The kindergarten of 1000-year-old trees

I have a vision, the notion of a kindergarten of 1000-year-old trees. Ever since Homo sapiens has pillaged the earth with his axe and saw, and later with his plow and pasture-grazing cattle, only a fleeting handful of these mighty forest cathedrals remain. But powerful monuments of nature do still exist, both enormous forests and individual giant trees, which, when we gaze upon them, allow us the sublime imagination of how intact forests in their natural age structure must have looked. A mere handful of these 1000+-year-old survivors still convey an inkling of the amazement that left our ancestors speechless at the sight of such green colossi-and an understanding for why they considered them godly dwellings worthy of worship.

Given the sheer mass of mankind's billions, the forests will not be able to be reestablished in any foreseeable amount of time. However, individual parks spanning the globe, united in spirit, could certainly plant carefully selected children, i.e. saplings from the known giant trees of this planet that are still germinable, brought together from as many parts of the earth as possible, to form an arboreal community of these offshoots of the oldest trees on Earth that, within living memory and for the next thousand years beyond, could bear an ever more imposing witness to the will of survival of the creatures of our endangered planet, of which mankind is a part. A green sign of the future, becoming ever more credible with every annual ring.

Unfortunately, not all tree species grow in the same location. These tree parks, these kindergartens of thousand-year-old trees, must therefore be content with saplings from parents native to our latitude. But even with this limitation the kindergarten would be well enough attended: trees from Japan (for example, ginkgos) would grow just as well as tree children from the USA, Canada, China, Europe, or Asia Minor. Everywhere in these countries there are still massive trees towering up into the sky. There are wonderful books about them with impressive descriptions and illustrations. They can let us guess at how this kindergarten of giants would stand in one or two hundred years with all of these different trees and groves, all growing mightier from year to year according to their nature and the survivalist energies of their parents. How sad that we will then no longer be able to stroll and marvel under their lofty crests!

However, we can take pleasure in our collaboration in bringing this kindergarten into existence. We, by that I mean the gaggle of like-minded souls that span the globe, would cultivate certified saplings of giant trees standing in our respective local areas and then reciprocally send each other these saplings as soon as a suitable site for the creation of such a park is found. The absolute requirement is that the trees would remain inviolable for the next several centuries. Communal parks would therefore readily lend themselves for this purpose, since they are more likely to offer the necessary security. But private entities would also be invited to consider ways of participating. Of course, the public must be granted entry, since this vision of a kindergarten of giant trees is actually less about saving one or the other species of tree, but rather about forming a global circle of mainly young or youthful-minded enthusiasts who together dream up, create, and care for these tree landmarks and later pass on their stewardship to a subsequent generation of similarly noble-minded youth, so that they too may palpably experience how we are all children of one Earth-an Earth that can provide a home to noble creatures great and small, provided we humans are noble enough to let them be.

Best regards,
Rudolf Humme

P.S.: Contact and comments appreciated!