in very large forested areas of the world such as the Congo Delta and the Amazon rainforests.

If you can add to that list, please write to me at Graham’s Valuable Trees, Features Office, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Queen Street South, Huddersfield, HD1 3DU.

To follow up the stories of trees, visit any of the following websites – www.treecouncil.org.uk (National Tree Week November 25 – December 6) or call 020 7407 9992; www.british-trees.com (The Woodland Trust, or call 01476 581111; www.trees.org.uk – The Arboricultural Association; www.communities.gov.uk – the Government site for tree information; www.kirklees.gov.uk – our local authority site for information about trees.

Call Simon Lyes of the Colne Valley Tree Society on 01484 840464 for details of their tree planting work during the coming winter.

For those of you without internet access at home, you can get access at many of your local libraries.