Spring arrived in South Africa on 1 September, and so did Arbor Month. What began as one Arbor Day in South Africa grew into Arbor Week, then a full Arbor Month when the whole country turns its attention to trees.
In South Africa, September is Heritage Month too, ending on Heritage Day on the 24th, a public holiday given over to the cultures, languages and traditions that make up the country. The overlap has become a tradition in its own right. South Africa’s champion trees are heritage in the fullest sense, and the Sagole Baobab in Limpopo, the largest indigenous tree in the country, is the clearest example. Trees like this store memory and history as much as they do carbon.
Greenpop was also born this month. In 2010, we set out to plant 1,000 trees in under-greened parts of Cape Town. Sixteen years later, we work across Southern Africa, and while the numbers have grown, the founding idea has not changed much. Planting should be joyful, and it should be done with people rather than to a piece of land.
It is easy to treat tree planting as beautification, because trees are indeed beautiful. They are also functional, however. Canopies cool streets during a heatwave, which matters most in neighbourhoods where shade is scarce and air conditioning isn’t an option. Roots hold soil on slopes and slow stormwater before it becomes a flood. Leaves catch dust. Fruit trees feed households. Birds, bees and insects need somewhere to live. And a schoolyard with trees in it is a different place to sit at break time.
This year South Africa’s Heritage Day arrives with an invitation attached. The Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment is asking South Africans to plant 10 million trees in a single day on 24 September, as the opening push of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential One Billion Trees Programme. The theme is “My Tree, My Oxygen. Plant Yours Today.”
It builds on last year’s One Million Trees Campaign, which set a target of a million and finished the day with more than 1.3 million. That happened without government buying a single tree. Citizens, businesses and organisations donated and planted them. The same model applies this year, with trees going into schools, clinics, parks, places of worship and residential streets across all nine provinces.
On Heritage Day, 24 September, South Africans are invited to plant 10 million trees in a single day as the opening push of President Ramaphosa’s Presidential One Billion Trees Programme, building on last year’s citizen-led campaign that surpassed its one million tree target without government purchasing a single tree. Photo by Juliette Bisset, courtesy of Greenpop.
Numbers like that are exciting, but planting is the easy part. Ten million is a good, shiny number. The harder number is how many are still standing in five years.
A tree in the ground is only a good thing if it is the right tree in the right place. This is the part of restoration that gets less airtime, and it decides whether a planting day still matters in ten years.
South Africa is a useful teacher here, because much of the country was never meant to be forest. Fynbos and grasslands look empty to an untrained eye, yet they are among the most species-rich systems on Earth, and most of their biodiversity sits below the ground or below the knee. Planting trees into them does not add life. It replaces one ecosystem with another, drinks up water that downstream communities rely on, and can push rare plants out entirely.
So at Greenpop we take care to avoid converting natural ecosystems through our tree planting. Our trees go into degraded forest patches, community orchards, schoolyards and grey urban spaces where canopy has been lost or was never allowed to grow in the first place.
Species choice matters just as much as location, and South Africa has had a sharp lesson in why.
The polyphagous shot hole borer (PSHB) is a beetle about the size of a sesame seed. First identified here in 2017, it has now been recorded in eight of the country’s nine provinces. It bores into a tree and carries a fungus that blocks the tree’s ability to move water and nutrients. More than a hundred South African tree species are known hosts, and oaks and drought-stressed trees are especially vulnerable.
The beetle travels mostly on human transport of infested firewood and garden waste, which means slowing it down is a community effort rather than a technical one.
For anyone planting trees, PSHB makes a simple case for diversity. A street lined with a single species is one pest away from an empty street. A mix of well-matched indigenous species is far harder to knock over.
The tree that survives is almost always the tree someone is responsible for. Watering through the first dry summer, mulching, pruning, checking bark for those tell-tale pinholes. This is why we plant with schools, community groups, and land partners who will still be there long after the planting day is over.
So this Arbor Month, find out what will thrive where you are. Then plant it.
