It’s Earth Day, which means it’s time for our annual update on the tiny forest that postcrossers help grow in central Portugal!
As some of you may remember from previous years, this is an unusual kind of meetup because it has no postcards at all! Instead, we join Quercus (a Portuguese environmental organization that works on reforestation and conservation projects) and spend a morning planting trees in the Pinhal de Leiria, the historic pine forest that was devastated by the 2017 wildfires and has been slowly regaining life ever since.
This year’s planting day happened on March 14 and, as seems to be becoming tradition in recent years, it was another rainy morning. Luckily, we weren’t alone: a group from a pharmaceutical association was also planting nearby, which made the work feel lighter!
In the end, fueled by some delicious viriatos (a typical sweet from Viseu), our group of 13 postcrossers managed to plant hundreds of young pines. This year we had an enthusiastic 2.5 year old among us, and seeing kids involved in these events always gives us hope for the future. We like to imagine that one day they’ll come back for a picnic in the shade of these trees.
Earlier this year, storm Kristin hit the area and left a trail of destruction in neighboring towns, including a lot of broken trees in the forest. It was sad to see, but also a relief to notice that the trees we planted in previous years are still small enough that they survived the storm well and are still standing and growing. One day they’ll be taller than us!
Afterwards, we all went for lunch together, tired and full of sand everywhere, but very happy. These tree-planting meetups have become a favorite tradition of ours, and we’re very grateful that, year after year, postcrossers choose to spend a saturday morning planting trees in this important forest.
We’d love to see similar initiatives happening elsewhere too! If you know a local organization that could use a hand planting trees (or doing other outdoor conservation work), why not gather a few postcrossers and give it a try? 💪
Here’s to trees and postcards — and to caring for the Earth together!
7 comments so far
beautiful initiative! thank you for sharing <3
Lovely concept! Let's do these tree-planting postcard-writing meetups all around the world!
🌿🍀🍁🍂🍃
Great idea, 👌 everyone should plants a tree 🌳.
Thank you for helping the earth. 🌎 Every tree planted becomes a little more sky, shade and birdsong.
That's a great initiative! 👍 Thank you for the report. 🌳
it is a good activity!!!