Essential to happiness

The article about Courier Country’s trees in Saturday’s Weekend magazine has inspired Courier columnist Jim Crumley to observe:

“I grew up on the slopes of the Balgay Hill, and the first forest of any size that I spent any time in was Tentsmuir. Between them, these established in my mind very early on that the presence of trees was essential to my happiness.

“The intervening decades have reinforced that flash of childhood wisdom a thousand times. An ascent of the Law reveals just how wooded Dundee and its surroundings are, and there is something precious to me about being able to link Balgay and Tentsmuir in a single glance.

“Turn the other way, look beyond these domestic woods, and on the right kind of day you can see Schiehallion, near neighbour of the Black Wood of Rannoch, a forest wild enough to fire the wildest of our aspirations, and quite literally fit for wolves.

“Highland Perthshire is wonderfully wooded in places. Good woods and forests take decades to evolve their own ecosytems, their own biodiversity, but all that takes only minutes – a single bad planning decision or a single stroke of thoughtless land management – to destroy.

“I would place the wellbeing of trees at the top of conservation priorities, because in a country like ours, establishing a wood is nature’s first priority. Leave it to its own devices and that’s what it does.

“Trees offer limitless possibilities for wildlife, they have the capacity to enchant us and calm us down. Planting millions of trees is the best thing we can do to combat global warming and trees are important for their own sake, the most remarkable, enduring, beautiful and miraculous living organisms.

“Take a walk in the woods. Take time to sit still and look around you. Then go back and do it again. Make trees essential to your way of life. That’s how you learn to understand their value, to people, to wildlife, to the land, to the wellbeing of the planet.”

Do you have a favourite tree, wood or forest? If so, we’d love to hear about it.