I planted a forest four years ago

This is the forest I planted four years ago. Yep, 1440 trees went in over 24 hours, which is a tree a minute. 25 types of trees, bushes, shrubs to be put in on a steep blank canvas. Without being dramatic, it's easily the hardest thing I've ever done in a single day. But it was also fun and the kind of thing that shifted how I tend to use my ideas and my body as a force for good. It was practical, hard, and an outcomes-driven use of time and energy. That's it, 1440. When I finally packed up that day, I hoped like heck the rabbits wouldn't move in and that the cows would be kept out. After four decent years of rain and mild summers, I've been itching to see how this small forest is doing. Look at that! I fear I'm going to be saying very positive things for the next couple of hours. You're very impressive. You're your own entity now. Your identity has changed. You're no longer a paddock. You're back to bush, because this was megaforest. This was some of the biggest forest in the world. You're on your way again, team. They're all taller than my house now. That's good metric, you know. Helen will ask, how big are the trees, love? I say, oh, they're bigger than the house, love. I could climb that tree. In fact, I'm going to climb that tree. Go back to being a young ginger. Halfway up a tree. I planted it. Now, that's no big surprise. Plenty of people plant trees and then climb them, but I didn't quite expect them to be this big. Regnans, boom! Largest flowering gum in the world. Look at you go! Yes! There's a mess, mate. Blackwood, hello. You don't have to go up, just go sideways. Lovely little flowering plants. Casuarina, some sort of she-oak. Beautiful. Like an Australian pine tree, these are. That is a bush scene. That's a camping site right there. That's flat enough for a tent. Roll into ya, partner. Oh, sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to roll into ya. There'd be a resident wombat around here, no doubt. You there, womby? Good morning. Look at it, there's a feather. Cocky's feather. I assume, yeah, tinge of yellow there. Things are living here. I didn't plan it for humans to wander through and have existential moments. I planted it for animals to use, in many respects, in the most unthinking of ways. They fly over and they see habitat. They wander through, they see somewhere to live. They come here to hunt. This is already doing so much. The trees here are already holding up water and making this wetter throughout the year. There's more shade here, there's more roots holding things back. It's good. Yeah, matey. This might be the biggest gum tree in the batch. Makes sense. It's got its feet just out of the creek. So it's not only undated with water, but it has a beautiful supply of water. So you've gone nuts, haven't ya? You're like a 15-year-old kid with a fridge that gets refilled every 10 minutes. I've had the thought recently that these are generational years. You know, from 40 to 60 is your big impact. It's where you've still got energy. You're the smartest you'll ever be in terms of how you can turn that into action. You raise your kids. You raise a forest. Try and do as much good as you can. I guess you could say planning out this paddock was a bit like getting fit and healthy in a relatively short space of time. The impact of making a start was visible and tangible. And after two years, the paddock was no longer a paddock. It was a growing forest. Wow, this is brilliant. And it wasn't long before I thought, I'm ready to do this again. And this time we'll take people along for the ride, putting up a YouTube film that converted ad revenue into trees. Where the more views the film got, the more trees got planted. And given my mate Heath wanted to continue to make this patch of forest bigger, we had an obvious place to start planting trees again. This is it. This steep section here that links together the stuff from four years ago, we're just going to keep on going. More snakes, more owls, more birds, more wombats, right through here. This has been good farmland or okay farmland for 100 years. But it's not overly productive compared to the farmland around it. So this is a good choice. They're the bits we're going to reforest. Creek lines, steep stuff, heavily eroded banks, heavily eroded paddocks to have no topsoil left. Plant them out, create topsoil again. Geez, it's a bit overzealous through here. This actually, this is when I was finishing things off and I needed to get a lot of plants in the ground. Now there's a blackwood and a wattle only a foot apart. That's bad planting. I was eating a lot of bananas at that stage. I'll blame bananas. Too many bananas, plant a lot of trees. I want to make a cup of tea. I want to make a cup of tea with trees that didn't make it and the stakes that I used during the planting. Have a cup of tea out of the forest. Oh, man down. I wonder what happened to this fella. All right, you're going to make me a cup of tea now. Plenty of old grass. Look at that. That's going to light like a bloody crazy man. It's a good looking snake. I almost picked it up as a stick. Isn't that great to see? Yeah, we're here, mate. Good to see a top predator's moved in. You wouldn't get that tiger snake hunting through here if it didn't have something to eat or something to drink. Every time I pick up a bit of bark now, I'll be picking up the tail of one of the deadliest snakes in the world. Want to come for tea, mate? Have a cup of tea, old tiger. Oh, ----. I put my bloody cup a bit too close to the action. There you go. There's a rookie mistake. I'm off trying to invite a tiger snake to the tea party and I burnt my cup. Bolognese milk with garlic and herbs. That was a grandad trick, that one. He always turned up with an old jar full of milk. So I'm going to drink the milk. I think he just captured milk coming out of my nose. Boom. I've still got milk coming out of my nose. I thought I was good at bush life. Turns out I'm not. I'm one step away from Russell Coy. Face full of smoke too. Very pleasing. The thing I love about a cup of tea is the five or ten minutes it takes. And I've said this before in other films too. It's just such a lovely way to stop. It's a good looking forest. If I was into tinder, I never was, and I was looking at forests, this is probably, it's a good looking little bit of forest, you know. I don't quite know what makes a good looking other than to say I planted it, so maybe I have, maybe I'm a bit biased. Like I think my kids are good looking for example, but they might not be. In 2003, when I set off on my first solo sea kiting trip, I disconnected from the rest of the world. When I returned to the mainland, the Iraq war had started. My state at sea was oblivious to the world at large. This small patch of forest is much the same. Existing out of touch for four years, as wars and elections, Olympic games, pandemics, millions of births and deaths happened everywhere else. It's a hell of a time capsule, and I feel like the first person to ever see what this thing has become. That's an empowering thing to think, that you can turn a blank space into something so radically different in a relatively short period of time. I just had a cup of tea made from a forest that didn't exist a few years ago, and it might be one of the most profound things I've done.