Planting a tree feels like a simple, hopeful act. You dig a hole, settle the roots in, firm the soil down, and something good happens. In practice, the trees that are still standing thirty years later are the ones that were planted with a bit more thought and then looked after for a few summers afterwards.
Most of the failures seen in UK planting schemes — the whips that vanish in the first season, the saplings that sulk for years and then die, the hedgerows with a gap every few metres — come down to a handful of decisions made too quickly. None of them are difficult to get right.
The most expensive mistake is choosing trees before looking properly at the ground. A species that thrives on a free-draining loam will struggle in heavy clay that sits wet all winter, and the reverse is just as true. Before ordering anything, dig a spade-deep hole and watch it after rain. Does water drain away within a day, or does it stand? Is the soil dark and crumbly, or pale, compacted and sticky?
Once you know that, the choices become much easier. Alder, willow and poplar cope with wet ground. Birch, rowan and Scots pine prefer thin, acidic soils. Field maple, hawthorn, oak and hornbeam handle clay well. On chalk, beech, wild cherry and dogwood tend to settle in. Exposure matters too: a wind-battered hillside is no place for a young beech, however handsome it looks in a nursery catalogue.
Native species are usually the sensible default, but not automatically. There is no rule that says a non-native tree has no place in a UK planting scheme, and there is no rule that a native one will thrive in the spot you have in mind. Be honest about space as well. A "small" oak is only small for the first twenty years.
A tree planted too deep rarely dies straight away. It sits there, puts out a little growth, and then fades over two or three years while everyone wonders what went wrong.
The marker to work to is the root collar — the point where the trunk flares out into the roots. That flare should be visible at, or just above, the finished soil level. If you can't find it, look for the old soil mark on the stem from the nursery bed. On grafted trees, the graft union must stay above ground as well.
Bury the collar and you smother the bark, starve the roots of air and create a damp band around the trunk where rot and disease get a foothold. Mounding soil up around the base to "support" the tree after planting does the same damage. So does planting into a hole that is deeper than the root system and then backfilling loosely, which lets the tree sink once the soil settles.
A useful trick: lay a cane across the top of the planting hole before you backfill. It shows you exactly where ground level will be, rather than where you hope it will be.
Spiral guards and plastic tree shelters are often fitted by habit, as though a tree isn't properly planted without one. They can help on sites with heavy rabbit or deer pressure, and shelters do give young broadleaves a start in exposed spots. Used carelessly, though, they cause their own problems.
Spirals rub the bark as the tree moves in the wind, and once the stem thickens they can girdle it if nobody comes back. Shelters trap heat and moisture, encourage tall, soft growth that snaps when the tube is finally removed, and hide damage, pests and disease from view for years. Rodents move in. Some designs trap birds. A guard left on a tree that no longer needs it is worse than no guard at all.
There are alternatives worth considering:
Whatever you use, decide at planting time who will come back and when it will be removed. If nobody can commit to that, don't fit it.
Bare-root stock goes in between late autumn and early spring, while the tree is dormant and the ground is neither frozen nor waterlogged. Container-grown and rootballed trees can be planted outside that window, but they need watering from the day they go in, which changes what the job actually involves.
How you handle the tree matters as much as where you put it. Roots left in a bag in the sun for an afternoon will suffer. If you can't plant the same day, heel the trees into a spare patch of soil and keep them damp.
Stake only if the site is windy or the tree is tall enough to rock. A stake left on for years produces a tree that cannot stand up for itself.
This is where most schemes quietly fall apart. Planting day gets volunteers, photographs and a biscuit tin; the following July gets nobody.
Some trees will die. That is normal, and it is not a reason to give up on the site. Set aside a few spare whips for each species, check the planting in the first winter, and replace failures then. Before replanting, work out why the tree died — waterlogging, drought, rabbit damage, a guard left on — otherwise the same thing happens again.
Resist the urge to clear every last thing away. Leaf litter, fallen twigs and a rough grassy margin around the edge of a planting are habitat, not mess. Strimmers kill more young trees than frost does, so mow or cut around trunks by hand.
Before the next planting day, do four things: check the drainage and the soil, choose species that suit the site, plant so the root collar sits at ground level, and decide who is coming back with water, a hoe and a pair of secateurs. Write down what went in and when — a simple record on a laminated sheet or a shared note is enough, and it will save a lot of guessing in five years' time.
Fewer trees planted properly will always outperform a large scheme abandoned by February. On bigger projects, a forestry or woodland adviser can look at your ground and species mix before the order goes in, and that conversation is usually cheaper than replacing a failed crop.
Photo: inonoyazy / Pixabay
