When did you last plant a tree?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. We do this in a bid to be less polluting and tackle climate change while at the same time keeping a global outlook. Recently Cicerone Guidebooks kindly gave Around Britain No Plane a very young oak tree. But where to plant it? Words by Nicola Baird 

My new oak tree, safe for a while in a big pot away from the bantams.

If I've got a proper life regret, then it's that I haven't planted enough trees. We all know we should plant more trees - to mop up pollution, provide habitat,  maybe even offer a sense of continuum - it's just that I don't really have anywhere I can put trees. My back garden is titchy and the hens and dog are expert at ruining any planting schemes I might have. And I live in London where the dreaded word subsidence is always linked to trees. Subsidence by the way is allegedly caused by street and garden tree roots undermining your home in their search for nourishment and water.

Worse for my tree planting dreams, my last purchase was a bowsaw which I intend to use to reduce the height of my giant privet hedge.

But I still long to plant trees. One a day is the Man Who Planted Trees mantra - and I have planted a few, maybe 100. Some highlights include:

• Acorns taken from trees later felled along the Newbury Bypass which are now growing at my brother's house.
• The mini orchard (you only need five trees to make an orchard!) in my home's front garden.
• The new whippet thin hedge saplings planted when I was doing a three month long course with British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, now the TCV.
• The small native woodland trees my friend Hannah has got me to plant in Wales. Always done when it's freezing.
• The olive tree that got put in my children's primary school grounds when the playground was remodelled.
• At Christmas my brother and I had the fun of planting two crazy trees in his garden - a little hazel which has truffles added to the root ball; and a weeping willow which he hopes to use as a picnic den, about 10 years from now...

Where to plant this baby oak?
This obsession with wanting to plant more trees means that I was thrilled to be given an oak sapling in February during a promotion for Britain"s National Trails by Cicerone, the publisher that specialises in long distance travel guides. I love the variety of Cicerone's guides and have The Danube Cycleway by my desk and on the kitchen table there's The Great Glen Way, just in case I have to take off, now... In some ways there is too much choice - Cicerone has 350 guidebooks and as a result has provided me with proper anorak information about Britain's National Trials... for instance 2016 will be:

• 45 years since Offa's Dyke Path was established
• 30 years sionce the opening of The Peddars Way and Norfolk coast Path
• 20 years since TheThames Path became a national trail
• 51 years since Britain's first national trail - the Pennine Way - was opened.

My husband and kids exploring the oak and hornbeam
woodland of Hatfield Forest, Essex - just beyond
Stansted Airport's runway.

Who will help me plant trees?
Walking and cycling across a long distance route are exactly the sort of times that get you thinking about landscape. Should the UK look so denuded?

Well it probably wouldn't if there were less sheep on the uplands and a different emphasis on land use. But that doesn't mean people aren't still planting trees. And the great thing is that it's possible to have a go yourself, even if you have zero outside space. For example:

• The Woodland Trust is a fabulous organisation doing a lot of tree planting - thanks to people like you and me (well actually not me, but I hope soon to have a go!). See more about how to plant trees with them on local community land, at schools and even in urban areas, here.
• The National Forest in Leicestershire is transforming 200 square miles into a huge forest. They rely on volunteers - so if you live in Leicestershire, Staffordshire or Derbyshire, or can make a trip to the Midlands, then you can help them out in their ambitions to plant more trees. See all the info here.
• You can also look at Trust for Conservation Volunteers website - just type in your postcode - and loads of green (management tasks and tree planting) pop up. Rather sweetly some of these are called green gyms.

Seeing the wood and the trees
I can see a couple of trees from my window as I type this, but amazingly 45% of the land in Russia, more than 50% of Brazil, 31% of Canada and 30% of the US are forested.

In the UK only 11% is forested.

Depending on your point of view woods can be beautiful, calming, wildlife and ecosystem havens. They are also a huge source of our cultural capital - lots of stories hint at the dark deeds that could happen "if you go down to the woods today". That mix of oasis and death trap does perhaps confuse the way we react to the idea of a walk in the woods. I certainly prefer to go into woods with my dog - although he's no friend to the larger animals we meet there (squirrels, munjac deer etc). But in the woods I notice how much calmer I always feel, it's almost as if time stops when I make the effort to touch and smell the bark of a large tree trunk or look up into the canopy.

Devon woodland - a place to stand & stare.

What to see
In winter I love the architectural quality of trees. In spring it's fun to compare the shades of the new green leaves, and see if you can spot love birds quarrelling over which is the best tree. In summer they just offer wonderful shade, and then autumn it's the joy of catching falling leaves and enjoying the array of reds, auburns and yellow displays.

Thank you
So thank you to the trees, and thank you to anyone - like Cicerone - who has ever made it possible for me to plant a tree. As you can see from the photo at the top of the page my baby oak is currently in a pot and at some point is going to need relocating so the roots can get growing properly. But here's to a year of planting many more and enjoying the ones that we know best. Let me know your tree planting stories. Here's a cheer to anyone who manages to plant even one tree, and proper envy and big respect to whoever plants the most!

Cold, need Canadian gloves

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This February old snap leads to questions about how people cope in really cold countries.  This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs). Pic is of my daughter Lola checking the post box hasn't frozen...  

Misery on my bike yesterday as both hands appeared to freeze during my 50 minute journey from Elephant and Castle back home. I wondered how cold it had to be to get frost bite. But I was wearing gloves - it's just that they are an old lady's pair, from a charity shop in Colchester. Moaning to fellow cyclists (forced to stop by me at red lights), all sympathised, but pointed at their cosy fingers claiming their gloves were warm as toast.

I think they meant bought in Canada or suitable for winter extremes.

"No such thing as bad weather, only bad gloves"
Although I have had toasty, ski gloves the problem is that one, then the other, always gets lost. Strangely I find it harder to ride my bike if I'm not in matching gloves (does anyone else have this problem?). So what I'd like to know is how to avoid losing wet gloves, damp hats and scarves. Do you know a system that makes it far harder to lose things? People living in cold places must have some secret - perhaps like gloves on a string I used when the kids were toddlers.

It's an east wind but shops are too hot
This particular cold snap comes with high pressure, and a very full moon so dry and bitter cold nights. You can see how the cold has leached the wet out of London's grey pavements. But on a shopping trip today (to get a warm duvet for Nell, for her birthday) Pete and I struggled to be warm enough for walking the streets, without dying of overheat in the Oxford Street shops.

Over to you
How do people manage this conundrum in really cold places like Moscow or Stockholm? Are there vast, efficiently run cloakrooms in their stores? Or do they just keep the store temperatures lower than we do in London .(In John Lewis quite a few of the staff were able to be in shirt sleeves - a habit which people often take home and might partially explain why the UK's carbon emissions rose by 3 per cent. It's the first time emissions have not been on a falling trend since 2003 (see story here). Horrible.

Bike for a French feel

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. This post is by Nicola Baird (picture above about how freeing a bike can be, is by Lola, aged 9).


My friend Rachel went cycling in France during the summer. It was quite easy, she told me looking distinctly svelte, just 1,ooo km over eight days so we had time to sight-see. This is a staggering distance, how on earth did she have time to sight-see?  The answer is that she's cycle fit. She cycles most weekends with her partner, Andy Cornwell, who is an extraordinarily passionate long-distance cyclist and has a great blog with ideas about where to ride, and how to test your endurance. Should you wish to do something similar, have a look at the Lonely Planet guide, Cycling France.


Admittedly the world's most famous cycle race, the Tour de France is 3,600 km, and lasts 21 days, but those  competitors want the challenge - they are super-fit, lean, mean bike machines. 


I find cycling is a good way to cheer me and the family up.


It's lovely to cycle on autumn days when there isn't a headwind and the leaves are turning red and yellow as if you were mountain biking through a Canadian fall. I like the way you can stop exactly when you want to - no worries about parking when you see a bramble bush still laden with blackberries. When the first frosts come it will be time to stop at the blackthorn and pick sloes to  make sloe gin or flavour vodka ready for a Christmas treat.





Sustrans offers fabulous off-road cycling all round the UK. 


For anyone based in London there are also some great journeys to make - your personal Tour de France  - either direct from your home or via a train line that allows bikes. I particularly like the stations running north of Finsbury Park that take you out to Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridge and Norfolk. In a recent issue of London Cycling Campaign's magazine there's a great ride around Stevenage. It's 30 miles which sounds a long way - but do it at your own pace, on a lovely autumn day, and you'll be rewarded with the same feeling of triumphal achievement that those Tour de France cyclists get when they cross the finishing line. 

Treasure island

All adventurers yearn to have a successful trip to Treasure Island. This post is from Nicola.

Lola and Nell figured taking on the landlubbers (Swabs!) on the tube would be the quickest way to collect treasure. I think they only resisted because Lola (aka Long John Silver) was using an umbrella as a crutch, and it just doesn't make as lethal a weapon. The photo shows Lola with her friend Freya dressed up ready to thrill at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket's, newest Stevenson adaptation of Treasure Island. You can book tickets here.

If you don't read the book carefully you'd assume Captain Flint - the evilest pirate of them all, easily outranking Blackbeard and the modern pirate ransom-takers in Sudan - hid his treasure in the Carribean.

But my family thinks this is wrong. Yes there are swamps and it's steamy hot. But there's also pine trees and such a tall tree (from which the skeleton points the way)that it couldn't be anything but a Giant Redwood. In other words is Treasure Island along Vancouver's carefuly mapped Candian coastline?

The last polar bear

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola, Lola and Nell (pic reminds you that you should always let sleeping bears lie, ahh)

At last we've seen Mercedes - the last polar bear in Britain. Put another way she is the only polar bear in a UK zoo and at her Edinburgh hill top home acts as an ambassador for all the wild polar bears in the North Pole which are suffering because of climate change. We all feel very lucky to have seen a huge, white polar bear, understand more about the problems they are facing from habitat loss and climate change. And we did that without making a polluting return air trip to Hudson Bay, Canada where other polar bear lovers go. There was one dicey moment when Lola realised that her favourite animal (a polar bear) was being fed raw meat taken from her other favourite animal (horse). Luckily she's got used to the idea that not everyone is a vegetarian - or in many animals's cases can be a veggie.

Lola: "I loved her. Mercedes was a wild polar bear in Canada but she got caught three times eating garbage. She was going to be shot but the mercedes car company gave Edinburgh zoo enough money to get her to Scotland and build a cage for her. That's why she's called Mercedes."

Nell: "You should stop driving cars, and especially flying areoplanes, because if you could see how much pollution we are putting into the air you'd actually give up. Ice melts and the sea level gets higher. And the bottom of the world [the low lying coast land and low islands] might get flooded if we don't stop. That polar bear was very lucky because if she was in the North Pole she could have drowned finding her own food, because the polar bears can only swim a certain amount, but there is more sea now. They have to find food, and it's not easy. And if they have babies, and they're looking for food and they drown then the babies [cubs] will die too because they need their mum to give them food and teach them to swim. And their dad isn't very good with children. You would have thought a dad could look after a polar bear baby, but no. Their life is difference to ours. When a dad sexes with a mum polar bear the dad doesn't just stay to see the babies it goes away, not even hoping to get a glimpse of them!"

Links with Canada

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic is of Nell and Lola looking at a giant redwood/sequoia planted in 1857 by Queen Victoria)

At Haddo House http://www.nts.org.uk/Property/73/ (partly administered by the Scottish National Trust) Nell cannot believe the ballroom (modelled on a Canadian style dance house) has a wooden roof. "It looks like slate," she insists, and it does. But this is cedar, skilfully cut to make roof tiling. The building has been there since Victorian times CHECK and is still looking good, what's more it's got a new lease of life as a music centre. Indeed Haddo is known as the Glynebourne of the north (ie, Scotland).

The Gordon family (now uber-grand Marquesses of Aberdeen thanks to a 1916 gift providing the title in perpetuity) has long links with Canada. Sometimes they've ruled it (as governor-generals) at other times they've sent their black sheep there in the hope they will see sense (eg, woman trouble) or avoid spending money (to sort out debts, death duties etc).

There's obviously a lot of fondness for Canada though and at the bottom of the main staircase you can see a sweet little sledge - ideal for the slopes at Haddo House's famous gardens - which was brought back from Canada and can be made to go even faster if it is harnessed to an obliging dog.

You don't have to use cedar to get the same roof tile effect. In Surrey woodsman Ben Law has used his sweet chestnut to do something similar on his unique house in the woods - the one that viewers reckoned was the best of all the Grand Design TV projects. Surprisingly Surrey is the most wooded county in England (not sure about Britain) and full of sweet chestnut that could be brought back into sustainable harvest management - either for coppicing to end up on your BBQ or for the sort of poles and palings that could create you a ballroom, music room or just a bit of an extension to the kitchen...

Discovery in King's Lynn

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference We hope to get a taste of loads of countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola.

In real life I am always running late – so when a letter drops on to the mat from my mum addressed to Lola I grab it and speed the girls towards the train station. It’s not until we’re nearly half way to King’s Lynn to celebrate Grandad’s 80th birthday that Lola opens the letter. Inside is a newspaper cutting from our Canadian relations who had their picture taken as a result of their campervan burning up on the way to Cousin Stacy’s wedding to a Japanese man, Miyoko.

“Pulled in for gas, smelt burning, truck exploded,” is the terse quote from Stacy’s younger sister, Heather in the paper, though there is a very beautiful picture of her and her nine-year-old daughter, Hailey. Despite this drama the van travellers made it safely to the celebrations. In all 40 people met up at Mayne Island, an island just off Vancouver Island. Love miles – the distance family connections oblige us to travel by planes – were high as my mum had come from the UK and 15 people, including bride and groom, from Japan. We saw the photos instead.

At 12.20 the train pulls into King’s Lynn and there’s just enough time to walk through the town’s rather uninspired shopping centre, stopping only to stand on the top of the world – a giant brass globe sculpture, marking the centre of the Vancouver Shopping Centre. During lunch we eventually find out what it’s doing there: King’s Lynn is the birthplace of Captain Vancouver who found the north west passage up America charting the waters up to the Island of Nootka. After seizing this from the Spanish Vancouver renamed it after himself.

The octogenarians at lunch think of Vancouver as a rather short green statue holding binoculars and clad in a tri-cornered hat that gulls favour as a rest point. But we need to walk off our lunch so after cheesecake and coffee we explore the quay by the famously muddy Ouse.

In Georgian times King’s Lynn used to be a busy port with tall ships tied up by the customs house or preparing to set sail. There was a huge fishing community and more pubs than ought to be good for you.

This summer Lynn (as the locals call it) is celebrating Captain Vancouver’s 250th anniversary with a long midsummer weekend of events at 18 sites round town, http://www.vancouver250.com. There’s going to be traditional dancing, classes in rope and clay pipe making and sea shanties to join in. The permanent show will stay at the Custom House – which Vancouver’s father ran, http://www.visitnorfolk.com and go to something with a bit more fizz and spark. A guided walk around the town looks interesting and the Town House Museum of Lynn Life is perfect for young history explorers with its reconstructed rooms. Best of all from 2008 there should be a Seahenge at the Lynn Museum – a replica of the 4,000 year old archaeological find uncovered at Holme, complete with a huge upturned oak stump as a centrepiece. I wonder if we’ll be allowed to stand on that for a digi snap?