One Million Trees in One Day
The One Million Trees in One Day project started out in early 2011 as a very ambitious idea with a small team mad enough to give it a go. In spring 2013, after two years of steady development of the concept, we ran a pilot planting project planting just over 100,000 trees in one day.
There were many and various teething problems, but in running the pilot we found that there was a huge appetite for tree planting all across the 32 counties and particularly for planting trees in small numbers on farms and smallholdings.
The project evolved over the next few years into a seasonal spring fixture on farms and in communities across the island, with several hundred planting projects completed each season and many wonderful donors and sponsors supporting the project and helping to fund the tree planting work.
By 2017, we were planting several hundred thousand trees on each annual planting day, but we were still falling short of a million trees in one day. The name started to become rather a mouthful to explain. We decided a new working title - Trees on the Land - might better describe the project.
Trees on the Land keeps much the same structure as One Million Trees in One Day with an annual planting project running native tree planting schemes for farms, communities, sports clubs, schools and colleges. Each season we aim to improve and innovate and to continue to support a wide variety of planting projects.
We have not given up on our targets; the One Million Trees in One Day concept is taking some fallow years while we continue to run the seasonal planting projects via Trees on the Land. We have planted well over two million trees since 2013 and aim to continue with our work in Ireland for as long as there are are people wishing to plant trees on their land.