Our journey with Scot’s Pine

Walking through the fields of our demonstration site where we planted 1100 native Irish trees, our eyes automatically scan the tree guards for the ones made out of wire as these are holding our Scot’s Pine - Pinus sylvestris - saplings that we planted in January of this year.

If you have ever planted bareroot Scot’s Pine you may have noticed that a couple of months after planting the trees don’t look so healthy. This is that point where you start calling all your tree friends looking for a solution. Because you are so sure that you did something wrong when you planted them. In our case that meant that around 20 or so of our friends and neighbours planted them wrong :) But all that we were told was “give it time, they will bounce back”. Yeah, sure.

In our blogpost of May this year we described what was happening. We are very happy to report that even though many of our 250 saplings we planted didn’t look so healthy or dare we say, were looking rather dead, at least 50% have bounced back. The scariest moment was when the individual saplings started to loose whatever sad looking brown needles they had been able to hold on to. But low and behold, the candles on top of the saplings started to elongate and green needles started to sprout from the sides of them.