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TREES / 12
I PLANTED A FOREST Terry O’Regan calls for a grand tree strategy that embraces the total tree population of the state on both public and private lands
I “Should we be working on a big picture tree plan? 800 mature trees would be destroyed under the national Transport Authority plan to improve Dublin’s bus corridors” 36
drafted this article as the 75th anniversary of D-Day was being marked on all media with stark images of the landings on the beaches of Normandy. The few remaining veterans and the thousands who died were thanked for the sacrifice they made to save the civilised world of the day. The many forgotten Irish who fought and died in the two world wars are finally being acknowledged. A well-known recruitment poster for the First World War came to mind, which had the caption ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ The universal threats are somewhat different today, and our brave young people are asking new questions – will there be posters before long asking – ‘Daddy, what did you do to save us from Global Warming?’ In the early noughties I gave a presentation in Enniscorthy. Afterwards, a young artist who had worked with me on a National Landscape Forum project in 1999 came up to say hello. I asked him what he was up to and his response caught me off-guard – “I’ve been planting a forest” he said. He went on to explain that he gathered acorns each autumn and planted them into roadside ditches on his rambles around the highways and byways of Wexford. He was the living embodiment of the visionary booklet
HORTICULTURECONNECTED / www.horticultureconnected.ie / Spring 2019
