Trees for Life & Alan Featherstone

Alan Featherstone may be a man of small physical stature, aka very gnome like - a forest gnome possibly, but his visions for restoration of the Scottish forest and of the restoration earth itself are antithesis of this physical attribute. His passion and accomplishments over the past 25 years are a testament of what love and determination can manifest in our world, for our world.

Alan committed to restoring the Caledonian Forest 25 years ago and from that effort grew Trees for Life which is now 20 years old, which is a program to re-forest Scotland with native trees, that had been decimated to approximately 1% of it's original growth over the past 300 years. This effort is not just focused on the re-forestation of the forest but also renewing the ecology that once thrived in this region which supported beaver, wild boar, wolf, and lynx, but not these animals are gone and too many deer now populate the region. The deer are one of the reasons why new growth is prevented as they graze on the pine tree saplings.

We were going to help Alan's project out by planting trees, this was going to be really cool because the trees planted by TfL are planting to "fit" the surroundings, not in a pattern. But, the snow prevented us from being able to participate in this activity. We were able to help the project by picking Pine cones for seed stock, so we picked enough pine cones that several thousand pine saplings will be ready to plant in about 2-years from now, after the seed is started this May. Seems like an good reason to come back to Findhorn;)

Everyone really enjoyed themselves so much on this adventure, being outside in the classroom was great; many snowball fights, Yeti-piles (akin to dogpiles), laughter, talks lead by Alan, and wonderful views of Glen Affric.

Glen Affric