When we speak of making a forest, most people picture something like this: people standing across a wide stretch of land, scattering handfuls of seed. And yet on our plantation, not a single seed is sown. What goes into the ground is already a young tree, about a hand's span tall. Why should that be? Is there something wrong with simply sowing the seed?
A seed is frailer than you would think
Put a eucalyptus seed on your palm and you may be surprised. It is small enough to be mistaken for dust — one breath and it is gone. Hard to believe that a single grain like that becomes a tree of twenty metres.
And what becomes of such a seed if it is simply scattered on open ground? Most of them never become trees.
One heavy rain and the seeds wash away with the soil. Birds and ants carry them off. Even if a seed is lucky enough to sprout, that tender shoot has its light taken by weeds already established there. A few days without rain and it dries out. For a newly opened shoot, open ground is far too rough a place.
So we reverse the order. Rather than entrusting the seed to the ground, we first raise it somewhere safe until it has gathered some strength, and only then send it out. That safe place is the nursery.
A kindergarten for trees
The nursery is, one might say, a kindergarten for trees — a place where young trees grow for several months under care.
Here everything is regulated. The temperature is held right, water comes several times a day in measured amounts, and when the sun grows too strong the shade cloth comes down. There are no weeds at all, because clean growing medium is used instead of soil. And to keep disease from spreading, even the feet and wheels that come and go are disinfected.
Seeds of which only a few in a hundred might have survived on open ground come through, here, nearly all of them. That is what being sheltered means.
Not every tree begins with a seed
One thing should be added. There are, in fact, two paths by which a tree begins in the nursery.
One is the seed we have just spoken of. And the other is this — a branch cut from a well-grown mother tree and made to put out roots. Without passing through a seed at all, a single length of branch becomes a tree in its own right. In fact, more of what we plant comes by this second path.
That story is interesting enough — and delicate enough — to deserve a piece of its own, so we will take it up next time. For today it is enough to remember this: a seed is not the only way a tree can begin.
And once grown, we make life hard for them on purpose
The most unexpected part of the nursery story is the final stage.
The seedlings we have tended so carefully for months, we deliberately put through hardship before they ship. We move them out of the greenhouse into full sun, let the wind reach them, and cut back the water they had been given. We make a comfortable world roughly harsher, on purpose.
Why do such a thing? Because a seedling raised only in a greenhouse knows nothing of the world outside it. Grown always in damp, windless air, its leaves are thin and its stem is soft. Send such a seedling straight out to the field and it wilts at the first sun and the first wind.
So we let it meet these things beforehand: the shortage of water, the sting of the sun, the sway of the wind. Through that, the leaves thicken and the stem hardens. It gains a body that can endure the open field. This is called hardening.
into a tree that can hold out in the field.
And then they are loaded onto trucks
A seedling that has come through hardening now goes to the plantation. It travels tens of kilometres by truck and is planted, one by one, into ground prepared in advance.
After that, no one waters it. There is no shade cloth. From here on it must entrust itself to the rain, the sun, and the soil, and grow. Those few months in the nursery were the preparation for precisely this moment — for standing alone from now on.
What is built before the plant
When people think of our business, they mostly picture the pellet plant — machines turning, pellets pouring out.
But where does the wood that enters that plant come from? From the forest we planted and raised. That forest begins with seedlings, and those seedlings come from the nursery. So, tracing the order backwards, the first process of this business is not a machine but a nursery.
Every year, tens of millions of young trees pass through this place. Each one becomes, some years later, a single tree; those trees together become a forest; and from that forest come pellets. If the beginning is weak, the years that follow turn on nothing.
So before we build the plant, we first prepare the place where trees are raised. Because a forest does not begin in the ground — it begins in that kindergarten.
Making a forest does not mean scattering seed across open ground. A eucalyptus seed is as small as dust, and sown that way it is mostly washed off by rain or starved of light by weeds. So we first raise it for several months in a nursery — a kindergarten for trees, where temperature, water, and light are regulated and both weeds and disease are kept out. Trees begin not only from seed but also from a branch cut from a mother tree and rooted, a story we take up next time. And at the end we make life hard on purpose: out into sun and wind, with water cut back, turning a greenhouse darling into a tree that can hold out in the field. This is hardening. Only then are the seedlings loaded onto trucks for the plantation. In the end, the first process of this business is not the machinery of the plant but the nursery.